Sure, I think it would be a good think to ask Obama and McCain the same question. For McCain, the first on the list might be the other four of the Keating five. But let's face it, even if you do that, it's still a much more pointed question for Hillary than for the others.
You never know though: while there's obviously Clinton's infamous 140 last minute pardons
In fact that brings up a good debate question for Hillary that I don't think anyone has asked yet. Build a list of any Clinton acquaintances and business or political associates who have been convicted of an offence in the last 8 years and ask her: "Who in this list will you pardon if you become President?"
Yeah, it's a bit of a gotcha question, but it's also valid given what Bill did. Why hasn't anybody asked it yet?
What's to stop Bush from issuing a blanket pardon after the elections just before leaving office, hmmm?
Wikipedia says: "The Justice Department recommends anyone requesting a pardon must wait five years after conviction or release prior to receiving a pardon. A presidential pardon may be granted at any time, however, and as when Ford pardoned Nixon, the pardoned person need not yet have been convicted or even formally charged with a crime. Clemency may also be granted without the filing of a formal request and even if the intended recipient has no desire to be pardoned."
Now, apart for Scooter Libby, nobody in the administration has actually been indicted, let alone convicted, of a crime for warantless wiretapping, torture, etc. Presidential Pardons shouldn't apply to the sitting President himself, so a Bush pre-emptive blanket pardon for all crimes involving FISA violations or torture (for example) would probably be invalid if Bush would be a beneficiary of that pardon. That might get appealed to the Supreme Court and who knows how they would vote now, but a good prosecutor might have enough motivation for pursuing it that far. More specific individual pardons would effectively identify who was guilty and what they were guilty of. Some may prefer to take their chances that they won't be found out than be outed by a pardon since it could destroy their career if they're a non-appointed government employee.
We're talking potentially hundreds of people here, so such an egregious abuse of the Presidential Pardon could even fuel the drive for a constitutional amendment to remove the power, although I doubt the Dems would be willing to give it up. You never know though: while there's obviously Clinton's infamous 140 last minute pardons, Republican politicians and their flunkies have generally been the bigger beneficiaries from Presidential Pardons in the last 40 years.
Republican senators are preventing the Democrats from holding the government accountable because it would expose the complicity of Republican senators over the last 8 years.
Here's how it works: the Bush administration picks the managers in the Justice Department, the Justice Department is blocking proper oversight and prosecutions, the Republican Senators prevent Bush from being impeached, and the White House runs the fear mongering that makes the sheeple support the Republican members of Congress. It's a house of cards that the Republican senators are holding up and preventing the Democrats from taking down.
The Republicans are hoping that by stalling the Democrats they can make the Dems look incompetent and get the voters pissed off at the Dems for not stopping the Iraq War (among other things). That way the Republicans might maintain control of the executive in 2009, and the house of cards can continue to stand. What's happening is that nearly a decade of economic mismanagement by the Republicans is finally catching up to them and the economy is going into the toilet, which generally works in favour of the Democrats come election time.
So the Democrats are running up the clock until the house of cards falls on the Republicans because that's all the Republican Senators are letting them do. When that house of cards falls, those high officials may not be liable to lawsuits, but some of them may be liable for criminal prosecution. After all, the Democrats are going to need some excuse to flush out all the (often incompetent) Republican partisan hacks that have been seeded throughout the Justice and Defense Departments. Criminal prosecutions (or the threat thereof) where applicable would go a long way to expediting matters without worries of wrongful dismissal lawsuits.
When the long knives come out for the right wing or religious zealots who have abused their power over the last few years, there won't be a lot of tears shed other than in right wing think tanks, Rupert Murdoch-owned editorial pages, and mega-churches like the Reverend Rod Parsley's.
They won't care about your guns when they can snoop on everything you do and nail you on the slightest wrongdoing - or blackmail enough other people into lying that you did something wrong that they can get you convicted.
But you're a tough guy, you can take whatever they throw at you! What about your family? Your parents, your children? How much suffering and indignity will you be willing to see them suffer through?
When that kind of power exists, sooner or later that's how it winds up getting used. History shows us this is a much greater threat to your country than a bunch of terrorists.
The Bush administration controls the Justice Department and they are blocking prosecution to protect their cronies in the CIA, NSA, and FBI who broke the law. The Democrats are trying to keep the Bush administration from completely shutting the door on prosecutions if the Republicans lose power in 2009. If an honest Justice Department can prosecute the Telcos in 2009, then they can use plea bargains to obtain evidence for prosecutions against the government-employed instigators of the crimes. If not, all the evidence can disappear, like so many White House e-mails at the end of December 2008.
Otherwise, if they want to make sure a lot of heads don't roll, Bush is going to break his wrist signing all the pre-emptive pardons that will be necessary at the end of this year.
The reason why the Bush administration wants the blanket immunity is to cover their own asses for after 2008. The Democrats won't bother doing anything now because they know the Justice Department will cover Bush's ass. But after January '09, Presidential pardons likely will no longer be an option.
When Bush leaves, criminal prosecutions by a Democrat-run Justice Department against telecom employees might get them to inform on the illegal behaviour carried out by Bush administration officials in a plea bargain. With telecom immunity however, the Bush/Telecom omerta can continue.
Are the muslim terrorists going to take over your nation, kill all the men, steal all the women for their harems, and make all the children work in their fields and hovels? Is your *nation* really at risk? If a few thousand men with kalashnikovs and IEDs can threaten a nation of 350 million with one of the highest proportions of gun ownership in the world, then you've got worse problems than those terrorists. Heck, just tell the crips, bloods, and the mafia that these guys want to take over their turf and the problem will be solved.
The FORTRAN would be for any kind of simulation or data analysis/processing software he might have had to write. Most number crunching for physics is done in Fortran - the most efficient parallelizing compilers for supercomputers are in FORTRAN and there's a lot of highly optimized toolsets like LINPAK.
The assembler he learned is probably for a microcontroller for controlling a custom apparatus (it could be anything but likely candidates are 8080, x86, or M68K). The VB is probably just for putting up quick and dirty GUIs to control parameters for repeated test runs or for controlling custom-made instrumentation and equipment for experiments.
I was thinking that probably involved more applied research than theoretical physics and then read the article. Sure enough: "One of his main projects involved the design of equipment and data analysis software for [Fermilab's] high energy particle collision detector."
The article also says, "What this actually means to tech policy remains unclear. Computer programming skills do not automatically lead to sound logic or wise positions on important issues."
True enough but, more importantly, a background in physics gives you a pretty darned good understanding of models and their appropriateness and limits in describing reality. I expect that Congressman Foster's reasoning and analytical abilities are way above average for both Congress and the population at large. What his background doesn't guarantee are the patience and political/networking skills necessary to stop bad legislation and get good legislation passed.
His impact will also depend on what committees he get himself assigned to as well. Even if he gets on committees where his background can be of most use - like Science & Technology, Education and Labour, or even Budget - since he's new blood, he won't have high ranking membership and his influence will be limited by the effectiveness his powers of persuasion.
Nevertheless, it's good news because someone in Congress will be able to recognize and call out bullshit when it's tabled by a lobbyist proxy. I hope he gets and opportunity to move to the Senate in a few years because it need those skills even more than the House does.
Yeah, it's a really smart move on their part. After all, with the US housing market downturn, the global credit crunch, North Americans worried about a recession and cutting back discretionary spending, they raise their prices! I smell an economics prize in the offing here: how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
No, the main thing that makes organics LEDs "green" is that they aren't made from semiconductors like silicon or gallium arsenide. So they don't need some of the more toxic dopants and cleaning solutions that semiconductor manufacturing uses, and OLEDs should be easier to break down and recycle than the latter. Of course, since OLEDs tend to wear out faster than semiconductor LEDs, that's even more important. There's probably still some contaminants used in the manufacturing of OLEDs, but the overall (toxic) waste production should be much lower.
As somebody else said, 1/2 the efficiency of an incandescent lightbulb isn't exactly amazing. A 12 watt compact fluorescent puts out what, about as much light as a 40 watt incandescent? So these OLEDs are probably only about half as efficient as a compact fluorescent. Then again, the LCD layer and light piping attenuates the light of the fluorescent backlighting in an LCD panel. Also an OLED won't use as much power for dark-displaying pixels whereas lit and "dark" backlit LCD pixels consume the same amount of energy. So it would probably average out to being about the same efficiency for OLED and backlight LCD for a laptop power budget - a good thing or these will have a much more restricted market.
I hope they can take this to production soon though. The 20" Sony Trinitron tube I use as a second monitor at home is showing signs of being on its last legs and probably only has a year or two left in it at most. It's lasted me over ten years and I got it used/refurbished, so I don't feel bad about replacing it because I've certainly gotten a lot of use out of it. However I would like to replace it with an OLED panel if possible to keep the environmental impact down. I have also been holding out for these to replace my TV set but, with the only recently-ended HD format wars, the lack of region-free BR format players, and a still-going-strong 27" picture tube, I'm in less of a rush for that.
The sex hormones are used to encourage growth in plants and animals. Many plants and animals raised with intensive farming techniques are treated with molecules that are estrogen precursors.
Have you heard how girls are reaching menarche at a younger age than a few decades ago and male sperm counts are dropping? "Better" growing up through chemistry.
Combine that with the mindless eco-babble that has tainted every aspect of North American life in the last few years
What?
He's clearly someone who has never been involved in running a datacentre and doesn't realize what part of the TCO is attributable to power consumption. In other words, like most anti-eco reactionaries, he doesn't know what the heck he's talking about; he's just PO'd people question his conspicuous consumption.
Or maybe I just translated Olympus_Mons from the latin into English for the hoi polloi.
Being a grammar nazi can be OK under some circumstances. However, an illiterate trying to be a grammar nazi isn't so impressive, although it can be funny in a pathetic sort of way. Analphabète diplomé!
A Mt. Olympus climb, Resource prospecting activities, Water ice collection trips, Locking down solar panels, antennas, and other breakables before dust storms, Environment leak repair due to a puncture from a sandstorm.
The winner gets *$10 million*!
If there are hidden hostile intelligent martians, then you just keep the contestants around for a second season called "Lost: Mars"
The movie publishers/distributors are also missing the point. They learned the wrong lesson from the record companies.
The lessons they should have learned are: a) don't treat all your customers like criminals because it alienates those customers who aren't criminals and doesn't convince any of the criminals to buy more of your product. b) provide your customers with flexibility, convenience, and value to compete with cheap knock-offs instead of decreasing your product's relative utility by increasing restrictions on your customers' use of your product.
Until they learn that lesson, their sales will continue to drop as their customers get increasingly dissatisfied with their products and re-allocate their entertainment dollars to alternative pursuits (which have multiplied in the last two decades).
The other thing is, of course, that all these "incentives" for the studios are going to have to be recup'ed from player sales and licencing, delaying the drop in price that would normally happen from production efficiency improvements and economies of scale as the technology matures and gains customer acceptance. That could wind up biting the studios as well because, without enough mass market penetration of BR players, disk pressings will be smaller and disk authoring and pressing costs will have to be spread over a smaller customer base, thus keeping BR disks much more expensive than DVDs as well. So well said, Pyrrhic victory indeed.
As a customer, the only winning move is NOT TO PLAY.
Apart for those Pixar (and older Disney) cartoons that kids insist on watching over and over again, don't purchase any movies and just rent DVDs for the next few years. There will be a point where the BluRay cartel will either have to write off the payments to the studios and start selling cheap players (so that the price of media can come down as well), or you can just skip this whole technological dead-end for its replacement in a decade.
IANAB (I am not a biologist), but it seems that our body's immune system operates more on heuristics than some exhaustive chemical look up table.
Yep, you're no biologist, and even less of an immunologist. You need to read up on antibodies. Now, part of the immune system does work on heuristics, but a big part of it is all the antibodies running around your body as a "chemical lookup table", but one with a massively parallel seek mechanism.
Or to put it another way, what the GP asked for, politicians being barred from public office for writing bad legislation would be the ultimate nanny state. Effectively the populace would be abdicating its responsibility for electing responsible representatives and placing it in the hands of the supreme court. That results in a dangerous concentration of power and bodes ill for the future of such a nation.
Nah, all it means is that you would eventually wind up with a corrupt (appointed) court. Quid custodiet ipsos custodes? Dishonest people will find ways to corrupt any power structure. The appointment of Samuel Alito to the US Supreme Court is a prime example. The dismissal of the Pakistani Supreme Court can be interpreted as another (less subtle and less successful) form.
The Supreme Court is a court of last recourse and you want to keep it that way. If it had the power of revoking the ability of politicians to get elected it would become a much higher target for the appointment of corrupt apparatchiks. It's a fine balance between giving your supreme court enough power to limit abuses by a corrupt government until the government can be replaced vs. making it so powerful that a corrupt government is willing to risk popular displeasure by packing it with corrupt(ible) judges. After all, Bush showed that demonstrably corrupt and dishonest politicians can still get re-elected because the electorate is a lot easier to bamboozle than a judge, especially when you have unspoken agreements between the politicians and the publishers of most major media.
The best way to combat that is to give the people the ability to remove corrupt officials through a democratic process, but that only works if you have an educated, informed, and involved populace.
Hmm. I would say instead that it's more for the same reason as why the original author of a novel or movie still holds partial copyright on translations of a work into other languages. The object code is just a translation of the source code into a language that's read by a computer, not a human. Since the compiler is an automated process, rather than one that involves a human being, the copyright of the compiled object code resides solely with the producer(s) of the source work.
I suppose a compiler maker could try to arrange a sales contract where they had partial copyright and proceeds of the compiled object code as the producer of a derived work, but there's enough competition in that market that no software developer would accept that at this time.
By the way, Ron Paul does not support a flat tax anyway. Most people with an economics background agree that taxing income is not the best way for a government to collect revenue.
But most people with a good knowledge of history, particularly the 19th century but previous centuries as well, understand that the concentration of wealth and power in relatively few hands does not make for healthy and stable societies. They also understand that some income redistribution through the taxing of income has benefits beyond the collecting of revenue.
Hah. With their headquarters in Hollywood, they are unfortunately on the wrong side of the San Andreas fault to be in sufficient proximity to a volcano for the ultimate irony to happen.
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Sure, I think it would be a good think to ask Obama and McCain the same question. For McCain, the first on the list might be the other four of the Keating five. But let's face it, even if you do that, it's still a much more pointed question for Hillary than for the others.
In fact that brings up a good debate question for Hillary that I don't think anyone has asked yet. Build a list of any Clinton acquaintances and business or political associates who have been convicted of an offence in the last 8 years and ask her: "Who in this list will you pardon if you become President?"
Yeah, it's a bit of a gotcha question, but it's also valid given what Bill did. Why hasn't anybody asked it yet?
Wikipedia says:
"The Justice Department recommends anyone requesting a pardon must wait five years after conviction or release prior to receiving a pardon. A presidential pardon may be granted at any time, however, and as when Ford pardoned Nixon, the pardoned person need not yet have been convicted or even formally charged with a crime. Clemency may also be granted without the filing of a formal request and even if the intended recipient has no desire to be pardoned."
Now, apart for Scooter Libby, nobody in the administration has actually been indicted, let alone convicted, of a crime for warantless wiretapping, torture, etc. Presidential Pardons shouldn't apply to the sitting President himself, so a Bush pre-emptive blanket pardon for all crimes involving FISA violations or torture (for example) would probably be invalid if Bush would be a beneficiary of that pardon. That might get appealed to the Supreme Court and who knows how they would vote now, but a good prosecutor might have enough motivation for pursuing it that far. More specific individual pardons would effectively identify who was guilty and what they were guilty of. Some may prefer to take their chances that they won't be found out than be outed by a pardon since it could destroy their career if they're a non-appointed government employee.
We're talking potentially hundreds of people here, so such an egregious abuse of the Presidential Pardon could even fuel the drive for a constitutional amendment to remove the power, although I doubt the Dems would be willing to give it up. You never know though: while there's obviously Clinton's infamous 140 last minute pardons, Republican politicians and their flunkies have generally been the bigger beneficiaries from Presidential Pardons in the last 40 years.
Republican senators are preventing the Democrats from holding the government accountable because it would expose the complicity of Republican senators over the last 8 years.
Here's how it works: the Bush administration picks the managers in the Justice Department, the Justice Department is blocking proper oversight and prosecutions, the Republican Senators prevent Bush from being impeached, and the White House runs the fear mongering that makes the sheeple support the Republican members of Congress. It's a house of cards that the Republican senators are holding up and preventing the Democrats from taking down.
The Republicans are hoping that by stalling the Democrats they can make the Dems look incompetent and get the voters pissed off at the Dems for not stopping the Iraq War (among other things). That way the Republicans might maintain control of the executive in 2009, and the house of cards can continue to stand. What's happening is that nearly a decade of economic mismanagement by the Republicans is finally catching up to them and the economy is going into the toilet, which generally works in favour of the Democrats come election time.
So the Democrats are running up the clock until the house of cards falls on the Republicans because that's all the Republican Senators are letting them do. When that house of cards falls, those high officials may not be liable to lawsuits, but some of them may be liable for criminal prosecution. After all, the Democrats are going to need some excuse to flush out all the (often incompetent) Republican partisan hacks that have been seeded throughout the Justice and Defense Departments. Criminal prosecutions (or the threat thereof) where applicable would go a long way to expediting matters without worries of wrongful dismissal lawsuits.
When the long knives come out for the right wing or religious zealots who have abused their power over the last few years, there won't be a lot of tears shed other than in right wing think tanks, Rupert Murdoch-owned editorial pages, and mega-churches like the Reverend Rod Parsley's.
They won't care about your guns when they can snoop on everything you do and nail you on the slightest wrongdoing - or blackmail enough other people into lying that you did something wrong that they can get you convicted.
But you're a tough guy, you can take whatever they throw at you! What about your family? Your parents, your children? How much suffering and indignity will you be willing to see them suffer through?
When that kind of power exists, sooner or later that's how it winds up getting used. History shows us this is a much greater threat to your country than a bunch of terrorists.
The Bush administration controls the Justice Department and they are blocking prosecution to protect their cronies in the CIA, NSA, and FBI who broke the law. The Democrats are trying to keep the Bush administration from completely shutting the door on prosecutions if the Republicans lose power in 2009. If an honest Justice Department can prosecute the Telcos in 2009, then they can use plea bargains to obtain evidence for prosecutions against the government-employed instigators of the crimes. If not, all the evidence can disappear, like so many White House e-mails at the end of December 2008.
Otherwise, if they want to make sure a lot of heads don't roll, Bush is going to break his wrist signing all the pre-emptive pardons that will be necessary at the end of this year.
The reason why the Bush administration wants the blanket immunity is to cover their own asses for after 2008. The Democrats won't bother doing anything now because they know the Justice Department will cover Bush's ass. But after January '09, Presidential pardons likely will no longer be an option.
When Bush leaves, criminal prosecutions by a Democrat-run Justice Department against telecom employees might get them to inform on the illegal behaviour carried out by Bush administration officials in a plea bargain. With telecom immunity however, the Bush/Telecom omerta can continue.
Are the muslim terrorists going to take over your nation, kill all the men, steal all the women for their harems, and make all the children work in their fields and hovels? Is your *nation* really at risk? If a few thousand men with kalashnikovs and IEDs can threaten a nation of 350 million with one of the highest proportions of gun ownership in the world, then you've got worse problems than those terrorists. Heck, just tell the crips, bloods, and the mafia that these guys want to take over their turf and the problem will be solved.
You guys need some sense of proportion.
The FORTRAN would be for any kind of simulation or data analysis/processing software he might have had to write. Most number crunching for physics is done in Fortran - the most efficient parallelizing compilers for supercomputers are in FORTRAN and there's a lot of highly optimized toolsets like LINPAK.
The assembler he learned is probably for a microcontroller for controlling a custom apparatus (it could be anything but likely candidates are 8080, x86, or M68K). The VB is probably just for putting up quick and dirty GUIs to control parameters for repeated test runs or for controlling custom-made instrumentation and equipment for experiments.
I was thinking that probably involved more applied research than theoretical physics and then read the article. Sure enough: "One of his main projects involved the design of equipment and data analysis software for [Fermilab's] high energy particle collision detector."
The article also says, "What this actually means to tech policy remains unclear. Computer programming skills do not automatically lead to sound logic or wise positions on important issues."
True enough but, more importantly, a background in physics gives you a pretty darned good understanding of models and their appropriateness and limits in describing reality. I expect that Congressman Foster's reasoning and analytical abilities are way above average for both Congress and the population at large. What his background doesn't guarantee are the patience and political/networking skills necessary to stop bad legislation and get good legislation passed.
His impact will also depend on what committees he get himself assigned to as well. Even if he gets on committees where his background can be of most use - like Science & Technology, Education and Labour, or even Budget - since he's new blood, he won't have high ranking membership and his influence will be limited by the effectiveness his powers of persuasion.
Nevertheless, it's good news because someone in Congress will be able to recognize and call out bullshit when it's tabled by a lobbyist proxy. I hope he gets and opportunity to move to the Senate in a few years because it need those skills even more than the House does.
Yeah, it's a really smart move on their part. After all, with the US housing market downturn, the global credit crunch, North Americans worried about a recession and cutting back discretionary spending, they raise their prices! I smell an economics prize in the offing here: how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The greedy jerks deserve what they'll get.
No, the main thing that makes organics LEDs "green" is that they aren't made from semiconductors like silicon or gallium arsenide. So they don't need some of the more toxic dopants and cleaning solutions that semiconductor manufacturing uses, and OLEDs should be easier to break down and recycle than the latter. Of course, since OLEDs tend to wear out faster than semiconductor LEDs, that's even more important. There's probably still some contaminants used in the manufacturing of OLEDs, but the overall (toxic) waste production should be much lower.
As somebody else said, 1/2 the efficiency of an incandescent lightbulb isn't exactly amazing. A 12 watt compact fluorescent puts out what, about as much light as a 40 watt incandescent? So these OLEDs are probably only about half as efficient as a compact fluorescent. Then again, the LCD layer and light piping attenuates the light of the fluorescent backlighting in an LCD panel. Also an OLED won't use as much power for dark-displaying pixels whereas lit and "dark" backlit LCD pixels consume the same amount of energy. So it would probably average out to being about the same efficiency for OLED and backlight LCD for a laptop power budget - a good thing or these will have a much more restricted market.
I hope they can take this to production soon though. The 20" Sony Trinitron tube I use as a second monitor at home is showing signs of being on its last legs and probably only has a year or two left in it at most. It's lasted me over ten years and I got it used/refurbished, so I don't feel bad about replacing it because I've certainly gotten a lot of use out of it. However I would like to replace it with an OLED panel if possible to keep the environmental impact down. I have also been holding out for these to replace my TV set but, with the only recently-ended HD format wars, the lack of region-free BR format players, and a still-going-strong 27" picture tube, I'm in less of a rush for that.
The sex hormones are used to encourage growth in plants and animals. Many plants and animals raised with intensive farming techniques are treated with molecules that are estrogen precursors.
Have you heard how girls are reaching menarche at a younger age than a few decades ago and male sperm counts are dropping? "Better" growing up through chemistry.
He's clearly someone who has never been involved in running a datacentre and doesn't realize what part of the TCO is attributable to power consumption. In other words, like most anti-eco reactionaries, he doesn't know what the heck he's talking about; he's just PO'd people question his conspicuous consumption.
Or maybe I just translated Olympus_Mons from the latin into English for the hoi polloi.
Being a grammar nazi can be OK under some circumstances. However, an illiterate trying to be a grammar nazi isn't so impressive, although it can be funny in a pathetic sort of way.
Analphabète diplomé!
Think of the possibilities!
For immunity contests you could have:
A Mt. Olympus climb,
Resource prospecting activities,
Water ice collection trips,
Locking down solar panels, antennas, and other breakables before dust storms,
Environment leak repair due to a puncture from a sandstorm.
The winner gets *$10 million*!
If there are hidden hostile intelligent martians, then you just keep the contestants around for a second season called "Lost: Mars"
The movie publishers/distributors are also missing the point. They learned the wrong lesson from the record companies.
The lessons they should have learned are:
a) don't treat all your customers like criminals because it alienates those customers who aren't criminals and doesn't convince any of the criminals to buy more of your product.
b) provide your customers with flexibility, convenience, and value to compete with cheap knock-offs instead of decreasing your product's relative utility by increasing restrictions on your customers' use of your product.
Until they learn that lesson, their sales will continue to drop as their customers get increasingly dissatisfied with their products and re-allocate their entertainment dollars to alternative pursuits (which have multiplied in the last two decades).
It's the Free market in action baby!
The other thing is, of course, that all these "incentives" for the studios are going to have to be recup'ed from player sales and licencing, delaying the drop in price that would normally happen from production efficiency improvements and economies of scale as the technology matures and gains customer acceptance. That could wind up biting the studios as well because, without enough mass market penetration of BR players, disk pressings will be smaller and disk authoring and pressing costs will have to be spread over a smaller customer base, thus keeping BR disks much more expensive than DVDs as well. So well said, Pyrrhic victory indeed.
As a customer, the only winning move is NOT TO PLAY.
Apart for those Pixar (and older Disney) cartoons that kids insist on watching over and over again, don't purchase any movies and just rent DVDs for the next few years. There will be a point where the BluRay cartel will either have to write off the payments to the studios and start selling cheap players (so that the price of media can come down as well), or you can just skip this whole technological dead-end for its replacement in a decade.
Yep, you're no biologist, and even less of an immunologist. You need to read up on antibodies. Now, part of the immune system does work on heuristics, but a big part of it is all the antibodies running around your body as a "chemical lookup table", but one with a massively parallel seek mechanism.
Up here in Vancouver, we've got lots of drivers taking those.
Or to put it another way, what the GP asked for, politicians being barred from public office for writing bad legislation would be the ultimate nanny state. Effectively the populace would be abdicating its responsibility for electing responsible representatives and placing it in the hands of the supreme court. That results in a dangerous concentration of power and bodes ill for the future of such a nation.
Nah, all it means is that you would eventually wind up with a corrupt (appointed) court. Quid custodiet ipsos custodes? Dishonest people will find ways to corrupt any power structure.
The appointment of Samuel Alito to the US Supreme Court is a prime example. The dismissal of the Pakistani Supreme Court can be interpreted as another (less subtle and less successful) form.
The Supreme Court is a court of last recourse and you want to keep it that way. If it had the power of revoking the ability of politicians to get elected it would become a much higher target for the appointment of corrupt apparatchiks. It's a fine balance between giving your supreme court enough power to limit abuses by a corrupt government until the government can be replaced vs. making it so powerful that a corrupt government is willing to risk popular displeasure by packing it with corrupt(ible) judges. After all, Bush showed that demonstrably corrupt and dishonest politicians can still get re-elected because the electorate is a lot easier to bamboozle than a judge, especially when you have unspoken agreements between the politicians and the publishers of most major media.
The best way to combat that is to give the people the ability to remove corrupt officials through a democratic process, but that only works if you have an educated, informed, and involved populace.
Hmm. I would say instead that it's more for the same reason as why the original author of a novel or movie still holds partial copyright on translations of a work into other languages. The object code is just a translation of the source code into a language that's read by a computer, not a human. Since the compiler is an automated process, rather than one that involves a human being, the copyright of the compiled object code resides solely with the producer(s) of the source work.
I suppose a compiler maker could try to arrange a sales contract where they had partial copyright and proceeds of the compiled object code as the producer of a derived work, but there's enough competition in that market that no software developer would accept that at this time.
But most people with a good knowledge of history, particularly the 19th century but previous centuries as well, understand that the concentration of wealth and power in relatively few hands does not make for healthy and stable societies. They also understand that some income redistribution through the taxing of income has benefits beyond the collecting of revenue.
The Democrats just need to find the right catch phrase that will resonate with their base and independents. I propose
"Stop dragnet fishing in the telecommunications sea".
The parallel works on many levels, from catching a lot of unmarketable small fish to destroying the environment all depend on.
Hah. With their headquarters in Hollywood, they are unfortunately on the wrong side of the San Andreas fault to be in sufficient proximity to a volcano for the ultimate irony to happen.