And how is that not the equivalent of claiming global jurisdiction? If you operate in territories A and B and a court with jurisdiction A wants to punish you for something you did in jurisdiction B, then that's effectively claiming jurisdiction. Particularly when it comes to fines you can nullify any foreign law, if Microsoft owes Motorola $100M in Germany and the US court gives $100M back then you're de facto rewriting German law, as long as both are big multinationals with no other choice than to have a US presence.
That's just a silly "all truth is relative, so I can just pick the one I like" excuse. Some news agencies tell the truth, others tell lies. Some represent the facts fairly, some misrepresent them. Sure none of them live in a vacuum outside the cultural/socioeconomic/religious society they live in and journalists are also human beings with their own individual understanding of the world, but to say all bias is equal is like saying a person speeding and a serial child rape/murderer are both equally criminal. The most biased typically start with the conclusion "Obama/Bush is the worst president we've ever had" and find every shred of evidence to support it and ignore everything that contradicts it. Finding the facts to support a given conclusion is completely different than finding facts to make a conclusion, nobody is free of bias but some have an open mind and some don't.
You can. This sheriff isn't arresting people for having hotspots, he's simply mailing them FUD.
Then again while it's fully legal to not lock your doors there's also no laws against the sheriff saying "You may want to lock your doors at night, sir. It will help protect you against burglary and vandalism." A crime is always 100% the criminal's fault, a theft is the thief's fault, a robbery the robber's fault, a rape the rapist's fault and so on. And it's still 100% the criminal's fault even if you act stupidly or recklessly, nobody forced them to be criminals even if you gave them an easy opportunity. I don't lock my door because it distributes the fault between me and the would-be thief, I just do it to take away his opportunity. The idealist in me would like to leave the door unlocked and everybody would leave my thing alone, but the realist in me would lock it every time. Part of life is dealing with reality as it is, not as you'd like it to be.
Maybe. You won't be charged with murder. You MAY be charged with manslaughter. The legal test for manslaughter is: 'caused a death where a reasonable person would not'.
Well, the scale usually goes accident - negligent - reckless - knowingly - intentionally. Usually the top three equal manslaughter, second and first degree murder. Sending these text messages I would say is an accident at best and negligent at worst, reckless is a pretty big step up.
The author is assuming that we all share his implicit understanding that the people who built the company will stay down at the bottom while the company grows and the managers will grow with the company adding more and more layers between them.
Well, maybe he's not cut out for IT management - or indeed any kind of management, either skill or will. Not with people and not with the drawing up plans and handing over the implementation to others. He might still be a brilliant low-level tech person, but he is still just one man. How would you possibly avoid the distance increasing? And a lot of people don't cope well going from being a big fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a big pond. I know I'd hate if all I did was Powerpoints with resource allocations and feature roadmaps and progress reports all day, I need to tweak some bits on a server. I'd probably spin myself off into some corner of the R&D department to come up with brilliant new features or just cash the stock and leave, I don't see myself riding that rocket up to CIO. I wouldn't be happy there and neither would the company.
Hell, a retina MBP fully tricked out costs under $4000. Which only over a half-decade ago would've been considered normal for high-end PCs. These days it puts it basically at the top end "for 1%ers only" category.
Sorry, but $4000 wasn't anything like normal even for a high end PC in 2007, that'd be a "1%er" PC with a $999 Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU and dual $599 nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX with still plenty cash for the rest. I think you'd have to go back to the 90s and probably early rather than late 90s to find prices like that.
Are there creative geniuses being suppressed because of non-stop access to entertainment? Probably not.
There's a proverb "necessity is the mother of invention" - if you don't need to entertain yourself chances are far slimmer that you will, even if you have the capability. For example it's not that hard to grow food, but many people have never eaten their own vegetables, hunted their own meat or fished their own fish. There's always food at the grocery store so why bother? So if there's always a YouTube video, PodCast or updates on Facebook to entertain you, why bother? And even creativity takes training, nobody writes epic books on their first try any more than athletes start at the top. If you never started at amateur level you're never going to get to the stage where you dedicate hours of your day to writing a book.
Hehe reminds me of this summer, a bunch of us went away to a cabin for a weekend that had no cell phone coverage. Could everybody stay off their phones for 48 hours? A few but the majority drove back into coverage range to check in. Several showed clear signs of abstinence and withdrawal problems. But when they got over it we had a lot more fun than when people are constantly on their phone. I think that's the biggest issue with the "always on" mentality, it also means you're never really off and 100% there in the moment.
Human drivers allow fatalities everyday. The question is not is it better than some hypothetical human driver, but is it better than the drivers we have right now.
But when I get behind the wheel I don't care if it's better than some hypothetical average driver, I care if it's better than me. And since some 90% of drivers think they're above average drivers, they wouldn't replace themselves with anything less. Even if was a coin flip whether the car would kill me or I'd kill myself, I'd clearly pick being in control myself. That would be the consequence of my own poor driving, rather than being accidentally killed by a car. Particularly if the situation is against the statistic where a human driver would have survived while the driverless car fucked up. Those cases would clearly happen in a 50-50 situation, you'd win some and you'd lose some.
To really take over you have to reach a level where most people accept that the driverless car is better than them, maybe the 90th or 95th or 99th percentile. That even if you're awake, sober and paying attention to the road you still don't have a 360 degree sensor grid, direct access to the car's systems like road grip, night vision, lightning-fast reaction skills and whatnot else a computer can do that you can't and the failures so few you can dismiss as real oddball cases you probably wouldn't have resolved well yourself either. On the other hand, any car approved for the road would hopefully get rid of a few drivers that probably know they shouldn't be driving but are holding on to their driver's license for their dear life.
The question I have is how it's less expensive (in the long run) to lay a chip out by hand once instead of improving your VLSI layout software forever.
You can teach a small kid to ride a bicycle. The same kid has no chance to program a robot into doing the same motion and balancing. It's the same order of magnitude in difference with VLSI layout, a person can lay out the circuits but it's almost impossible to describe to the computer all the reasons why he'd lay it out that way. It's not easy controlling anything well through a level of indirection, that's true for most things.
As for being "less expensive", companies don't just have expenses but they have income too. If you can increase revenue because you got a better chip that sells more, they're willing to pay a higher cost. Companies care about profits, not expenses in isolation. Those tiny improvements to the compiler, how valuable are they to Apple in 10 years? 20 years? As opposed to an optimized chip which they know how much is worth right now.
Taxes should indeed be used to modify behavior. High taxes on energy, tobacco and alcohol makes perfect sense. High taxes on labor makes no sense. In this case, taxing energy should be enough to make cheaper sources of light preferrable for consumers.
Assuming that people using less energy actually produces beneficial results. For example if people shower less, run the dishwasher less and wash their clothes less that could result in poorer hygiene leading to bad effects for society. Going after light bulbs is going after a specific inefficiency, if you want lighting you shouldn't produce mostly heat. That said I feel it's a total waste of money here in Norway. Today it's 9C here (48F) and it's still early autumn so 80-90% of the year less lighting means more heating. I understand it's different in the southern parts of Europe where you have to run AC to get rid of the heat again leading to a >100% energy less, but the ban still applies here too. Not that we're actually members of the EU, but we do a damn good impression of one.
Wikipedia doesn't give a more recent figure than 2001, but a solid majority in the UK (71.6%) still identify as Christians. The Church and religious leaders have lost most of their power and authority for sure, but people still have beliefs. I guess it depends if you choose to define these as religious or not, I do but they don't let it get in the way of having a secular society.
I also trust Ford to build a car that won't get me killed in a car crash, I trust them do keep that up with spare parts, recalls and authorized service centers. It doesn't mean I want them to install a GPS tracker in my car so they can "improve my experience". Saying you should trust Ubuntu because they already 0wn your computer isn't exactly a confidence builder.
What happens when the outfit that sold you your "queen marking cage" doesn't sell them on Amazon and there's middle men re-listing everything at a higher price on Amazon on the chance that someone with a default scope searches for it through Ubuntu?
You mean like today? There's always more places to look but there's a diminishing gain, for the most part I only check prices until it's reasonably optimal not check every store to see if somebody, somewhere offers it for $2 less. Your mileage - and valuation of your time - may vary.
The Muslims are not worse than what Christians used to be with the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch trials and all that. Religions can change, the problem is that Islam largely haven't.
How pirates ended up in a country with no sea? How did they commute?
They airlift them in with a swarm of talking parrots, you can often see the foreman sitting on the captain's shoulder negotiating for more crackers or threatening to blabber about the treasure. The colors are actually for navigation, red parrots on the left, green parrots on the right and white parrots on the tail. One crazy captain called the Flying Dutchman even airlifted his whole ship this way, but he got lost in the Swiss alps somewhere and the parrots froze to death in the winter. Who knows, maybe the descendants of the crew still live up there continuing their pirating ways...
But this organization has since submitted a counterclaim claiming 'under penalty of perjury' that they do in fact have the rights to this work, and YouTube has reinstated the video. It looks like the only way I can pursue this further is to spend the money to take the organization to court and get an injunction
Perjury is a federal offense and by doing it under the DMCA they're violating US law.
Whoever (...) (2) in any declaration, certificate, verification, or statement under penalty of perjury as permitted under section 1746 of title 28, United States Code, willfully subscribes as true any material matter which he does not believe to be true; is guilty of perjury and shall, except as otherwise expressly provided by law, be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. This section is applicable whether the statement or subscription is made within or without the United States.
Perhaps filing a police complaint or giving the FBI a call would help? Unlike lawyers they're free, so it wouldn't cost you any more than your time.
Of course it is a lot simpler if you wait for a finished product to show up for purchase, you'd know exactly what you get and when you get it. But the reason these projects are on Kickstarter is that they need/want funding. If they don't get it, well there's a good chance the project won't happen and the finished product never shows up. If you want it badly enough you're willing to pay risk money to make it happen. To take a simple math example, assume the Kickstarter project will make a thing that'll cost $100. The value to you - not the market, just you - is $200. With $50 in Kickstarter funding the chance of it happening is 80% - without it 20%. Let's do the math on the utility to you:
Guess what? That $50 is worth it to you even if you don't get a cent in reduced price just by increasing the odds of it happening from 20% to 80%. Of course you run a risk of being out $50 so the worst case is worse but if you're averaging over many small projects you gain in the long run.
My suggestion would be to give users a randomly generated number that is then one way hashed with their SSN. Then that information can be published online and anyone can take their autogenerated number and plug it into the hash with their SSN. If they fear retaliation or if they fear their boss might demand the number from them to check on them, they can merely opt for the official to destroy their number.
"So you destroyed that number and you can't show who you voted for? That must mean you did not vote for the party I told you to vote for."
Yes. It would also allow purchasing of votes (no verification, no payout). It is essential that even if you have incentives to or are under duress to prove how you voted, you can't.
This is not just annoying, it's the beginning of the end of Ubuntu as free software. No matter how unobtrusive the ads are, if Amazon is paying Ubuntu, Ubuntu is bound to become dependent on that cash stream, which means Amazon controls what happens to Ubuntu. And Amazon has shown little interest in the future of free software.
So who cares if it's just incidental? Amazon pays to develop Ubuntu => Ubuntu has polish => users choose Ubuntu => ad revenue from some of the users => more money to develop Ubuntu. As long as that circle is turning a profit and code gets written, who cares? The only thing they could possibly close source on are the things Ubuntu owns 100% copyright on, which is very little. And how exactly would that improve their cash flow since they'd lose an enormous amount of community goodwill and charging a subscription fee would kill 99.9% of their ad revenue potential? Amazon will have an interest in making more people use Ubuntu, thus writing code that makes it more usable. I'd say their interests seem pretty well aligned with the community.
Studies on population migrations suggest one mutated birth (such as the ability to digest milk) can spread over most of the species in 6-7 thousand years, and markers associated with (and do not predate) the Vikings can be found in significant quantities in most inhabited continents after far less time than that.
Well the Vikings that lived so 1200 years ago went everywhere from Newfoundland in current Canada to Gibraltar to Baghdad, Iraq so they could cover four continents (Europe, North America, Africa, Asia) in the span of a generation, so what did you expect? Sure, most people never went far from their birthplace but there were exceptions and they were huge. Marco Polo for example traveled all the way from Italy all the way through Asia to the Pacific and back - it took him 24 years with an effective pace of 3 km/day. That's less than an hour's walk even at a leisurely pace, believe it or not that is walking distance. For sure there are many such people throughout history, probably not rich or famous and nobody told their tale but that crossed vast distances by simply setting out in one direction and not looking back.
The data recommend a person who lives near the job, has reliable transportation and uses one or more social networks, but not more than four.
Remind me never to seek a Xerox job then. Who's gonna force the companies to add the legal equivalent of "or willingness to whore self out to Facebook or Twitter" to their equal-opportunity-employer pledges?
Equal opportunity doesn't mean you have to ignore every character trait you find in a person. If you're all over the place jumping on every new social fad maybe you're the restless type who'll jump on the first job opportunity that looks better. If you're not on any social network maybe statistically you're not a very social person who likes talking or otherwise communicating with customers all day but only need the paycheck. I would say it's more discriminating against those who choose to live outside the city or in the suburbs or who don't happen to go to work the way the selector wants them to.
Or you could stop eating beef and dairy products or buy from suppliers that use the genetically engineered low-fart cows. Or you could plant some trees or put renewable energy devices on your house or get a shorter commute or replace flying with telecommuting or make your next car electric or see if there's an option to buy renewable power in your area or phase in lower-power devices in your home or maintain/reuse things instead of replacing them...but yeah it's hopeless and there's nothing an individual could do.
While every ounce helps the main issue is that there's billions of people that want the same standard of living as the top 1-2 billion and the corresponding CO2 emissions. If you don't have a car and can barely afford one you take the cheapest, not the most environmentally friendly. The small fraction of people of the world that don't have any more urgent matters to think of than their carbon footprint is dwarfed by the vast masses that want a modern home and a modern life instead of living in a shed.
"hipster douche" persona requires it. Keep in mind that audiophiles also prefer $600 ultra-low-oxygen digital interconnects with hand-wavy allusions to "bit slew". And as for the appeal to audiophiles, vinyl, and all things Steve Jobs... I got a kick out of TFA: "When asked if Young had approached Apple about the idea, Young said that he had, in fact, met with Jobs and was "working on it," but that "not much" ended up happening to the pursuit."
Well, if Apple hadn't been too busy moving from iPods to iPhones to iPads, why not? I'm sure they'd do one helluva job of branding it as Studio Quality (using Apple Lossless of course, not FLAC or Pogo), sell some iMonster connector cables for their proprietary connector and overall make a huge margin. Despite it all though there aren't that many true audiophiles, they're more interested in selling the iPhone 5 to a kazillion people.
Slashdot Mirror
And how is that not the equivalent of claiming global jurisdiction? If you operate in territories A and B and a court with jurisdiction A wants to punish you for something you did in jurisdiction B, then that's effectively claiming jurisdiction. Particularly when it comes to fines you can nullify any foreign law, if Microsoft owes Motorola $100M in Germany and the US court gives $100M back then you're de facto rewriting German law, as long as both are big multinationals with no other choice than to have a US presence.
That's just a silly "all truth is relative, so I can just pick the one I like" excuse. Some news agencies tell the truth, others tell lies. Some represent the facts fairly, some misrepresent them. Sure none of them live in a vacuum outside the cultural/socioeconomic/religious society they live in and journalists are also human beings with their own individual understanding of the world, but to say all bias is equal is like saying a person speeding and a serial child rape/murderer are both equally criminal. The most biased typically start with the conclusion "Obama/Bush is the worst president we've ever had" and find every shred of evidence to support it and ignore everything that contradicts it. Finding the facts to support a given conclusion is completely different than finding facts to make a conclusion, nobody is free of bias but some have an open mind and some don't.
You can. This sheriff isn't arresting people for having hotspots, he's simply mailing them FUD.
Then again while it's fully legal to not lock your doors there's also no laws against the sheriff saying "You may want to lock your doors at night, sir. It will help protect you against burglary and vandalism." A crime is always 100% the criminal's fault, a theft is the thief's fault, a robbery the robber's fault, a rape the rapist's fault and so on. And it's still 100% the criminal's fault even if you act stupidly or recklessly, nobody forced them to be criminals even if you gave them an easy opportunity. I don't lock my door because it distributes the fault between me and the would-be thief, I just do it to take away his opportunity. The idealist in me would like to leave the door unlocked and everybody would leave my thing alone, but the realist in me would lock it every time. Part of life is dealing with reality as it is, not as you'd like it to be.
If I kill you by accident, that is alright then?
Maybe. You won't be charged with murder. You MAY be charged with manslaughter. The legal test for manslaughter is: 'caused a death where a reasonable person would not'.
Well, the scale usually goes accident - negligent - reckless - knowingly - intentionally. Usually the top three equal manslaughter, second and first degree murder. Sending these text messages I would say is an accident at best and negligent at worst, reckless is a pretty big step up.
"Eternal Beta" does describe certain types of software you can find on Linux...
Only if it's made by Google, otherwise it's an alpha branded as a release candidate.
The author is assuming that we all share his implicit understanding that the people who built the company will stay down at the bottom while the company grows and the managers will grow with the company adding more and more layers between them.
Well, maybe he's not cut out for IT management - or indeed any kind of management, either skill or will. Not with people and not with the drawing up plans and handing over the implementation to others. He might still be a brilliant low-level tech person, but he is still just one man. How would you possibly avoid the distance increasing? And a lot of people don't cope well going from being a big fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a big pond. I know I'd hate if all I did was Powerpoints with resource allocations and feature roadmaps and progress reports all day, I need to tweak some bits on a server. I'd probably spin myself off into some corner of the R&D department to come up with brilliant new features or just cash the stock and leave, I don't see myself riding that rocket up to CIO. I wouldn't be happy there and neither would the company.
Hell, a retina MBP fully tricked out costs under $4000. Which only over a half-decade ago would've been considered normal for high-end PCs. These days it puts it basically at the top end "for 1%ers only" category.
Sorry, but $4000 wasn't anything like normal even for a high end PC in 2007, that'd be a "1%er" PC with a $999 Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU and dual $599 nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX with still plenty cash for the rest. I think you'd have to go back to the 90s and probably early rather than late 90s to find prices like that.
Are there creative geniuses being suppressed because of non-stop access to entertainment? Probably not.
There's a proverb "necessity is the mother of invention" - if you don't need to entertain yourself chances are far slimmer that you will, even if you have the capability. For example it's not that hard to grow food, but many people have never eaten their own vegetables, hunted their own meat or fished their own fish. There's always food at the grocery store so why bother? So if there's always a YouTube video, PodCast or updates on Facebook to entertain you, why bother? And even creativity takes training, nobody writes epic books on their first try any more than athletes start at the top. If you never started at amateur level you're never going to get to the stage where you dedicate hours of your day to writing a book.
Hehe reminds me of this summer, a bunch of us went away to a cabin for a weekend that had no cell phone coverage. Could everybody stay off their phones for 48 hours? A few but the majority drove back into coverage range to check in. Several showed clear signs of abstinence and withdrawal problems. But when they got over it we had a lot more fun than when people are constantly on their phone. I think that's the biggest issue with the "always on" mentality, it also means you're never really off and 100% there in the moment.
Human drivers allow fatalities everyday. The question is not is it better than some hypothetical human driver, but is it better than the drivers we have right now.
But when I get behind the wheel I don't care if it's better than some hypothetical average driver, I care if it's better than me. And since some 90% of drivers think they're above average drivers, they wouldn't replace themselves with anything less. Even if was a coin flip whether the car would kill me or I'd kill myself, I'd clearly pick being in control myself. That would be the consequence of my own poor driving, rather than being accidentally killed by a car. Particularly if the situation is against the statistic where a human driver would have survived while the driverless car fucked up. Those cases would clearly happen in a 50-50 situation, you'd win some and you'd lose some.
To really take over you have to reach a level where most people accept that the driverless car is better than them, maybe the 90th or 95th or 99th percentile. That even if you're awake, sober and paying attention to the road you still don't have a 360 degree sensor grid, direct access to the car's systems like road grip, night vision, lightning-fast reaction skills and whatnot else a computer can do that you can't and the failures so few you can dismiss as real oddball cases you probably wouldn't have resolved well yourself either. On the other hand, any car approved for the road would hopefully get rid of a few drivers that probably know they shouldn't be driving but are holding on to their driver's license for their dear life.
The question I have is how it's less expensive (in the long run) to lay a chip out by hand once instead of improving your VLSI layout software forever.
You can teach a small kid to ride a bicycle. The same kid has no chance to program a robot into doing the same motion and balancing. It's the same order of magnitude in difference with VLSI layout, a person can lay out the circuits but it's almost impossible to describe to the computer all the reasons why he'd lay it out that way. It's not easy controlling anything well through a level of indirection, that's true for most things.
As for being "less expensive", companies don't just have expenses but they have income too. If you can increase revenue because you got a better chip that sells more, they're willing to pay a higher cost. Companies care about profits, not expenses in isolation. Those tiny improvements to the compiler, how valuable are they to Apple in 10 years? 20 years? As opposed to an optimized chip which they know how much is worth right now.
Taxes should indeed be used to modify behavior. High taxes on energy, tobacco and alcohol makes perfect sense. High taxes on labor makes no sense. In this case, taxing energy should be enough to make cheaper sources of light preferrable for consumers.
Assuming that people using less energy actually produces beneficial results. For example if people shower less, run the dishwasher less and wash their clothes less that could result in poorer hygiene leading to bad effects for society. Going after light bulbs is going after a specific inefficiency, if you want lighting you shouldn't produce mostly heat. That said I feel it's a total waste of money here in Norway. Today it's 9C here (48F) and it's still early autumn so 80-90% of the year less lighting means more heating. I understand it's different in the southern parts of Europe where you have to run AC to get rid of the heat again leading to a >100% energy less, but the ban still applies here too. Not that we're actually members of the EU, but we do a damn good impression of one.
Wikipedia doesn't give a more recent figure than 2001, but a solid majority in the UK (71.6%) still identify as Christians. The Church and religious leaders have lost most of their power and authority for sure, but people still have beliefs. I guess it depends if you choose to define these as religious or not, I do but they don't let it get in the way of having a secular society.
I also trust Ford to build a car that won't get me killed in a car crash, I trust them do keep that up with spare parts, recalls and authorized service centers. It doesn't mean I want them to install a GPS tracker in my car so they can "improve my experience". Saying you should trust Ubuntu because they already 0wn your computer isn't exactly a confidence builder.
What happens when the outfit that sold you your "queen marking cage" doesn't sell them on Amazon and there's middle men re-listing everything at a higher price on Amazon on the chance that someone with a default scope searches for it through Ubuntu?
You mean like today? There's always more places to look but there's a diminishing gain, for the most part I only check prices until it's reasonably optimal not check every store to see if somebody, somewhere offers it for $2 less. Your mileage - and valuation of your time - may vary.
The Muslims are not worse than what Christians used to be with the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch trials and all that. Religions can change, the problem is that Islam largely haven't.
How pirates ended up in a country with no sea? How did they commute?
They airlift them in with a swarm of talking parrots, you can often see the foreman sitting on the captain's shoulder negotiating for more crackers or threatening to blabber about the treasure. The colors are actually for navigation, red parrots on the left, green parrots on the right and white parrots on the tail. One crazy captain called the Flying Dutchman even airlifted his whole ship this way, but he got lost in the Swiss alps somewhere and the parrots froze to death in the winter. Who knows, maybe the descendants of the crew still live up there continuing their pirating ways...
But this organization has since submitted a counterclaim claiming 'under penalty of perjury' that they do in fact have the rights to this work, and YouTube has reinstated the video. It looks like the only way I can pursue this further is to spend the money to take the organization to court and get an injunction
Perjury is a federal offense and by doing it under the DMCA they're violating US law.
Whoever (...) (2) in any declaration, certificate, verification, or statement under penalty of perjury as permitted under section 1746 of title 28, United States Code, willfully subscribes as true any material matter which he does not believe to be true; is guilty of perjury and shall, except as otherwise expressly provided by law, be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. This section is applicable whether the statement or subscription is made within or without the United States.
Perhaps filing a police complaint or giving the FBI a call would help? Unlike lawyers they're free, so it wouldn't cost you any more than your time.
Of course it is a lot simpler if you wait for a finished product to show up for purchase, you'd know exactly what you get and when you get it. But the reason these projects are on Kickstarter is that they need/want funding. If they don't get it, well there's a good chance the project won't happen and the finished product never shows up. If you want it badly enough you're willing to pay risk money to make it happen. To take a simple math example, assume the Kickstarter project will make a thing that'll cost $100. The value to you - not the market, just you - is $200. With $50 in Kickstarter funding the chance of it happening is 80% - without it 20%. Let's do the math on the utility to you:
No kickstarter:
($200-$100) * 0,2 + 0$ * 0.8 = $20
Kickstarter:
($200-$150)*0,8 + ($0-$50) * 0,2 = $30
Guess what? That $50 is worth it to you even if you don't get a cent in reduced price just by increasing the odds of it happening from 20% to 80%. Of course you run a risk of being out $50 so the worst case is worse but if you're averaging over many small projects you gain in the long run.
My suggestion would be to give users a randomly generated number that is then one way hashed with their SSN. Then that information can be published online and anyone can take their autogenerated number and plug it into the hash with their SSN. If they fear retaliation or if they fear their boss might demand the number from them to check on them, they can merely opt for the official to destroy their number.
"So you destroyed that number and you can't show who you voted for? That must mean you did not vote for the party I told you to vote for."
Yes. It would also allow purchasing of votes (no verification, no payout). It is essential that even if you have incentives to or are under duress to prove how you voted, you can't.
This is not just annoying, it's the beginning of the end of Ubuntu as free software. No matter how unobtrusive the ads are, if Amazon is paying Ubuntu, Ubuntu is bound to become dependent on that cash stream, which means Amazon controls what happens to Ubuntu. And Amazon has shown little interest in the future of free software.
So who cares if it's just incidental? Amazon pays to develop Ubuntu => Ubuntu has polish => users choose Ubuntu => ad revenue from some of the users => more money to develop Ubuntu. As long as that circle is turning a profit and code gets written, who cares? The only thing they could possibly close source on are the things Ubuntu owns 100% copyright on, which is very little. And how exactly would that improve their cash flow since they'd lose an enormous amount of community goodwill and charging a subscription fee would kill 99.9% of their ad revenue potential? Amazon will have an interest in making more people use Ubuntu, thus writing code that makes it more usable. I'd say their interests seem pretty well aligned with the community.
Studies on population migrations suggest one mutated birth (such as the ability to digest milk) can spread over most of the species in 6-7 thousand years, and markers associated with (and do not predate) the Vikings can be found in significant quantities in most inhabited continents after far less time than that.
Well the Vikings that lived so 1200 years ago went everywhere from Newfoundland in current Canada to Gibraltar to Baghdad, Iraq so they could cover four continents (Europe, North America, Africa, Asia) in the span of a generation, so what did you expect? Sure, most people never went far from their birthplace but there were exceptions and they were huge. Marco Polo for example traveled all the way from Italy all the way through Asia to the Pacific and back - it took him 24 years with an effective pace of 3 km/day. That's less than an hour's walk even at a leisurely pace, believe it or not that is walking distance. For sure there are many such people throughout history, probably not rich or famous and nobody told their tale but that crossed vast distances by simply setting out in one direction and not looking back.
The data recommend a person who lives near the job, has reliable transportation and uses one or more social networks, but not more than four.
Remind me never to seek a Xerox job then. Who's gonna force the companies to add the legal equivalent of "or willingness to whore self out to Facebook or Twitter" to their equal-opportunity-employer pledges?
Equal opportunity doesn't mean you have to ignore every character trait you find in a person. If you're all over the place jumping on every new social fad maybe you're the restless type who'll jump on the first job opportunity that looks better. If you're not on any social network maybe statistically you're not a very social person who likes talking or otherwise communicating with customers all day but only need the paycheck. I would say it's more discriminating against those who choose to live outside the city or in the suburbs or who don't happen to go to work the way the selector wants them to.
Or you could stop eating beef and dairy products or buy from suppliers that use the genetically engineered low-fart cows. Or you could plant some trees or put renewable energy devices on your house or get a shorter commute or replace flying with telecommuting or make your next car electric or see if there's an option to buy renewable power in your area or phase in lower-power devices in your home or maintain/reuse things instead of replacing them...but yeah it's hopeless and there's nothing an individual could do.
While every ounce helps the main issue is that there's billions of people that want the same standard of living as the top 1-2 billion and the corresponding CO2 emissions. If you don't have a car and can barely afford one you take the cheapest, not the most environmentally friendly. The small fraction of people of the world that don't have any more urgent matters to think of than their carbon footprint is dwarfed by the vast masses that want a modern home and a modern life instead of living in a shed.
Audiophiles prefer vinyl simply because their
"hipster douche" persona requires it.
Keep in mind that audiophiles also prefer $600 ultra-low-oxygen digital interconnects with hand-wavy allusions to "bit slew". And as for the appeal to audiophiles, vinyl, and all things Steve Jobs... I got a kick out of TFA: "When asked if Young had approached Apple about the idea, Young said that he had, in fact, met with Jobs and was "working on it," but that "not much" ended up happening to the pursuit."
Well, if Apple hadn't been too busy moving from iPods to iPhones to iPads, why not? I'm sure they'd do one helluva job of branding it as Studio Quality (using Apple Lossless of course, not FLAC or Pogo), sell some iMonster connector cables for their proprietary connector and overall make a huge margin. Despite it all though there aren't that many true audiophiles, they're more interested in selling the iPhone 5 to a kazillion people.