If you like the whole thing, sure, pay $10-$15 that popular CDs usually cost on Amazon. For single tracks, including the convenience factor, complaining about $0.99 is IMHO silly.
Their "value" is only true when they are still, you know, asteroids. If they ended up safely on Earth, they'd shake up the markets so that the valuable stuff wouldn't be so valuable anymore. Unless DeBeers monopolizes the business, that is. Diamonds are comparatively cheap to mine and plentiful...
Stuff that floats in the ocean is, presumably, stuff that fell of the ships. Throwing stuff into the water onshore isn't a good way of disposing floating things. Usually they wind up back on the same shore, a few miles to the side.
As opposed to shelling out $15+ for a CD that you may only like one track from?! You must be a realtor, because it's their logic. The housing market sucks almost everywhere, yet they have the gall to put up billboards that fucking say grass is greener. I kid you not.
You're also wasting your customers' time. I buy all the development tools that I use (that are not free), but I only use the cracked versions and leave distribution disks untouched. I only run all that stuff on VMs, and I need to be able to restore previous snapshots of the system without the online license check complaining etc. I also hate license managers with a passion. I want to run the fine compiler executable without worrying that I might not have license server available on the network, or that it will fail locally without a network interface present, or said interface coming and going with different MACs, or that the phase of the moon is wrong and WTF do they think that numeric errors are OK?! Etc... My longer-term strategy was and is to push towards more open or at least free-as-in-beer development platforms where possible, and abandon platforms that have DRM-laden environments. So far I'm pretty successful at that. Buhbye TI and Analog Devices.
What's done is done. It's not like they watch live feeds where there is a reasonable expectation of possibility of help "if only". Who knows, perhaps a few of the abused ones from those videos got some sort of help/consolation by now. In any case, one can't but stay reasonable about it. Widely meant abuse of other humans and animals is something that seems to be a trait of humanity. I'm not saying one has to accept it as an unsolvable problem, but so far there are no trivial or even nontrivial solutions to it that have been shown to work, it's all slogans and oversimplifying by politicians at best. Given that, whether you watch it or not, it happens. Watching doesn't change anything. Reading various kinds of mainstream fiction should be enough to give one an idea of what humans are capable of. Watching it on video would be shocking if one lacks visual fantasy perhaps. Anecdotally, I've never had a problem imagining stuff that I happened to read about and extrapolated from. I can't understand how it'd be a pleasurable experience to be either serving such abuse or merely viewing it, but viewing it or reading about it is not the end of the world.
There are two kinds of "crap" doctors deal with, perhaps even three. One is trauma, neglect and abuse that they see in incoming patients. Another is the generally considered "system" of medical care in the U.S. and elsewhere. Yet another is personal/family troubles. I think it's not clear cut at this point what is the biggest contributor to the depression and eventual suicide. Claiming like it was a foregone conclusion that condition of the patients is "it" is a little bit far fetched IMHO.
Emergency trauma surgery sometimes means that you have to temporarily maim the patient even worse. Not only you have to deal with it, you have to inflict the damage, yes, even if only temporarily. It's double-bad when not only you have to maim the poor kid, but the kid doesn't make it. As for definitions and stuff, opening up bodies when you've got seconds to do so is pretty much maiming. Feel free to disagree.
What?! Do you have to click on that crap? You get "not just kids/animals/fetish stuff" as text?! I don't know what spam you get, but I go through my spambox regularly and have never ever run into anything even remotely disturbing. As a rule, we have image display disabled by default, and DUH we don't display images when going through the spambox. I'd say you've got a bunch of self-inflicted pain by choice. No reason to complain. That important email that got blocked wasn't an inline jpeg with no text body.
As a trauma surgeon in a major metro center's only hospital for kids? Nope, she sees that shit every day she's at work. Exceptional days are quite rare. It's so bad they have child services office in the same building (not that those are all angels either, they sometimes overreact and take kids away where nobody is to blame).
Surgeons usually have to deal with the patients through some of the recovery, usually for the entire length of patients' stay in the hospital. Usually you want one doctor to be the lead doctor on the team taking care of a patient, and that single doctor is the go-to person who needs to keep track of things pretty much until discharge (with some exceptions). I'd say the aftermath is no better or worse than the lead-up, especially when the lead-up consists of multiple events that are perhaps not all that "concentrated" in themselves. It's one thing watching, say, a kid getting kicked in the ribs once, and yet another when said kid arrives for you to deal with cumulative effects of such kicks...
I'd think pediatric surgeons would be good candidates for such a job. They have empathy, but they have seen all that crap up-close, for the most part. Beaten kids, raped kids, systematically malnourished and otherwise neglected and abused kids, kids with amputations from farm machinery, etc. A friend of mine has been at it for almost two decades and she still cries every now and then, but not always at work. She cries when she sees perfectly normal, healthy kids. She is not psychopathic by any stretch of imagination. It's a job. Humans are the cruelest of the animals. Get over it or go crazy, your pick. Getting over it is not psychopathic, neither is it lacking empathy. Empathy doesn't mean you have to lose your wits every time you see abuse...
Even then it's a gamble. If something bad happens, your life insurance policy may not pay out, or it will cost your heirs a significant amount in legal fees:(
If you don't know the person, and just happen by the airport, it's hard to argue the pilot would not be performing service in exchange for something. The payment doesn't have to be monetary, it can be in kind -- say you buying the gas, paying for a scheduled maintenance, etc. Myself, I tend to think of it from a immigration and tax law perspectives: they have a fairly broad definition of performing/providing a service, to a point where it's technically not legal to do volunteer work without a green card (or outside of campus in case of F-1 students).
They are paid silly money anyway. I think any concessions are just a slap on the face. An entry-level U.S. pilot job with a legacy carrier earns less than a fresh school bus driver gets in the school district where I live. If that's not fucked up, I don't know what is.
A major part of their business plan is capping the growth, IIRC at 8% of capacity. They have, correctly, figured out that growth brings wide internal changes that can only happen at a certain pace and no faster, and just because you've got more passengers that you can carry, passengers aren't everything. I can't but admire their leadership's business acumen. All that in spite of fierce opposition from various parties who did everything they could to keep them from surviving as a business in their early years. Their first few decades are eye-opening, it seems they faced what is, effectively, an airline mafia in action.
I'd think a lot of people who fly recreationally and are not commercial pilots, have licenses that don't allow them to do any sort of for-hire work. They'd lose their licenses if it ever came out that they did. So that's not quite nice to those pilots, it's like waving a lollipop and enticing them to do stuff they shouldn't.
There must be some local airlines though, where there is no security circus. I was in Vancouver, BC, and it takes about 5 minutes to get a joyride on a DeHavilland Otter. It's a piece of history, too. If wherever you're going has water nearby and a dock, you can get there. Well worth the price -- it's almost hard to believe you can be up in the air in under 10 minutes since walking in from the street, never having even been to the city in the first place.
You have to go through the customs, and they want you to do that with all you possesions in tow, understandably enough. The checking in of your bags is someone's fantasy. Normally you hand them to a person who puts them on a conveyor belt after you've exited the customs, or you do so yourself. It takes a few seconds at most. International arrivals choke at immigration, usually, and if you're unlucky you may be standing in line for 1h. Customs will be quick once you find your bags, who might be still on the carousel, or may have been pulled off by someone. Once out on the U.S. soil, you may need to go through the security brouhaha to get on the connecting flight, or you may be lucky enough to stay in the secure zone, depending on the airport and where you're coming from.
This is a bunch of rubbish. Guess what: in the U.S., a minimum wage job is not enough to keep a single, reasonably healthy individual a roof over their head. Never mind someone who is malnourished (like many minimum wage earners are), has chronic health problems (also likely, even in case of people under 30!), or, $DEITY forbid, is crazy enough to have children. Read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and stop spewing crap.
That's all fine and dandy until there's a dielectric breakdown somewhere. The components are isolated, but that means you have huge unloaded loops of wire exposed to large but slowly variable magnetic fields. Presumably if the field can induce huge currents, in absence of the currents you'll get huge voltages, until eventually the current starts flowing. It's like with an automotive induction coil: the only thing preventing it from developing arbitrarily large voltage is the inevitable breakdown somewhere, and dissipation (including EM radiation). You will get high voltages followed by high currents, that's my bet, and once those high currents start flowing well, there'll be nothing to stop them. Now, there obviously are geomagnetic storms of various strengths, it'd take an extraordinary one to wreak havoc, but there's a threshold effect at play: if it's good enough to break down a dozen substations, it's probably good enough to break down everything everywhere. Once the field is strong and variable enough to break down breakers in a couple of substations, it's unlikely that further variations won't break down everything else in short order. Futher, fires caused by initial breakdowns are likely to produce enough ions and particulates to lower breakdown voltages across entire substation.
Basically either you have a geomagnetic storm that's easy to deal with in spite of isolated problems, perhaps even blackouts due to grid's fragility in presence of those problems, or you have something where in a couple minutes every substation on the planet with long wires attached to it is blowing up. Presumably isolated producer-consumer systems with short haul will be OK -- think a small hydroelectric plant feeding a settlement nearby.
Many such sites don't have a 24/7 human presence anyway. There are multiple such half-acre substations within a couple miles of where I live. Those would be more than sufficient.
That's a bit of a gumball stretchy logic if you ask me. Either way a religious group can't do what they'd like to do (kill others, deny their workers contraconception, whatever), what is called for by their beliefs. It doesn't make much sense, to me, to distinguish between "you have to do something you don't want", and "you can't do something you wish to do". If Catholics are shortsighted sufficiently to believe that the HHS mandate doesn't make others better off for it, oh well, too fucking bad I say.
Their free online site looks almost like a scam made to appropriate the OUP credentials. It's loaded with ads of dubious services, and looks like if a scammer designed it. I didn't bother checking if it's legitimate -- whois looks reassuring, but hey, in practice anyone can put anything they want in their domain contact data. I'd go to see a printed version at a library to confirm your, um, findings.
"The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science — Darwin made it up," Waide said
It whooshed on him that theories are the thing, the deliverable that science gives us -- essentially science's crowning achievements. To say that a theory "is not science" is admitting to being entirely clueless. Perhaps all the wackos who proclaim "ah, it's just a theory" need to look it up in the fucking encyclopedia first. Even wikipedia gets it right:
In modern science, the term "theory" refers to scientific theories, a well-confirmed type of explanation of nature, made in a way consistent with scientific method, and fulfilling the criteria required by modern science.
Slashdot Mirror
If you like the whole thing, sure, pay $10-$15 that popular CDs usually cost on Amazon. For single tracks, including the convenience factor, complaining about $0.99 is IMHO silly.
Their "value" is only true when they are still, you know, asteroids. If they ended up safely on Earth, they'd shake up the markets so that the valuable stuff wouldn't be so valuable anymore. Unless DeBeers monopolizes the business, that is. Diamonds are comparatively cheap to mine and plentiful...
Stuff that floats in the ocean is, presumably, stuff that fell of the ships. Throwing stuff into the water onshore isn't a good way of disposing floating things. Usually they wind up back on the same shore, a few miles to the side.
As opposed to shelling out $15+ for a CD that you may only like one track from?! You must be a realtor, because it's their logic. The housing market sucks almost everywhere, yet they have the gall to put up billboards that fucking say grass is greener. I kid you not.
You're also wasting your customers' time. I buy all the development tools that I use (that are not free), but I only use the cracked versions and leave distribution disks untouched. I only run all that stuff on VMs, and I need to be able to restore previous snapshots of the system without the online license check complaining etc. I also hate license managers with a passion. I want to run the fine compiler executable without worrying that I might not have license server available on the network, or that it will fail locally without a network interface present, or said interface coming and going with different MACs, or that the phase of the moon is wrong and WTF do they think that numeric errors are OK?! Etc... My longer-term strategy was and is to push towards more open or at least free-as-in-beer development platforms where possible, and abandon platforms that have DRM-laden environments. So far I'm pretty successful at that. Buhbye TI and Analog Devices.
What's done is done. It's not like they watch live feeds where there is a reasonable expectation of possibility of help "if only". Who knows, perhaps a few of the abused ones from those videos got some sort of help/consolation by now. In any case, one can't but stay reasonable about it. Widely meant abuse of other humans and animals is something that seems to be a trait of humanity. I'm not saying one has to accept it as an unsolvable problem, but so far there are no trivial or even nontrivial solutions to it that have been shown to work, it's all slogans and oversimplifying by politicians at best. Given that, whether you watch it or not, it happens. Watching doesn't change anything. Reading various kinds of mainstream fiction should be enough to give one an idea of what humans are capable of. Watching it on video would be shocking if one lacks visual fantasy perhaps. Anecdotally, I've never had a problem imagining stuff that I happened to read about and extrapolated from. I can't understand how it'd be a pleasurable experience to be either serving such abuse or merely viewing it, but viewing it or reading about it is not the end of the world.
There are two kinds of "crap" doctors deal with, perhaps even three. One is trauma, neglect and abuse that they see in incoming patients. Another is the generally considered "system" of medical care in the U.S. and elsewhere. Yet another is personal/family troubles. I think it's not clear cut at this point what is the biggest contributor to the depression and eventual suicide. Claiming like it was a foregone conclusion that condition of the patients is "it" is a little bit far fetched IMHO.
Three periods FTW, I say!
Emergency trauma surgery sometimes means that you have to temporarily maim the patient even worse. Not only you have to deal with it, you have to inflict the damage, yes, even if only temporarily. It's double-bad when not only you have to maim the poor kid, but the kid doesn't make it. As for definitions and stuff, opening up bodies when you've got seconds to do so is pretty much maiming. Feel free to disagree.
What?! Do you have to click on that crap? You get "not just kids/animals/fetish stuff" as text?! I don't know what spam you get, but I go through my spambox regularly and have never ever run into anything even remotely disturbing. As a rule, we have image display disabled by default, and DUH we don't display images when going through the spambox. I'd say you've got a bunch of self-inflicted pain by choice. No reason to complain. That important email that got blocked wasn't an inline jpeg with no text body.
As a trauma surgeon in a major metro center's only hospital for kids? Nope, she sees that shit every day she's at work. Exceptional days are quite rare. It's so bad they have child services office in the same building (not that those are all angels either, they sometimes overreact and take kids away where nobody is to blame).
Surgeons usually have to deal with the patients through some of the recovery, usually for the entire length of patients' stay in the hospital. Usually you want one doctor to be the lead doctor on the team taking care of a patient, and that single doctor is the go-to person who needs to keep track of things pretty much until discharge (with some exceptions). I'd say the aftermath is no better or worse than the lead-up, especially when the lead-up consists of multiple events that are perhaps not all that "concentrated" in themselves. It's one thing watching, say, a kid getting kicked in the ribs once, and yet another when said kid arrives for you to deal with cumulative effects of such kicks...
I'd think pediatric surgeons would be good candidates for such a job. They have empathy, but they have seen all that crap up-close, for the most part. Beaten kids, raped kids, systematically malnourished and otherwise neglected and abused kids, kids with amputations from farm machinery, etc. A friend of mine has been at it for almost two decades and she still cries every now and then, but not always at work. She cries when she sees perfectly normal, healthy kids. She is not psychopathic by any stretch of imagination. It's a job. Humans are the cruelest of the animals. Get over it or go crazy, your pick. Getting over it is not psychopathic, neither is it lacking empathy. Empathy doesn't mean you have to lose your wits every time you see abuse...
Even then it's a gamble. If something bad happens, your life insurance policy may not pay out, or it will cost your heirs a significant amount in legal fees :(
If you don't know the person, and just happen by the airport, it's hard to argue the pilot would not be performing service in exchange for something. The payment doesn't have to be monetary, it can be in kind -- say you buying the gas, paying for a scheduled maintenance, etc. Myself, I tend to think of it from a immigration and tax law perspectives: they have a fairly broad definition of performing/providing a service, to a point where it's technically not legal to do volunteer work without a green card (or outside of campus in case of F-1 students).
They are paid silly money anyway. I think any concessions are just a slap on the face. An entry-level U.S. pilot job with a legacy carrier earns less than a fresh school bus driver gets in the school district where I live. If that's not fucked up, I don't know what is.
A major part of their business plan is capping the growth, IIRC at 8% of capacity. They have, correctly, figured out that growth brings wide internal changes that can only happen at a certain pace and no faster, and just because you've got more passengers that you can carry, passengers aren't everything. I can't but admire their leadership's business acumen. All that in spite of fierce opposition from various parties who did everything they could to keep them from surviving as a business in their early years. Their first few decades are eye-opening, it seems they faced what is, effectively, an airline mafia in action.
I'd think a lot of people who fly recreationally and are not commercial pilots, have licenses that don't allow them to do any sort of for-hire work. They'd lose their licenses if it ever came out that they did. So that's not quite nice to those pilots, it's like waving a lollipop and enticing them to do stuff they shouldn't.
There must be some local airlines though, where there is no security circus. I was in Vancouver, BC, and it takes about 5 minutes to get a joyride on a DeHavilland Otter. It's a piece of history, too. If wherever you're going has water nearby and a dock, you can get there. Well worth the price -- it's almost hard to believe you can be up in the air in under 10 minutes since walking in from the street, never having even been to the city in the first place.
You have to go through the customs, and they want you to do that with all you possesions in tow, understandably enough. The checking in of your bags is someone's fantasy. Normally you hand them to a person who puts them on a conveyor belt after you've exited the customs, or you do so yourself. It takes a few seconds at most. International arrivals choke at immigration, usually, and if you're unlucky you may be standing in line for 1h. Customs will be quick once you find your bags, who might be still on the carousel, or may have been pulled off by someone. Once out on the U.S. soil, you may need to go through the security brouhaha to get on the connecting flight, or you may be lucky enough to stay in the secure zone, depending on the airport and where you're coming from.
This is a bunch of rubbish. Guess what: in the U.S., a minimum wage job is not enough to keep a single, reasonably healthy individual a roof over their head. Never mind someone who is malnourished (like many minimum wage earners are), has chronic health problems (also likely, even in case of people under 30!), or, $DEITY forbid, is crazy enough to have children. Read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and stop spewing crap.
That's all fine and dandy until there's a dielectric breakdown somewhere. The components are isolated, but that means you have huge unloaded loops of wire exposed to large but slowly variable magnetic fields. Presumably if the field can induce huge currents, in absence of the currents you'll get huge voltages, until eventually the current starts flowing. It's like with an automotive induction coil: the only thing preventing it from developing arbitrarily large voltage is the inevitable breakdown somewhere, and dissipation (including EM radiation). You will get high voltages followed by high currents, that's my bet, and once those high currents start flowing well, there'll be nothing to stop them. Now, there obviously are geomagnetic storms of various strengths, it'd take an extraordinary one to wreak havoc, but there's a threshold effect at play: if it's good enough to break down a dozen substations, it's probably good enough to break down everything everywhere. Once the field is strong and variable enough to break down breakers in a couple of substations, it's unlikely that further variations won't break down everything else in short order. Futher, fires caused by initial breakdowns are likely to produce enough ions and particulates to lower breakdown voltages across entire substation.
Basically either you have a geomagnetic storm that's easy to deal with in spite of isolated problems, perhaps even blackouts due to grid's fragility in presence of those problems, or you have something where in a couple minutes every substation on the planet with long wires attached to it is blowing up. Presumably isolated producer-consumer systems with short haul will be OK -- think a small hydroelectric plant feeding a settlement nearby.
Many such sites don't have a 24/7 human presence anyway. There are multiple such half-acre substations within a couple miles of where I live. Those would be more than sufficient.
That's a bit of a gumball stretchy logic if you ask me. Either way a religious group can't do what they'd like to do (kill others, deny their workers contraconception, whatever), what is called for by their beliefs. It doesn't make much sense, to me, to distinguish between "you have to do something you don't want", and "you can't do something you wish to do". If Catholics are shortsighted sufficiently to believe that the HHS mandate doesn't make others better off for it, oh well, too fucking bad I say.
Their free online site looks almost like a scam made to appropriate the OUP credentials. It's loaded with ads of dubious services, and looks like if a scammer designed it. I didn't bother checking if it's legitimate -- whois looks reassuring, but hey, in practice anyone can put anything they want in their domain contact data. I'd go to see a printed version at a library to confirm your, um, findings.
"The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science — Darwin made it up," Waide said
It whooshed on him that theories are the thing, the deliverable that science gives us -- essentially science's crowning achievements. To say that a theory "is not science" is admitting to being entirely clueless. Perhaps all the wackos who proclaim "ah, it's just a theory" need to look it up in the fucking encyclopedia first. Even wikipedia gets it right:
In modern science, the term "theory" refers to scientific theories, a well-confirmed type of explanation of nature, made in a way consistent with scientific method, and fulfilling the criteria required by modern science.