No.
People will figure out a better business model.
A better business model than 'person X produces something of probable value to others, others pay to use it if they wish'? There's the 'taxpayers will pay for it' model that works for well connected authors writing about the politically fashionable (the academic, the religious, the minority language 'culture', etc.). There's the 'let's sell t-shirts and tours of the musical version' that extracts some reward for the most fashionable few percent of works (and not for, say, textbooks on compression). There's the rich patron approach, which produces works a particular few people care about from authors the patrons happen to like. There's not much else, and nothing that links your rewards and incentives to the value of the work to others as effectively.
In some ways your response reminds me of the Australian government and its censorship. 'Don't worry, the boffins will find a way to make it work. We just need to pass the law, not worry about whether it's possible.'. Dumping an insoluble problem on someone else to suit yourself doesn't make it soluble.
How do you define fitness for purpose other than on a case-by-case basis, though?
You do it case by case. The same with the 'their quality and performance are satisfactory' requirement (and, AIAUI, price is typically taken in to account when defining 'satisfactory').
If I, as a software seller, advertise that I can save and restore your text editing data with 99.9999% reliability and you buy it, can you win a case suing me if you lose a document in that 0.00001%? Let's say I can run an automated test for the court that shows that 99.9999% of documents are safely stored and retrieved, but that some freakishly rare confluence of states in the software cause 0.00001% of documents to be corrupted upon saving. Have I or have I not, then, sold you a "suitable" product?
IANAL, but I'd guess yes. The product attempts to recover documents and was sold for that purpose. If it, say, could only play MP3s, or if it pretended to try to recover documents and then only ever prints 'failed' then it wouldn't be.
Once you determine suitability, what is the liability?
Either you repair it (ie, make it recover documents if it doesn't) or you give a full refund. That's it. (This is extrapolating from the current law concerning goods, of course, so this is to some extent speculation. However, extending that particular law covering goods to licences is what the proposal appeared to say to me so I don't think that extrapolation is unreasonable). Advertising laws might come in to this, too, but they already apply.
There's no guarantee that every bug will be gone just because there's a law requiring licensing.
I don't think that's the goal and I don't think the commissioners are that naive. It fixes a minor anomaly in consumer protection, it isn't the huge shift in product liability the summary makes it out to be.
Ok, it's not an operating system anymore, it's computer crippling software now. Happy?
Nope. If it obviously IS an operating system then it doesn't matter what you call it, it still would have to be fit for the purposes for which operating systems are normally used. (Assuming, of course, that the extension to software uses the same requirements as for goods). As for advertising....I hardly think that your ad company is going to be happy about being told to refer to the product only as computer crippling software and never as 'Windows'. Remember, you can't call it an OS in your adverts and price lists and then say otherwise when it breaks! Besides, if it was called 'Computer Crippling Software' instead of 'Windows, how would anyone know to buy it?
I don't see why MS would care too much anyway. Remember, you have to give the goods back when you get your refund, and I presume that'd apply to licences. Obviously there's an increased piracy risk there, but for non-pirates it'd have to be a pretty drastic flaw to give up on using Windows altogether.
...and if the summary has jumped further, then it's because it's jumping from the shoulders of giants. All of the various rants here don't seem to have realised that the proposal has been exaggerated at least twice....
Why don't I just forbid european use of my software via the license agreement. They can still buy it, but since they already violated the EULA it isn't my liabiliy anymore.
Surely by selling it to a european you'd be implicitly saying it's OK to use it in Europe? Besides, if you sold someone something they couldn't use at all wouldn't that count as not fit for its purpose? Then you'd have to give a refund under this law.
No software is 100% bug free
No. So what? It doesn't have to be 100% bug free to be fit for its purpose, and IIRC courts take in to account the price paid, and more, when deciding if the quality is sufficient.
The motivation for what is proposed is that consumer protections on product or service sales don't apply to sales of licences. Presumably, you wouldn't be able to get round an extension to licences by selling a licence to a consumer in a different way.
The point about liability is that you can only be liable for what you promised.
Goods must be 'fit for the purposes for which goods of the same type are normally used', according to an EU directive. (AFAICS this directive is/is part of what they are proposing be extended to software). If not, you can demand a repair or you get a refund. Not promising anything would make the sellers advertising a bit dull, too.
It will allow the government to say thing like, "Well your small company does not have the financial ability to support your product for "X" amount of years and you need insurance in case there are millions of lawsuits we are sorry but you can't sell your product".
No, it doesn't. If I buy a DVD player from a shop and it breaks down after a month I can take it back and demand a repair or a replacement, or I get a refund. If the shop is bankrupt I'm out of luck. There's no requirement for insurance for shops and they've had laws like this for years - why do you think it'll suddenly be different with software?
If I bought it locally for $20, I would still not complain to Hamilton about it. I'd just take it back to the retailer who sold it to me. If they don't take it back, then I'm still out of luck, but I won't buy anything like that from them again and if they screw enough people over fast enough, no one else will either.
If that happens in the UK (and, I presume, the rest of the EU) you could sue in the small claims court for you $20, if you can be bothered. The consumer protection people might be able to go after the retailer, too - I'm not sure.
The issue here is if a law is passed saying that yor old license CAN'T waive product liability.
This isn't about product liability in the 'it shot my cat, give me a million dollars' kind of way. It's about the requirement of a seller to repair or replace inadequate products, or give a refund if that's not possible. Here are some excerpts from the directive on physical goods:
1. The seller must deliver goods to the consumer which are in conformity with the contract of sale.
2. Consumer goods are presumed to be in conformity with the contract if they:
(a) comply with the description given by the seller and possess the qualities of the goods which the seller has held out to the consumer as a sample or model;
(b) are fit for any particular purpose for which the consumer requires them and which he made known to the seller at the time of conclusion of the contract and which the seller has accepted;
(c) are fit for the purposes for which goods of the same type are normally used;
(d) show the quality and performance which are normal in goods of the same type and which the consumer can reasonably expect, given the nature of the goods and taking into account any public statements on the specific characteristics of the goods made about them by the seller, the producer or his representative, particularly in advertising or on labelling.
This is not a 'we can sue you for every bug' law, it's a 'we can have our money back if there are so many bugs as to make the software useless for its purpose' law.
I never claimed otherwise. Can you give me an example which would void "This software can only be used for XYZ"?
IIRC UK law implies certain terms in to contracts selling goods, such as a warranty that what's being sold is of satisfactory quality and is fit for the purpose for which it is intended. (However it isn't easy to tell from the article exactly what they intend to extend to software, other than 'the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions'.) If your 'XYZ only' product is quite evidently intended to be used for A-W as well then I can't imagine your clause is going to help you.
And why non-edible substances aren't held to the same standard (i.e., you can't sue someone for eating something that wasn't labelled as food)?
I suspect you could sue someone for selling you something which was quite obviously an apple which poisoned you, even if it wasn't labeled 'food' or 'apple'.
It's a bit similar to "May Contain Nuts" - faced with the problem that they were liable for unexpected nuts, but being unable to guarantee them not being there, we end up with large numbers of products saying "May Contain Nuts".
Surely that's about being sued over personal injury, not being sued because the product wasn't fit for its purpose or of satisfactory quality. I really don't think that personal injury is what the proposed law is about.
The complexities of software suggest that we'll see the same thing happening there - "This product may crash or delete your data".
How would such a clause help you? Crashing or deleting your data could very well mean that the software is not fit for its purpose or not of satisfactory quality. Warning the user in advance doesn't stop that being true. The buyer might then be able to demand a repair or a refund even more easily.
On the other hand, something that isn't well-enough realised is that ultimately what banks are playing with is quite close to a fixed-total-reward game.
No-one should be put off studying such things from a belief that it's a zero sum game, or that it's close to one, though. What's happening now is clearly not zero sum: banks, borrowers, governments, the property industry and whoever else everyone blames this week have cause an avoidable huge loss of beneficial economic output because they made poor investment decisions, backed up in part by poor models. Improving the pricing of stocks is not zero sum, either, because it affects real economy investment, management and take-over decisions. Maybe most of the activity financial market participants engage in is mostly zero sum, but that doesn't mean that the bit that remains doesn't have a huge real-economy impact.
Or, to put it another way, a financial market could trade a dodgy investment in commercial property back and forth a thousand times, make virtually all of the activity almost zero sum. But if all that activity produces prices that mean that economic resources are spent pointlessly building more and more commercial property that isn't going to be used then that mis-pricing has a real physical cost.
I'm not convinced that arming huge numbers of civilian owned ships with crews from wherever's-cheap-this-week with heavy weaponry and then sending them to the middle east will make the world a safer place. Think what happens when they land in the hands of criminals, pirates, insurgents, hostile navies and terrorists. You've really got no hope of keeping control of all those weapons.
Mount a few.50 caliber machine guns to the side of the ship to use on these speedboats to keep them from getting close enough to board and arm the crew with rifles and pistols on the off chance that they manage to board anyway.
Then once the pirates have boarded, they're now rather better defended. And I doubt those machine guns will still be there when you get your boat back (assuming they don't want it as a new mother-ship).
Fighting poverty would be a lot cheaper and better for everyone than fighting its causes.
But fighting poverty from outside is near impossible. Most of the problems which keep nations in poverty aren't things an outsider can fix. Just imagine starting a business in one of the dodgier African countries. The electricity is off half the time, you need huge amounts of money for bribes to start up and run, there's crippling bureaucracy (more paperwork steps=more bribes, so corruption breeds bureaucracy), government thugs/warlords/criminals/whoever keep arbitrarily seizing your property, you can't get proper title to property so you can't raise mortgages, the courts don't work so you can't enforce your contracts or trademarks (and everyone knows that, so they don't pay and you can't buy things without cash up front), you can spend years waiting for something as simple as a phone line, there's no worthwhile banking system, educated potential workers have all left the country, corrupt currency controls means that only the favoured few don't have to buy foreign currency at black market rates and sell at (lower) official rates, and you've got no hope of raising finance. Oh, and you can't compete in the tradition first-step-up from agriculture (textiles) because the Asians have it thoroughly, erm, sewn up. And, of course, the politicians and politics are all shit.
Then, after all that, some git of a pirate seizes your exports and your customer won't pay when they are four months late.
Well lets look at Europe who has both. Airlines sell tickets at around 100$ and the train from London to Paris is 200$
That depends where you're starting and going to. The Eurostar will take you from St Pancras (central London) to Paris Nord (central Paris) in about 2h20m for 65-100ish UKP. For me it would take about 1h30m from here (3 miles from Stansted Airport, 35 from London) and 16UKP to get to St Pancras. Let's say 3h50 and 90 UKP.
To fly? From central London it's something like 25UKP and 45 minutes to get to an airport, two hours before you leave, 1-1:30 flying for 90-150UKP and something like 40 minutes to central Paris (no idea how much....let's say another 20UKP). My quick search revealed no flights from Stansted (!??), but even if there are any it'd still be likely to take me just as long and cost me more if I have more than hand luggage, even from here.
IIRC the Eurostar goes quite a bit faster than the proposed US trains, though - once it's in France, anyway.
It's amazing how many nationalized differences there are with punctuation usage and spelling.
Not to mention tenses. 'Horse already left the barn' is incorrect in UK English (or, at least, it sounds very wrong to me, and is not typical use). US English seems allergic to the perfect tense for some reason. In the UK it'd be written 'The horse has already left the barn', which indicates the sentence is about the current state of horselessness and not the moment of leaving.
Sure the queen does not really know about any important political or defense issues
Actually, she might. She has a weekly meeting with the PM. No-one knows what they talk about but I'm sure some of it will be sensitive, especially what is technically her army is fighting a war.
I imagine she doesn't take her iPod with her, however.
Erm, I'm not so sure about that. Take a sample of people. Take records of the rate of lots of diseases. Take records of lots of environmental factors. Throw in records of 100 different numbers with each set randomly generated for each person, if you like.
Now look for correlations. You're likely to find some - and, if you didn't, it's because you didn't record enough randomly generated numbers.
Why? Suppose you're statistical methods will tell you're there's a (significant) correlation with 99% certainty. If you were specifically testing a single hypothesis your study had set out to find, that's just fine. If, instead, you search through hundreds of possible correlations between variables then you're going to find some spurious ones. You can't be sure of those until you run a new study, on new data, specifically testing a hypothesised link.
This isn't 'correlation is not causation', it's something different entirely.
Of course companies need to maximise the profit. Why should they minimise debt is beyond me (if you are talking about maximising net profit and not turn-over, debt is not an issue).
Because investors don't just care about profit, they also care about risk. Average profit with above average risk is not good.
Debt and profit interact like this (ignoring tax, for now):
Case 1: A company uses 100m of capital, all from shareholders, to make an average of 10m/year of profit. Return to shareholders: 10%, plus annual variation. The company goes bust if it persistently makes less than 0 profit.
Case 2: An equivalent company uses 100m of capital, 50m from shareholders, 50m from 5% debt, to make an average of 10m/year of profit before interest, 7.5m/year after interest. Return to shareholders: 15%. The company goes bust if it persistently makes less than 2.5m/year from its operations, so the risk to shareholders is larger. If profits are a normal distribution - or anything like it - this could be quite a big difference in risk.
So what matters is not profit, but risk-adjusted profit....and leverage increases risk. In theory, shareholders should care because they adjust the leverage themselves (owning 1000 of the share capital in case one, or 500 of the share capital and 500 of the debt in case two, is equivalent). However, the tax system encourages debt by taxing profit AFTER interest. This is a BAD thing, and may have contributed to our current mess, because it decreases shareholder returns in case 1 more than in case 2, encouraging otherwise pointless risky behaviour.
Well, okay, but here's the simple fact: DHS pulls aside for additional questioning or searches fewer than 10% of all passengers. If you don't want to be searched or questioned, simply don't give them a reason to do so.
That may be OK individually, but generally (not just with smells and aeroplanes) it's a dangerous route to go down collectively. Only a few are questioned, so everyone tries to conform to what they think the authorities consider normal. So the authorities lower their thresholds and then everyone becomes even more conforming, etc. It leads to everyone 'self-censoring' their behaviour to some degree to please government and security guard's prejudices.....it's far better for people to feel secure against unreasonable harrassment. It's not that your suggestion is necessarily bad - but if you can be bothered with baking soda then you ought to also be bothered opposing it politically.
It won't cause early death, but RSI can indeed cause permanent damage - permanent loss of range of motion, weakness or loss of sensation, for example. Hands, arms, neck and shoulders are important - it can be significantly disabling. You have to keep accumulating damage for quite a long time to do that permanently and gaming is usually rather more optional than, say, working at a computer - but given the non-stop nature of it and the way some people just can't keep away I'd imagine it's to be taken seriously. The longer you keep going after getting symptoms the longer you need to rest, so people who work at computers need to take it very seriously very early and keep away from leisure activities like gaming - otherwise good luck explaining to your boss that you need three weeks off to recover from a typing injury.
Anyone who works with computers, or employs people who do, really should know about all of this.
Erm...actually, using a computer for long enough - especially if you're tensing your muscles, sitting badly, pressing too hard and not taking both frequent small and regular large breaks - IS risky and can damage your joints, muscles, tendons and nerves. Both lack of exercise and (separately) obesity will increase the risk of that happening. 'Long enough' isn't necessarily all that long if you're doing it badly enough - a couple of hours a day upwards, I've heard.
Diet is a much more reliable indicator of obesity.
Yes, but if these adverts (I haven't seen them) are linking inactivity only with health risks via obesity then IMO they're making a mistake. Lack of exercise is bad for you whether you're a healthy weight or not and it's only going to lead to people dismissing exercise because they're not overweight.
Slashdot Mirror
No. People will figure out a better business model.
A better business model than 'person X produces something of probable value to others, others pay to use it if they wish'? There's the 'taxpayers will pay for it' model that works for well connected authors writing about the politically fashionable (the academic, the religious, the minority language 'culture', etc.). There's the 'let's sell t-shirts and tours of the musical version' that extracts some reward for the most fashionable few percent of works (and not for, say, textbooks on compression). There's the rich patron approach, which produces works a particular few people care about from authors the patrons happen to like. There's not much else, and nothing that links your rewards and incentives to the value of the work to others as effectively.
In some ways your response reminds me of the Australian government and its censorship. 'Don't worry, the boffins will find a way to make it work. We just need to pass the law, not worry about whether it's possible.'. Dumping an insoluble problem on someone else to suit yourself doesn't make it soluble.
How do you define fitness for purpose other than on a case-by-case basis, though?
You do it case by case. The same with the 'their quality and performance are satisfactory' requirement (and, AIAUI, price is typically taken in to account when defining 'satisfactory').
If I, as a software seller, advertise that I can save and restore your text editing data with 99.9999% reliability and you buy it, can you win a case suing me if you lose a document in that 0.00001%? Let's say I can run an automated test for the court that shows that 99.9999% of documents are safely stored and retrieved, but that some freakishly rare confluence of states in the software cause 0.00001% of documents to be corrupted upon saving. Have I or have I not, then, sold you a "suitable" product?
IANAL, but I'd guess yes. The product attempts to recover documents and was sold for that purpose. If it, say, could only play MP3s, or if it pretended to try to recover documents and then only ever prints 'failed' then it wouldn't be.
Once you determine suitability, what is the liability?
Either you repair it (ie, make it recover documents if it doesn't) or you give a full refund. That's it. (This is extrapolating from the current law concerning goods, of course, so this is to some extent speculation. However, extending that particular law covering goods to licences is what the proposal appeared to say to me so I don't think that extrapolation is unreasonable). Advertising laws might come in to this, too, but they already apply.
There's no guarantee that every bug will be gone just because there's a law requiring licensing.
I don't think that's the goal and I don't think the commissioners are that naive. It fixes a minor anomaly in consumer protection, it isn't the huge shift in product liability the summary makes it out to be.
Ok, it's not an operating system anymore, it's computer crippling software now. Happy?
Nope. If it obviously IS an operating system then it doesn't matter what you call it, it still would have to be fit for the purposes for which operating systems are normally used. (Assuming, of course, that the extension to software uses the same requirements as for goods). As for advertising....I hardly think that your ad company is going to be happy about being told to refer to the product only as computer crippling software and never as 'Windows'. Remember, you can't call it an OS in your adverts and price lists and then say otherwise when it breaks! Besides, if it was called 'Computer Crippling Software' instead of 'Windows, how would anyone know to buy it?
I don't see why MS would care too much anyway. Remember, you have to give the goods back when you get your refund, and I presume that'd apply to licences. Obviously there's an increased piracy risk there, but for non-pirates it'd have to be a pretty drastic flaw to give up on using Windows altogether.
TFA is jumping to conclusions
...and if the summary has jumped further, then it's because it's jumping from the shoulders of giants. All of the various rants here don't seem to have realised that the proposal has been exaggerated at least twice....
Why don't I just forbid european use of my software via the license agreement. They can still buy it, but since they already violated the EULA it isn't my liabiliy anymore.
Surely by selling it to a european you'd be implicitly saying it's OK to use it in Europe? Besides, if you sold someone something they couldn't use at all wouldn't that count as not fit for its purpose? Then you'd have to give a refund under this law.
No software is 100% bug free
No. So what? It doesn't have to be 100% bug free to be fit for its purpose, and IIRC courts take in to account the price paid, and more, when deciding if the quality is sufficient.
The motivation for what is proposed is that consumer protections on product or service sales don't apply to sales of licences. Presumably, you wouldn't be able to get round an extension to licences by selling a licence to a consumer in a different way.
The point about liability is that you can only be liable for what you promised.
Goods must be 'fit for the purposes for which goods of the same type are normally used', according to an EU directive. (AFAICS this directive is/is part of what they are proposing be extended to software). If not, you can demand a repair or you get a refund. Not promising anything would make the sellers advertising a bit dull, too.
It will allow the government to say thing like, "Well your small company does not have the financial ability to support your product for "X" amount of years and you need insurance in case there are millions of lawsuits we are sorry but you can't sell your product".
No, it doesn't. If I buy a DVD player from a shop and it breaks down after a month I can take it back and demand a repair or a replacement, or I get a refund. If the shop is bankrupt I'm out of luck. There's no requirement for insurance for shops and they've had laws like this for years - why do you think it'll suddenly be different with software?
If I bought it locally for $20, I would still not complain to Hamilton about it. I'd just take it back to the retailer who sold it to me. If they don't take it back, then I'm still out of luck, but I won't buy anything like that from them again and if they screw enough people over fast enough, no one else will either.
If that happens in the UK (and, I presume, the rest of the EU) you could sue in the small claims court for you $20, if you can be bothered. The consumer protection people might be able to go after the retailer, too - I'm not sure.
The issue here is if a law is passed saying that yor old license CAN'T waive product liability.
This isn't about product liability in the 'it shot my cat, give me a million dollars' kind of way. It's about the requirement of a seller to repair or replace inadequate products, or give a refund if that's not possible. Here are some excerpts from the directive on physical goods:
1. The seller must deliver goods to the consumer which are in conformity with the contract of sale.
2. Consumer goods are presumed to be in conformity with the contract if they:
(a) comply with the description given by the seller and possess the qualities of the goods which the seller has held out to the consumer as a sample or model;
(b) are fit for any particular purpose for which the consumer requires them and which he made known to the seller at the time of conclusion of the contract and which the seller has accepted;
(c) are fit for the purposes for which goods of the same type are normally used;
(d) show the quality and performance which are normal in goods of the same type and which the consumer can reasonably expect, given the nature of the goods and taking into account any public statements on the specific characteristics of the goods made about them by the seller, the producer or his representative, particularly in advertising or on labelling.
This is not a 'we can sue you for every bug' law, it's a 'we can have our money back if there are so many bugs as to make the software useless for its purpose' law.
I never claimed otherwise. Can you give me an example which would void "This software can only be used for XYZ"?
IIRC UK law implies certain terms in to contracts selling goods, such as a warranty that what's being sold is of satisfactory quality and is fit for the purpose for which it is intended. (However it isn't easy to tell from the article exactly what they intend to extend to software, other than 'the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions'.) If your 'XYZ only' product is quite evidently intended to be used for A-W as well then I can't imagine your clause is going to help you.
And why non-edible substances aren't held to the same standard (i.e., you can't sue someone for eating something that wasn't labelled as food)?
I suspect you could sue someone for selling you something which was quite obviously an apple which poisoned you, even if it wasn't labeled 'food' or 'apple'.
It's a bit similar to "May Contain Nuts" - faced with the problem that they were liable for unexpected nuts, but being unable to guarantee them not being there, we end up with large numbers of products saying "May Contain Nuts".
Surely that's about being sued over personal injury, not being sued because the product wasn't fit for its purpose or of satisfactory quality. I really don't think that personal injury is what the proposed law is about.
The complexities of software suggest that we'll see the same thing happening there - "This product may crash or delete your data".
How would such a clause help you? Crashing or deleting your data could very well mean that the software is not fit for its purpose or not of satisfactory quality. Warning the user in advance doesn't stop that being true. The buyer might then be able to demand a repair or a refund even more easily.
It's net-zero carbon output
Grasslands can sequester carbon, IIRC by putting it in to soil. This article talks about the affect of grazing: http://www.international.inra.fr/press/positive_role_grasslands_carbon_storage . It looks like it's still a net sink, but only just and not everywhere and in every year.
On a happier note, the Canadian RIAA pushed for those stupid levees on our CDs to compensate for piracy.
Surely you mean to stop the flood of piracy? Or, perhaps, hold back the tide of piracy?
On the other hand, something that isn't well-enough realised is that ultimately what banks are playing with is quite close to a fixed-total-reward game.
No-one should be put off studying such things from a belief that it's a zero sum game, or that it's close to one, though. What's happening now is clearly not zero sum: banks, borrowers, governments, the property industry and whoever else everyone blames this week have cause an avoidable huge loss of beneficial economic output because they made poor investment decisions, backed up in part by poor models. Improving the pricing of stocks is not zero sum, either, because it affects real economy investment, management and take-over decisions. Maybe most of the activity financial market participants engage in is mostly zero sum, but that doesn't mean that the bit that remains doesn't have a huge real-economy impact.
Or, to put it another way, a financial market could trade a dodgy investment in commercial property back and forth a thousand times, make virtually all of the activity almost zero sum. But if all that activity produces prices that mean that economic resources are spent pointlessly building more and more commercial property that isn't going to be used then that mis-pricing has a real physical cost.
I'm not convinced that arming huge numbers of civilian owned ships with crews from wherever's-cheap-this-week with heavy weaponry and then sending them to the middle east will make the world a safer place. Think what happens when they land in the hands of criminals, pirates, insurgents, hostile navies and terrorists. You've really got no hope of keeping control of all those weapons.
Mount a few .50 caliber machine guns to the side of the ship to use on these speedboats to keep them from getting close enough to board and arm the crew with rifles and pistols on the off chance that they manage to board anyway.
Then once the pirates have boarded, they're now rather better defended. And I doubt those machine guns will still be there when you get your boat back (assuming they don't want it as a new mother-ship).
Fighting poverty would be a lot cheaper and better for everyone than fighting its causes.
But fighting poverty from outside is near impossible. Most of the problems which keep nations in poverty aren't things an outsider can fix. Just imagine starting a business in one of the dodgier African countries. The electricity is off half the time, you need huge amounts of money for bribes to start up and run, there's crippling bureaucracy (more paperwork steps=more bribes, so corruption breeds bureaucracy), government thugs/warlords/criminals/whoever keep arbitrarily seizing your property, you can't get proper title to property so you can't raise mortgages, the courts don't work so you can't enforce your contracts or trademarks (and everyone knows that, so they don't pay and you can't buy things without cash up front), you can spend years waiting for something as simple as a phone line, there's no worthwhile banking system, educated potential workers have all left the country, corrupt currency controls means that only the favoured few don't have to buy foreign currency at black market rates and sell at (lower) official rates, and you've got no hope of raising finance. Oh, and you can't compete in the tradition first-step-up from agriculture (textiles) because the Asians have it thoroughly, erm, sewn up. And, of course, the politicians and politics are all shit.
Then, after all that, some git of a pirate seizes your exports and your customer won't pay when they are four months late.
Well lets look at Europe who has both. Airlines sell tickets at around 100$ and the train from London to Paris is 200$
That depends where you're starting and going to. The Eurostar will take you from St Pancras (central London) to Paris Nord (central Paris) in about 2h20m for 65-100ish UKP. For me it would take about 1h30m from here (3 miles from Stansted Airport, 35 from London) and 16UKP to get to St Pancras. Let's say 3h50 and 90 UKP.
To fly? From central London it's something like 25UKP and 45 minutes to get to an airport, two hours before you leave, 1-1:30 flying for 90-150UKP and something like 40 minutes to central Paris (no idea how much....let's say another 20UKP). My quick search revealed no flights from Stansted (!??), but even if there are any it'd still be likely to take me just as long and cost me more if I have more than hand luggage, even from here.
IIRC the Eurostar goes quite a bit faster than the proposed US trains, though - once it's in France, anyway.
It's amazing how many nationalized differences there are with punctuation usage and spelling.
Not to mention tenses. 'Horse already left the barn' is incorrect in UK English (or, at least, it sounds very wrong to me, and is not typical use). US English seems allergic to the perfect tense for some reason. In the UK it'd be written 'The horse has already left the barn', which indicates the sentence is about the current state of horselessness and not the moment of leaving.
Sure the queen does not really know about any important political or defense issues
Actually, she might. She has a weekly meeting with the PM. No-one knows what they talk about but I'm sure some of it will be sensitive, especially what is technically her army is fighting a war.
I imagine she doesn't take her iPod with her, however.
Erm, I'm not so sure about that. Take a sample of people. Take records of the rate of lots of diseases. Take records of lots of environmental factors. Throw in records of 100 different numbers with each set randomly generated for each person, if you like.
Now look for correlations. You're likely to find some - and, if you didn't, it's because you didn't record enough randomly generated numbers.
Why? Suppose you're statistical methods will tell you're there's a (significant) correlation with 99% certainty. If you were specifically testing a single hypothesis your study had set out to find, that's just fine. If, instead, you search through hundreds of possible correlations between variables then you're going to find some spurious ones. You can't be sure of those until you run a new study, on new data, specifically testing a hypothesised link.
This isn't 'correlation is not causation', it's something different entirely.
Of course companies need to maximise the profit. Why should they minimise debt is beyond me (if you are talking about maximising net profit and not turn-over, debt is not an issue).
Because investors don't just care about profit, they also care about risk. Average profit with above average risk is not good.
Debt and profit interact like this (ignoring tax, for now):
Case 1: A company uses 100m of capital, all from shareholders, to make an average of 10m/year of profit. Return to shareholders: 10%, plus annual variation. The company goes bust if it persistently makes less than 0 profit.
Case 2: An equivalent company uses 100m of capital, 50m from shareholders, 50m from 5% debt, to make an average of 10m/year of profit before interest, 7.5m/year after interest. Return to shareholders: 15%. The company goes bust if it persistently makes less than 2.5m/year from its operations, so the risk to shareholders is larger. If profits are a normal distribution - or anything like it - this could be quite a big difference in risk.
So what matters is not profit, but risk-adjusted profit....and leverage increases risk. In theory, shareholders should care because they adjust the leverage themselves (owning 1000 of the share capital in case one, or 500 of the share capital and 500 of the debt in case two, is equivalent). However, the tax system encourages debt by taxing profit AFTER interest. This is a BAD thing, and may have contributed to our current mess, because it decreases shareholder returns in case 1 more than in case 2, encouraging otherwise pointless risky behaviour.
Well, okay, but here's the simple fact: DHS pulls aside for additional questioning or searches fewer than 10% of all passengers. If you don't want to be searched or questioned, simply don't give them a reason to do so.
That may be OK individually, but generally (not just with smells and aeroplanes) it's a dangerous route to go down collectively. Only a few are questioned, so everyone tries to conform to what they think the authorities consider normal. So the authorities lower their thresholds and then everyone becomes even more conforming, etc. It leads to everyone 'self-censoring' their behaviour to some degree to please government and security guard's prejudices.....it's far better for people to feel secure against unreasonable harrassment. It's not that your suggestion is necessarily bad - but if you can be bothered with baking soda then you ought to also be bothered opposing it politically.
It won't cause early death, but RSI can indeed cause permanent damage - permanent loss of range of motion, weakness or loss of sensation, for example. Hands, arms, neck and shoulders are important - it can be significantly disabling. You have to keep accumulating damage for quite a long time to do that permanently and gaming is usually rather more optional than, say, working at a computer - but given the non-stop nature of it and the way some people just can't keep away I'd imagine it's to be taken seriously. The longer you keep going after getting symptoms the longer you need to rest, so people who work at computers need to take it very seriously very early and keep away from leisure activities like gaming - otherwise good luck explaining to your boss that you need three weeks off to recover from a typing injury.
Anyone who works with computers, or employs people who do, really should know about all of this.
However, these adverts are for children and RSI is apparently rarely permanent in children: http://www.rsi.org.uk/news_article.asp?articleno=89
Erm...actually, using a computer for long enough - especially if you're tensing your muscles, sitting badly, pressing too hard and not taking both frequent small and regular large breaks - IS risky and can damage your joints, muscles, tendons and nerves. Both lack of exercise and (separately) obesity will increase the risk of that happening. 'Long enough' isn't necessarily all that long if you're doing it badly enough - a couple of hours a day upwards, I've heard.
Diet is a much more reliable indicator of obesity.
Yes, but if these adverts (I haven't seen them) are linking inactivity only with health risks via obesity then IMO they're making a mistake. Lack of exercise is bad for you whether you're a healthy weight or not and it's only going to lead to people dismissing exercise because they're not overweight.