You may have little patience for people who demand more than they are worth; but this generation has absolutely no patience for companies unwilling to engage them at market value.
Hmm, how much does some notion of market value matter now compared to, say, forty years ago? People didn't change employer so much. I suspect that pay forty years ago was more likely to follow bureaucratic formulae - this much for three years service, that much for a going up a 'grade' because it's your turn - rather than be related to how much you could achieve and what you'd be worth in the marketplace. If that's true we might expect a 'flattening' of pay compared to age - with better younger workers outpacing less skillful older workers more quickly, but finding that their pay doesn't keep going up just because they've got, say, 12 years experience of writing software instead of eight.
If there were a village of people starving, and I could either give them democracy and let them continue to starve to death, or give them rice and let them live under a brutal dictator, I'd choose the rice, too.
Except that famines come about through politics. They're very rare indeed in functioning democracies (to the point that some people claim there has never been one in such a place). Watch Zimbabwe for an example (or look up the Great Leap Forward for another fabulous demonstration of breathtaking political incompetence killing people).
Ultimately it's those in poor countries that must bring themselves out of poverty, by developing their political systems and economies (markets, finance, industries, infrastructure businesses themselves, enforceability of contracts etc.). Many have huge problems with corruption. In many it takes dozens of official steps to do something as simple as set up a business as a legal entity simply because more steps means more bribes. In some, official property rights to land are near impossible to get, harming stability for businesses and making it impossible to obtain mortgages. Electricity is unreliable or rationed (unless you live next door to an important politician), which hardly makes running a business easier because they all need their own generators and fuel. In some places you have to be on a waiting list for years to get a phone line. Now put all of this together and imagine trying to run a business.
Regardless, a ticket is a ticket -- ONE butt in ONE seat. What difference does it make who's butt it is, or how much the human paid for the seat?
The stadium is probably private property. The owner has a legitimate interest in knowing who is on it and in being able to exclude certain people. In the UK, for example, football clubs are strictly required to keep opposing sides separate, and some also want to know everyone who is in the stadium and where they are sitting. This makes it easier to identify those who, say, throw objects on to the pitch and are caught on camera.
This isn't always true. Sometimes Ticketmaster actually buy some of the tickets to sell on at their own price (especially, I think, 'high-end' tickets). They effectively part-underwrite the event when they do this.
Also, it's not always true that the admin charges and amount taken by the ticketing-system supplier are equal. I'm not sure about Ticketmaster, but with at least some suppliers the fee is set in a long-term contract and is paid by the venue/promoter. The venue may set the admin charge to be the same, but isn't required to do so.
Oh, and sometimes suppliers will have very long contracts with venues which prohibit the sale of tickets through any other system (and 'system' may include the software running on the computers in the venue's own box office - any decent system will integrate the two, so that buyers through any sales channel can choose a seat out of all of those available).
There is no reason that numbers need to be stored - even for subscriptions.
There ARE reasons to store numbers with the current system - and especially there are reasons to store enough to be able to return money. Consider, for example, an event which is cancelled with a few tens of thousands of tickets sold. Are you going to call all of the ticketholders and ask for the card number? What will you do when someone spoofs those calls? What if you receive an order which you believe to be fraudulent (because you've discovered a connection with other fraudulent orders, for example)? If you have the PAN you can get a message to the issuer who can suspend the card until it's been checked with the holder. If not, you can't. And storing at least hashes of a card number can be useful for detecting the suspicious reuse of a card across multiple transactions, and for refusing cards for which you've received questionable chargebacks in the past.
You are, however, right that it's not actually necessary, but the card industry needs to get its act together. Why is the number which identifies the card so valuable? Why not have an ADDITIONAL number I need for authorization, but not for tying transactions to a card, sending refunds and reporting fraud? CVV is a bit like this, but not quite there...(how about extending the number on the magstripe? how about making it mandatory enough that a PAN alone (or just a unique and usable part of it) isn't valuable and I can store it without too much fear?). Why not give me a special code for continuing authorities (like subscriptions) which I (and only I) can use in place of a PAN? Actually, some payment service providers in the UK used to do this (and used to allow refunds based on a past transaction ID_...but have drastically cut back this sort of thing because of fear of liability arising from keeping all of those card numbers....so they've passed these problems back to the merchants.
You can just store the first and last four digits. That's all the information credit card companies give businesses when they report fraud anyway.
That's not my experience. The ones I see have the full card number (and are sent one at a time, printed out, by post). If you keep hashes of the card numbers you can then find the transactions from it easily enough.
Secondly, if the US dollar has fallen in value against the pound sterling (and most other currencies), surely it is the dollar that is depreciating and thus the US that would experience inflation?
Inflation causes currency movements and currency movements cause inflation. Suppose all US prices doubled overnight, with everything else staying the same. All of the dollar exchange rates would have to change to keep everything balanced....you'd get twice as many dollars for every pound, and every pound would buy just as many US goods as before. However, if the exchange rate changes for another reason (with no change in prices, so that the real exchange rate changes) then inflation measures in the US will change because the local price of imported goods has changed. You can't tell the two cases apart just by looking at the exchange rate.
Ah....the GP gave me the impression that even the basic foodstuffs came with HFCS in them in the US, which would be just plain deceitful and leave even those who care about what they eat with no choice. If you're buying 'milk drinks' to put on your cornflakes or in your tea then you deserve everything you get... The same with 'processed meats' (I assume you mean ready-made beefburger patties and prepared meals, rather than, say, prosciutto or ready-severed chicken parts). As I haven't bought a ready-made meal for several years (or a 'milk drink' in my lifetime) I've no idea what they put in them here...but I'd be unsurprised to see 'glucose syrup' on the ingredients list. That seems to be the cheap-easy-to-process sugar of choice in the UK (and is also an excellent red flag for anyone wanting to avoid buying low quality prepared food, biscuits, cakes, etc.).
It is added to everything from meat, milk, coffee to bread.
Wow!
Milk?
The stuff that comes out of the bottom of cows? The stuff which, where I come from, is taken from the cow, pasteurised, bottled and sold as it is?
And MEAT? HOW????? Surely adding sugar to meat, milk or coffee means it isn't meat, milk or coffee any more. It's a prepared meal, a milk drink or...errr...a ready sweetened powdery thing? At least bread I can understand....(it's shit here, too - but you can make that yourself (hint: buy a machine, and use nothing but water, yeast, salt and flour))...but meat, milk and coffee are not things that should be in need of an ingredients list. If it's not what it says it is, the seller wants arresting.
I think you may have missed the point of combined heat and power. The idea is to generate electricity and heat simultaneously in the winter instead of just heat. As you no doubt know, power stations throw away two-thirds of the energy going in in the form of heat released in to the environment (AFAIK there are no cases in the UK where this heat is pumped in to homes). Combined heat and power in a home can be MORE efficient overall than a power station even if it produces less electricity from the input because it can use a large amount of what would have been waste heat.
You'd only use such a generator when you want heat and not when you just want electricity. The rest of the time you'd use mains electricity.
Presumably they mean that the proteins which detect it (and hence some part of your body) are at 10C and not the air temperature. How do you think you'd feel if your fingers were 10C? If both the surface of your body and the air temperature were 10C, I think I'd have to conclude you were dead...
Does the US need to do more to reduce its (carbon) emissions? Hell yes. But so does everyone else. Make it simple. Everyone...reduce your individual countries emissions by x% in y years. No breaks, no 'trading', no excuses. X%.
This is a bad idea, for two reasons.
Firstly, trading is essential to both finding new ways to cut emissions and to cutting emissions efficiently (which in turns allows more cuts because they are more politically acceptable). It helps cut emissions more efficiently because some industries and countries have easier routes to cuts than others. If one country can cut more than their 'fair share' cheaply and sell their credits to another that can only do so expensively for an intermediate price then both countries gain, the same global reduction occurs and people's lives are better because there is more economic output. It helps find new ways to cut emissions by making finding them pay. If you, as a company, only need to go below some bar and no more then you'll invest and research so as to just about meet it. If you can sell credits you don't need (or have to buy expensive credits) then you suddenly have an incentive to be inventive - you can increase your profits by cutting by more than your 'fair share' demands.
Secondly, any regime which demands differing carbon allowances for different people is not going to survive politically in the long term. If you say to a chinese person 'you can only emit one tenth of what I can emit' and, as a result, that person suffers drastically reduced economic well-being, then countries with lower quotas will sooner or later either fail to agree to quotas, quietly cheat on quotas more than otherwise or just outright tell you to fuck off. Parity for carbon allowances worldwide, whilst rather frightening for the rich, is an eventual and inevitable consequence of running such a scheme because anything else is effectively saying 'we're more entitled to this earth than you are'.
That is why appeals to non-scarcity cannot differentiate IP from other property.
You're joking, right??? The term this thread is searching for is 'non-rival' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics) ). Apples are rivalrous goods. If I eat an apple I reduce the amount of apple left for everyone else. Housing services (think 'house-months') are, too. If I live in a house for a month, I reduce the amount of housing left for everyone else for that month. A musical recording, or a piece of software, is non-rival. If I listen to (or copy) some country music it doesn't - regrettably - reduce the amount of country music left in the world for everyone else.
That is the difference, and is why intellectual property is fundamentally different. No free market can produce an optimal outcome for an economy containing non-rival goods (see my other post on the first theorem of welfare economics). With no IP protection there's too little incentive to generate IP. With IP protection people who might benefit from the IP but not by enough to pay the market price cannot make use of it, and this can add up to a lot of lost economic welfare (especially for those in poorer countries - consider AIDS drugs). There's a second-best maxima at some level of IP protection, but it isn't as much as the perfect economic choices (all IP which costs less to produce than the total benefits is produced, and anyone who can benefit from it uses it freely).
The only problem with a pure free market is that it acts under the assumption that what makes the best business sense will be inherently good for everyone.
If you'll excuse me being pedantic, markets don't assume anything as they're mechanisms and don't have brains. What's important are the people involved in them and the effect the mechanism has on their behaviour. The lay-belief in 'free markets' (without, of course, any adequate definition of 'free') has it's more rigorous counterpart in the first theorem of welfare economics. This shows that the economic outcome of a whole free-market economy is 'efficient' (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency , but in summary it means no-one can be made better off without making someone else worse off) and distribution of wealth neutral if certain conditions are met. These include:
There are no missing markets, for ANYTHING in limited supply which affects human economic welfare. As others have already said this would require a market in pollution rights, with supply ultimately limited by the capacity of the earth to cope with every pollutant. (This implication of 'no missing markets' is sometimes made a separate assumption - an assumption of no externalities; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalities . Whether you consider this to be a 'missing market' or not, this IS a requirement of the theory).
Everyone has all the same information.
There are no monopolies, (or industries which are 'natural monopolies').
There are no 'public goods': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good . This means that for the theorem to work you have to assume the non-existence of literature, software, street-lighting, policing, defence and so on.
This theorem is essentially the entire theoretical basis for a 'free market', but the assumptions are ridiculous. It's an excellent starting point, practically and theoretically, but the economic argument for pure free markets falls massively short of what some lay-economists think it supports. To come to any sensible conclusion about free markets you REALLY have to understand the first theorem of welfare economics. Unfortunately, the wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_fundamental_th eorem_of_welfare_economics) is awful and I can't find any good alternatives, so you may have to resort to a library...
The indicator LED is ON when the tv is OFF, and OFF when the tv is ON.
No, the LED is off when the TV is on and on when the TV is in standby. The LED tells you it's still using power. If you aren't using the TV, turn it off properly. Unfortunately, manufacturers sometimes makes this impossible without pulling out the plug. So rather than a campaign for fewer lights, we really ought to have a campaign for real off switches.
What is wrong with Joe wanting to accelrate a 7-ton monster from zero to 60 in under 4 seconds? Instead of dictating to these folks how they should drive, how about improving the technology to make such driving more efficient?
There's nothing wrong with it as long as he's prepared to pay the full economic cost of doing so. That includes all of the internal costs (the ones he pays when he buys stuff) - oil extraction, car maintenance, etc - and all of the external ones - local pollution (think health, building damage and loss of crops), accident risk, policing, noise, global pollution, road wear etc. I can't find any summaries right now (but http://www.belspo.be/belspo/home/publ/pub_ostc/mob il/rapp04_en.pdf appears to be an interesting study in to these costs, which I don't have time to read now). However, IIRC, global warming is less than half of the total external costs on average and the external cost is VERY sensitive to the population densities where you drive.
Practically, this means substantial taxes on fuel, and ideally congestion charges in major cities as well (these, of course, should be used to offset other taxes). I don't remember the figures, but I think it comes out in the few dollars per litre range.
Or maybe the right question is, why should obvious things be spelled out in a law for the drivers to read? Maybe we should just ban patently stupid drivers from driving at all.
Because it removes any doubt, for both drivers and courts. If a picture of you driving your car with your phone gets you a conviction, with no arguing over whether it counts as 'reckless' or not or what the penalty should be, mass enforcement becomes a whole lot more feasible.
He is a KING. A KING. He should be able to deal with (oh horror) FEET!.
I doubt very much that this has anything to do with him being able to 'deal with' feet or not, or indeed about him as a person. I also doubt anyone actually asked him. It's far more likely that he's in some sense considered the embodiment and a symbol of the nation and that insulting him is insulting the whole nation. No excuse for prison by Western standards, I know, but we ARE talking about a military government somewhere rather different.
He doesn't mean 'foreign keys actually work', or 'inserting nonsense dates gives an error' or anything of that kind. He means things like:
- The database doesn't corrupt tables. Ever.
- If the power fails or the kernel goes away at an arbitrary instant, then when the database starts up again all of the data will be there, with committed transactions entirely present and uncommitted ones entirely gone.
Secondly, it's not justified to just assume that MySQL will be faster even with it's limits on data integrity. It depends on your workload. Consider differences in locking strategy and query plans, for example. There's a benchmark showing scaling behaviour in one particular set of circumstances here: http://tweakers.net/reviews/674/6 ; this shows a fairly striking difference in scaling with load on a specific machine.
In fact, probably more tasty. Something I read long ago about deer-hunting talked about making sure you had a quick, clean kill, because triggering the animal's fight-or-flight response would release lots of hormones and stuff, making the meat taste more gamy.
There's energy (as glycogen, I think) and oxygen stored in muscle. If an animal uses this up just before slaughter then the enzymes which tenderize and flavour the meat during hanging don't work properly.
I'm sure google will find you some more thorough explanations, if you're particularly interested.
You cannot prove or disprove God or any other deity.
It's not in principle impossible to disprove particular religions, to a good standard of evidence. Look, for instance, at the evidence concerning the age of the Earth. Or imagine being able to examine Jesus's and his family's DNA (we can't/actually/ do that, but that doesn't make it in principle impossible). Of course, the religious then 'reinterpret' their religion in some way - essentially coming up with a new religion which asserts a subtly different hypothesis.
There's a huge leap from asserting that a God exists to asserting that God exists and has human emotions, can listen to everyone's thoughts simultaneously, can do the otherwise physically impossible whenever he wishes and knows everything that is or ever has been. (As an aside: Just thing what that last one implies about the complexity of whatever structure God uses to store this knowledge; presumably God is supposed to know the precise position and momentum of every particle in the Universe; this isn't something you could store and retrieve even if you tried to USE the position and momentum of every particle in the Universe to store it).
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Hmm, how much does some notion of market value matter now compared to, say, forty years ago? People didn't change employer so much. I suspect that pay forty years ago was more likely to follow bureaucratic formulae - this much for three years service, that much for a going up a 'grade' because it's your turn - rather than be related to how much you could achieve and what you'd be worth in the marketplace. If that's true we might expect a 'flattening' of pay compared to age - with better younger workers outpacing less skillful older workers more quickly, but finding that their pay doesn't keep going up just because they've got, say, 12 years experience of writing software instead of eight.
Except that famines come about through politics. They're very rare indeed in functioning democracies (to the point that some people claim there has never been one in such a place). Watch Zimbabwe for an example (or look up the Great Leap Forward for another fabulous demonstration of breathtaking political incompetence killing people).
Ultimately it's those in poor countries that must bring themselves out of poverty, by developing their political systems and economies (markets, finance, industries, infrastructure businesses themselves, enforceability of contracts etc.). Many have huge problems with corruption. In many it takes dozens of official steps to do something as simple as set up a business as a legal entity simply because more steps means more bribes. In some, official property rights to land are near impossible to get, harming stability for businesses and making it impossible to obtain mortgages. Electricity is unreliable or rationed (unless you live next door to an important politician), which hardly makes running a business easier because they all need their own generators and fuel. In some places you have to be on a waiting list for years to get a phone line. Now put all of this together and imagine trying to run a business.
Of course, in more deprived areas a safe house will do.
The stadium is probably private property. The owner has a legitimate interest in knowing who is on it and in being able to exclude certain people. In the UK, for example, football clubs are strictly required to keep opposing sides separate, and some also want to know everyone who is in the stadium and where they are sitting. This makes it easier to identify those who, say, throw objects on to the pitch and are caught on camera.
Also, it's not always true that the admin charges and amount taken by the ticketing-system supplier are equal. I'm not sure about Ticketmaster, but with at least some suppliers the fee is set in a long-term contract and is paid by the venue/promoter. The venue may set the admin charge to be the same, but isn't required to do so.
Oh, and sometimes suppliers will have very long contracts with venues which prohibit the sale of tickets through any other system (and 'system' may include the software running on the computers in the venue's own box office - any decent system will integrate the two, so that buyers through any sales channel can choose a seat out of all of those available).
There ARE reasons to store numbers with the current system - and especially there are reasons to store enough to be able to return money. Consider, for example, an event which is cancelled with a few tens of thousands of tickets sold. Are you going to call all of the ticketholders and ask for the card number? What will you do when someone spoofs those calls? What if you receive an order which you believe to be fraudulent (because you've discovered a connection with other fraudulent orders, for example)? If you have the PAN you can get a message to the issuer who can suspend the card until it's been checked with the holder. If not, you can't. And storing at least hashes of a card number can be useful for detecting the suspicious reuse of a card across multiple transactions, and for refusing cards for which you've received questionable chargebacks in the past.
You are, however, right that it's not actually necessary, but the card industry needs to get its act together. Why is the number which identifies the card so valuable? Why not have an ADDITIONAL number I need for authorization, but not for tying transactions to a card, sending refunds and reporting fraud? CVV is a bit like this, but not quite there...(how about extending the number on the magstripe? how about making it mandatory enough that a PAN alone (or just a unique and usable part of it) isn't valuable and I can store it without too much fear?). Why not give me a special code for continuing authorities (like subscriptions) which I (and only I) can use in place of a PAN? Actually, some payment service providers in the UK used to do this (and used to allow refunds based on a past transaction ID_...but have drastically cut back this sort of thing because of fear of liability arising from keeping all of those card numbers....so they've passed these problems back to the merchants.
That's not my experience. The ones I see have the full card number (and are sent one at a time, printed out, by post). If you keep hashes of the card numbers you can then find the transactions from it easily enough.
They did that once. 'America', I think they called it.
Remind me never to buy a storage array from you...
Inflation causes currency movements and currency movements cause inflation. Suppose all US prices doubled overnight, with everything else staying the same. All of the dollar exchange rates would have to change to keep everything balanced....you'd get twice as many dollars for every pound, and every pound would buy just as many US goods as before. However, if the exchange rate changes for another reason (with no change in prices, so that the real exchange rate changes) then inflation measures in the US will change because the local price of imported goods has changed. You can't tell the two cases apart just by looking at the exchange rate.
Ah....the GP gave me the impression that even the basic foodstuffs came with HFCS in them in the US, which would be just plain deceitful and leave even those who care about what they eat with no choice. If you're buying 'milk drinks' to put on your cornflakes or in your tea then you deserve everything you get...
The same with 'processed meats' (I assume you mean ready-made beefburger patties and prepared meals, rather than, say, prosciutto or ready-severed chicken parts). As I haven't bought a ready-made meal for several years (or a 'milk drink' in my lifetime) I've no idea what they put in them here...but I'd be unsurprised to see 'glucose syrup' on the ingredients list. That seems to be the cheap-easy-to-process sugar of choice in the UK (and is also an excellent red flag for anyone wanting to avoid buying low quality prepared food, biscuits, cakes, etc.).
Wow!
Milk?
The stuff that comes out of the bottom of cows? The stuff which, where I come from, is taken from the cow, pasteurised, bottled and sold as it is?
And MEAT? HOW????? Surely adding sugar to meat, milk or coffee means it isn't meat, milk or coffee any more. It's a prepared meal, a milk drink or...errr...a ready sweetened powdery thing? At least bread I can understand....(it's shit here, too - but you can make that yourself (hint: buy a machine, and use nothing but water, yeast, salt and flour))...but meat, milk and coffee are not things that should be in need of an ingredients list. If it's not what it says it is, the seller wants arresting.
You'd only use such a generator when you want heat and not when you just want electricity. The rest of the time you'd use mains electricity.
Presumably they mean that the proteins which detect it (and hence some part of your body) are at 10C and not the air temperature. How do you think you'd feel if your fingers were 10C? If both the surface of your body and the air temperature were 10C, I think I'd have to conclude you were dead...
This is a bad idea, for two reasons.
Firstly, trading is essential to both finding new ways to cut emissions and to cutting emissions efficiently (which in turns allows more cuts because they are more politically acceptable). It helps cut emissions more efficiently because some industries and countries have easier routes to cuts than others. If one country can cut more than their 'fair share' cheaply and sell their credits to another that can only do so expensively for an intermediate price then both countries gain, the same global reduction occurs and people's lives are better because there is more economic output. It helps find new ways to cut emissions by making finding them pay. If you, as a company, only need to go below some bar and no more then you'll invest and research so as to just about meet it. If you can sell credits you don't need (or have to buy expensive credits) then you suddenly have an incentive to be inventive - you can increase your profits by cutting by more than your 'fair share' demands.
Secondly, any regime which demands differing carbon allowances for different people is not going to survive politically in the long term. If you say to a chinese person 'you can only emit one tenth of what I can emit' and, as a result, that person suffers drastically reduced economic well-being, then countries with lower quotas will sooner or later either fail to agree to quotas, quietly cheat on quotas more than otherwise or just outright tell you to fuck off. Parity for carbon allowances worldwide, whilst rather frightening for the rich, is an eventual and inevitable consequence of running such a scheme because anything else is effectively saying 'we're more entitled to this earth than you are'.
You're joking, right??? The term this thread is searching for is 'non-rival' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics) ). Apples are rivalrous goods. If I eat an apple I reduce the amount of apple left for everyone else. Housing services (think 'house-months') are, too. If I live in a house for a month, I reduce the amount of housing left for everyone else for that month. A musical recording, or a piece of software, is non-rival. If I listen to (or copy) some country music it doesn't - regrettably - reduce the amount of country music left in the world for everyone else.
That is the difference, and is why intellectual property is fundamentally different. No free market can produce an optimal outcome for an economy containing non-rival goods (see my other post on the first theorem of welfare economics). With no IP protection there's too little incentive to generate IP. With IP protection people who might benefit from the IP but not by enough to pay the market price cannot make use of it, and this can add up to a lot of lost economic welfare (especially for those in poorer countries - consider AIDS drugs). There's a second-best maxima at some level of IP protection, but it isn't as much as the perfect economic choices (all IP which costs less to produce than the total benefits is produced, and anyone who can benefit from it uses it freely).
If you'll excuse me being pedantic, markets don't assume anything as they're mechanisms and don't have brains. What's important are the people involved in them and the effect the mechanism has on their behaviour. The lay-belief in 'free markets' (without, of course, any adequate definition of 'free') has it's more rigorous counterpart in the first theorem of welfare economics. This shows that the economic outcome of a whole free-market economy is 'efficient' (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency , but in summary it means no-one can be made better off without making someone else worse off) and distribution of wealth neutral if certain conditions are met. These include:
This theorem is essentially the entire theoretical basis for a 'free market', but the assumptions are ridiculous. It's an excellent starting point, practically and theoretically, but the economic argument for pure free markets falls massively short of what some lay-economists think it supports. To come to any sensible conclusion about free markets you REALLY have to understand the first theorem of welfare economics. Unfortunately, the wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_fundamental_th eorem_of_welfare_economics) is awful and I can't find any good alternatives, so you may have to resort to a library...
No, the LED is off when the TV is on and on when the TV is in standby. The LED tells you it's still using power. If you aren't using the TV, turn it off properly. Unfortunately, manufacturers sometimes makes this impossible without pulling out the plug. So rather than a campaign for fewer lights, we really ought to have a campaign for real off switches.
There's nothing wrong with it as long as he's prepared to pay the full economic cost of doing so. That includes all of the internal costs (the ones he pays when he buys stuff) - oil extraction, car maintenance, etc - and all of the external ones - local pollution (think health, building damage and loss of crops), accident risk, policing, noise, global pollution, road wear etc. I can't find any summaries right now (but http://www.belspo.be/belspo/home/publ/pub_ostc/mo
Practically, this means substantial taxes on fuel, and ideally congestion charges in major cities as well (these, of course, should be used to offset other taxes). I don't remember the figures, but I think it comes out in the few dollars per litre range.
Because it removes any doubt, for both drivers and courts. If a picture of you driving your car with your phone gets you a conviction, with no arguing over whether it counts as 'reckless' or not or what the penalty should be, mass enforcement becomes a whole lot more feasible.
I doubt very much that this has anything to do with him being able to 'deal with' feet or not, or indeed about him as a person. I also doubt anyone actually asked him. It's far more likely that he's in some sense considered the embodiment and a symbol of the nation and that insulting him is insulting the whole nation. No excuse for prison by Western standards, I know, but we ARE talking about a military government somewhere rather different.
He doesn't mean 'foreign keys actually work', or 'inserting nonsense dates gives an error' or anything of that kind. He means things like:
- The database doesn't corrupt tables. Ever.
- If the power fails or the kernel goes away at an arbitrary instant, then when the database starts up again all of the data will be there, with committed transactions entirely present and uncommitted ones entirely gone.
Secondly, it's not justified to just assume that MySQL will be faster even with it's limits on data integrity. It depends on your workload. Consider differences in locking strategy and query plans, for example. There's a benchmark showing scaling behaviour in one particular set of circumstances here: http://tweakers.net/reviews/674/6 ; this shows a fairly striking difference in scaling with load on a specific machine.
You don't get it, do you. This is religion. It doesn't have to be accurate to be true. There are deeper truths than truth!
There's energy (as glycogen, I think) and oxygen stored in muscle. If an animal uses this up just before slaughter then the enzymes which tenderize and flavour the meat during hanging don't work properly.
I'm sure google will find you some more thorough explanations, if you're particularly interested.
It's not in principle impossible to disprove particular religions, to a good standard of evidence. Look, for instance, at the evidence concerning the age of the Earth. Or imagine being able to examine Jesus's and his family's DNA (we can't
There's a huge leap from asserting that a God exists to asserting that God exists and has human emotions, can listen to everyone's thoughts simultaneously, can do the otherwise physically impossible whenever he wishes and knows everything that is or ever has been. (As an aside: Just thing what that last one implies about the complexity of whatever structure God uses to store this knowledge; presumably God is supposed to know the precise position and momentum of every particle in the Universe; this isn't something you could store and retrieve even if you tried to USE the position and momentum of every particle in the Universe to store it).