However in Iraq, the US and UK would like nothing better than to leave
I'm not sure whether that's 100% true. Sure they would like it, if suddenly the situation would stabilize, a democratic western-oriented government would gain the respect of the population, and troop levels could be reduced. However if the situation would move in that direction, how likely is it that the US would like to maintain just a few bases in Iraq? There are still US bases in Germany, 60 years after WWII ended, and well after the cold war ended, too. There are bases in Saudi Arabia, well after the end of the first gulf war. Iraq has very significant resources - how likely is it that the US government would resist the temptation to keep some military presence in the region? If they do want to leave now, it's not unreasonable to think that the insurgents are the main reason for that.
Even if the US and UK governments genuinely wanted to leave and would want to do that even if things were going well, their credibility is very low. The insurgents may well operate under the assumption that they are not telling the truth.
This stuff only works because you define a group called "them" and when you cause someone to hate you (e.g. by destroying their country and killing their friends and relatives) then you add them to "them". In this respect yeah, "they" attact you, and now you fight "them" in Iraq. The problem with that is that there was no connection between Iraq and terrorism before the US invaded.
As for France - yes there were some severe riots, but to claim that this is going on every night is mis-informed to put it lightly. (It's not like there are never riots in the US either...) Not sure how the Germans are accomodating muslims - maybe you are referring to discussions about the conditions under which german-born foreigners could obtain citizenship? Not unjustified, but not exactly bending over backwards according to US standards where that would be a plain right.
I could see something like this being interesting, when there is a long distance between TV and computer. So the computer with your movie archive sits in your appartment in NYC, and you are watching them on a TV while on a business trip in Seattle (maybe it's raining and you don't want to go out...). It's not clear to me how much bandwidth is required on both ends, though.
Now allofmp3.com fits that bill but as this story shows, their legality is in question.
There is really no question, they operate according to Russian law. Now the law may change, and then their business must change, too. However that will not change the fact that they are now legal and have been legal in the past.
Anyone can file a suit against anyone else, so if that happens it should not be taken as an indication that the accuser is right.
Really and what does a conventional generator do when all this winderful fee energy is being generated? Exactly the same as it does when it is not i.e. they keep on running.
No it won't. Power plants turn off generators when they don't need them. Electric utilities don't switch off generators for every little fluctuation in consumption, that's correct. However they ramp production up and down in order to track the demand curve (predicting the demand curve is actually an interesting research subject). Also while generators turn at a fixed frequency they require less fuel to do so if the load on the generator is smaller. You can try that with a toy hand-cranked generator - it's easy to turn without a load, but once you hang a few lightbulbs on it, it takes a lot of effort to keep the number of revolutions constant.
Typically an electric utility in Europe maintains about a 5% reserve online - i.e. generators are not generating to their maximum capacity but at about 95%. This is to take care of sudden increases in consumption. The rest of generators are offline when they are not needed. Not all power plants are built to do a lot of ramping up and down, typically some plants are reserved for that job, while others are intended to stay online continously.
I used to work for an electric utility company as a student, the task of the division I was working in was to decide when to switch power-plants online, when to buy power from neighbouring utilities and the like.
Wind power currently accounts for 23% of energy production in Denmark, 6% in Germany. Wind power is the fastest growing energy technology http://www.sffe.no/vind/wind.htm .
It may well be interesting to look at the Dutch decision, however to conclude from their decision that wind power is inviable is invalid. With the same (actually slightly better) justification you could look at all the other countries which expand it's use and conclude it must be viable.
Does that matter though? When you burn hydrogen you get potable water back. You could use a closed system like that. Think about the effort expended to access oil - you prospect, you drill (could be offshore) you refine. It can't possibly be as hard to distill salt water as this. So in that sense water can never be as scarce as oil.
Anyway the whole article seems to center around "hydrogen is not a primary energy source". Which is typically true, but kinda obvious.
The applications for hydrogen which are investigated, usually use hydrogen as a kind of battery. So if you use wind or solar power as primary energy sources you could use hydrogen to store excess production and burn it later when you have less wind or less sun. It's possible that hydrogen is not the ideal solution for that, but the article offers no rationale for that, it's just an assortment of wild claims that it will not be feasable. That the energy efficiency will not reach 100% is obvious - this will be true for any battery.
The next unfounded claim is that the future will be an "electron economy" (like we don't have one in the present...). Meaning that all power will first be converted to electricity, then delivered to the consumer. Of course this doesn't solve the battery problem at all, unless you want to fix every car with an extension cord. On top of that, it may make a lot more sense to generate electricity locally and deliver gas or oil to the consumer, since in this case the heat generated by burning it can be used to supply the heat for a house. Heat generated in remote power plants is usually just "thrown away", so that's inefficient too.
I agree, of course he wasn't money laundering. However what I was trying to point out is that it's very reasonable to have the suspicion given the circumstances.
Is it? I suspect that Japan isn't the only country where money laundering is something the police takes an interest in. If someone on a student visa (who normally wouldn't have an income) transfers over $1 million, it's reasonable to be suspicious. In all likelyhood he committed tax fraud, btw.
It's the English edition of a Japanese paper. As long as you trust the original source it's reasonable to assume that they can translate their own articles properly.
Another poster suggested that deporting might be the only option - I doubt that. They can probably fine him or just ask him to pay taxes on his income. If I'd made $1.3 million I'd be less concerned about being deported and more about being made to pay about $500k taxes....
This may not be what you want, since it's a Flash Player, and considering the thread you probably want something harddrive based. However I think it's a cool piece of hardware with actually good sound quality (based on own bias, not measurements: http://www.gadgets.com.au/processtype.asp?ProductI D=IO-Z3-1GBWH&ProcessType=1 (don't know where you buy this in the US). It plays mp3, wma and ogg.
That's more or less true - nevertheless, it does make a huge difference whether the a government increases debt only slightly (or even reduces it a little), or whether it increases it dramatically. Since 1946 Democratic Presidents on average have increased national debt by 3.7% per year - which is a lot. On the other hand Republican Presidents have on average increased national debt by 9.3% per year - which is a lot worse.
This simple average comparison is a bit unfair to Republican Presidents though. Given inflation a dollar borrowed in 1950 is a lot worse than one borrowed in 2006. In the timeframe since 1946 all Presidents (no matter what party) have decreased the national debt as a percentage of the GDP. With the notable exception of Reagan, Bush and G.W. Bush.
Here are some good graphs: http://zfacts.com/p/318.html the site has a clear bias though, so I doubt you'd want to accept the data without checking. There is confirming material availabe here though:
http://www.marktaw.com/culture_and_media/TheNation alDebt.html - This is not quite as illustrative but provides the links to the official government information regarding debt, so you can verify the information.
I'd disagree - Christianity for example is testable. It makes a variety of claims (like prophets stopping the sun) which can be disproven (e.g. by finding no mentioning of this event in other cultures). (Lots of other things like age of the world, creation of animals etc.) It's contradictory in itself, too - hence can not be true as a whole in the first place. Yet you can see that many people continue believing, even going out of their way to avoid knowledge of their supposed core religious text (how many Christians actually read the bible?) just to avoid facing the contradictions. People continue believing since this belief is important to them, a key point of world view, because it makes them feel safe and part of a community and many other reasons like that. Their capacity to put up with their belief being demonstratable false seems high.
Redefining job titles can have an effect on pay. If you had 15 titles at one point, and reduce that to 5, then you have a variety of ways of screwing employees out of raises. Let's say you were an T8 before the re-org, trying to get promoted to T9 (whatever this may be). Now you get a new title N3, so you don't "need" a promotion anymore, and you don't get the customary raise. In a few years they re-org again, you are now a T10. You just never got a promotion.
Sorry you got me confused now. In my initial post I listed three options (A,B,C), in your reply you addressed the first (A) and the last(C), not the middle one(B).
From that you argued it's either A or C - I disagree.
Further: a country which is under occopation by a foreign army doesn't have a democratic government, since the government doesn't have control over it's territory. It's governed by a foreign army.
As for the civil government failing when you walk away - yes likely, but that doesn't mean it will work if you stay. Using more violence against the population, or against the populations livelyhood will not help that government to gain more support.
There are historical examples where the population of an insurgent country has been controlled by violence. That's feasable. However you'd make a complete mockery of the alleged government which had to stand by, powerless to protect it's citizens. (Let's recall: you've specifically suggested to destroy the homes and risk the deaths of bystanders!)
It's easy to claim that military action will eventually lead to victory as long as you don't pull out. If you don't put a time limit on that - no matter whether it takes years or decades, you can never be proven wrong, you can always argue that yet another 5 years would have made the difference. No matter how ruthless you've already been, you can always claim that being even less caring, being even more violent would have done the trick.
However as long as you can present no evidence in favour of that, I don't see why that course of action should be considered.
By all accounts of people who've been there, though (I don't believe the politicians, but military personel I do believe), this is not the case, though.
That's too bad, relying on random anecdotical evidence of a few acquaintances isn't a very sensible basis to make decisions on.
If that's what happens, it's because there's too many people like you who want it to happen.
First : don't blame me for Bush's mistakes, he had many years to run this war unopposed, at least hold put the blame on those who are responsible for the failure. Second: I stated quite clearly what I want to happen: apologize, pay reparations, put the criminals on trial. You restrict your options to two, because you can't stomach that one. Third: for your approach to make strategic sense you need to come up with a plan to go from military victory to democracy. You did not present such a plan. Going into this without a plan was a major contributor to the disaster in the first place, as you'll remember.
As I pointed out already - colonial style war and occupation can work, there are historical examples. However that does not give you a point in time when you can leave, you need to keep up the occupation and you need to keep up a ruthless regime. If you do that well, you may even be able to turn this into a source of revenue, expoiting natural resources etc. However that's a political pipe dream, the US won't have the stomach to become a ruthless colonial power, either.
One main obstacle in the war against Iraq is that it was unjust. This is not a military category as such, but it has serious military consequences. It means that only a tiny minority of the Iraqi population supports continued US occupation, it means a large majority opposes the US, and it means that recruiting for the Iraqi side will be easy. It also gives ready access to outside supply of weapons and support to the Iraqis. Additionally their moral is in great shape, and they have firm religous backing which helps them energize their troops.
Each time you kill Iraqis - be it by collateral damage or by killing enemy soldiers - you'll create more enemies among their family. Whether that's fair or not, whether it's your fault or the other guy's.
For the strategy you suggest, you need to deal with that. An enormous amount of violence would eventually lead to the population giving up - an amount bigger than the several 100,000 who are already dead.
This approach can work, and it has worked in the past in colonial wars. However it's not clear how you get from there to democracy. Unlike in Germany or Japan you have no lever to somehow justify your actions, so you won't be able to convince the population that your presence there was appropriate. You'll also have tainted everything which sounds democratic. You could find a local dictator to take over and keep up a totalitarian regime, but there would have been an easier approach to get to that state of affairs.
Another alternative would be to try and undo the damage already wrought. You'd need to repair the reputation of the US, and re-establish the credibility of democracy. For that you first need to admit you were wrong, and that your presence in Iraq can only be justified as part of paying a debt incurred. You'd explain to your troops that their role there is no longer that of soldiers but of policemen. You'd make it clear to them that their job is to protect the Iraqi population, and that they are expected to risk their lives for civilians if necessary - just as a policeman would. You'd also issue an apology to the Iraqi people in order to re-establish credibility, and you'd start sending the Bush-clique to the Hague to be tried for the war crimes they commited. With all that, maybe you stand a chance of drying up support for the insurgents and enter into peace negotiations.
Of course, this option would require actual courage, a lot more than sending more US soldiers to their death, killing more Iraqis and frittering away tax money. I doubt there is a single politician in the US with that kind of courage. The American people can not stomach the thought that they were the bad guys in this.
What's actually going to happen is this: The US will pull out, make some empty promises to support the elected government, and watch the resulting ethnic and religious civil war. Bush will be too much of a coward to implement this himself, so we'll have to wait for the next president to abort the disaster. In the meantime congress will press for troop reductions and withdrawal schedules. And many Americans will continue to delude themselves with absurd claims that some good had come from this, and attempt to console themselves that "at least Saddam has been removed".
Sending other people to war doesn't show you have a backbone, torturing people is not bravery. Admitting you were wrong requires courage - I'm not holding my breath.
Not sure I get it yet - they can only make this deal on source they themselves create, right? So if I create a piece of code which Novel is distributing, I can still sue MS if they violate the copyright. Or are the convenants structured so that their customer's can't sue? I didn't see that in the article.
I'm not sure this is a useful concept - depending how far you are willing to stretch it, I think it either doesn't encompass all cases or it becomes to broad to mean anything. My wife looks beautiful, yet I have no interest in sharing her naked pictures with you. I want to keep that to myself, even though "looking good" applies...
Similarly, if I'm into S&M or something like that - I have no interest in my workplace knowing about these activities. This would potentially stretch into the "looking bad" category, but then the solution "avoid looking bad" makes no sense whatsoever. If that's what I'm into, than I have no interest in avoiding it - regardless what my (potentially) stick-in-the-ass employer thinks, or what my fundi christian neighbours have to say to that.
It seems like we are counting mining accidents and plant accidents to get the total number of accidents. That seems reasonable, however I don't see numbers for uranium mining accidents. It might be a lower number, but I don't think that can be zero. Using similar equipment and performing similar tasks I'd expect there should be accidents in uranium mines, too.
Ok, I don't play WoW, but what kind of idiot would install a keylogger to get access to some other guy's game account? I can understand the motivation to steal someone's bank info - it's immoral, but there is the recognizable purpose of obtaining the money. However if you aren't playing according to the rules, what's be the point in playing a game? You could just as well print yourself a nice certifcate "You have won" and save your time. So maybe people don't pay much attention to these things because they overestimate the intelligence of their fellow citizens...
Ok, but in manufacturing the components this sort of thing could become useful knowledge. The snapping of pieces could (in some process) be an efficient way to get to pieces of a certain length etc.
I guess ear plugs would do the trick. Headphones may work too - many of the people in that age group have those readily available with their iPods.
Also it occured to me that maybe there are useful applications, too. Maybe this could be used to prevent little kids to approach areas which are dangerous to them, while not obstructing access to maintenance personnel. Could be handy for a farmer with lots of machinery and a few small children.
Well the article says that They found that during autumn and spring, when the birds are normally migrating, they reverse their typical sleep patterns [...]
So that does suggest something going on which is not related to the caging, since they were caged and observed during the whole year.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure whether that's 100% true. Sure they would like it, if suddenly the situation would stabilize, a democratic western-oriented government would gain the respect of the population, and troop levels could be reduced. However if the situation would move in that direction, how likely is it that the US would like to maintain just a few bases in Iraq? There are still US bases in Germany, 60 years after WWII ended, and well after the cold war ended, too. There are bases in Saudi Arabia, well after the end of the first gulf war. Iraq has very significant resources - how likely is it that the US government would resist the temptation to keep some military presence in the region? If they do want to leave now, it's not unreasonable to think that the insurgents are the main reason for that.
Even if the US and UK governments genuinely wanted to leave and would want to do that even if things were going well, their credibility is very low. The insurgents may well operate under the assumption that they are not telling the truth.
As for France - yes there were some severe riots, but to claim that this is going on every night is mis-informed to put it lightly. (It's not like there are never riots in the US either...) Not sure how the Germans are accomodating muslims - maybe you are referring to discussions about the conditions under which german-born foreigners could obtain citizenship? Not unjustified, but not exactly bending over backwards according to US standards where that would be a plain right.
Actually the exchange rate should favour sales to the turnip union. In principle a US$900 console should only cost 695 Turnips currently.
Thanks for the informative reply - I was looking at some of their other products, and they seem to make the claim "an Internet connected computer or compatible mobile phone" could be used. Maybe they reduce the quality, or maybe they assume a lot of bandwidth, or maybe they assume that the computer is internet-connected but on the LAN, too... :-)
http://store.digitalriver.com/servlet/ControllerSe rvlet?Action=DisplayPage&Locale=en_US&id=ProductDe tailsPage&SiteID=slingbox&productID=53042900
I could see something like this being interesting, when there is a long distance between TV and computer. So the computer with your movie archive sits in your appartment in NYC, and you are watching them on a TV while on a business trip in Seattle (maybe it's raining and you don't want to go out...). It's not clear to me how much bandwidth is required on both ends, though.
Now allofmp3.com fits that bill but as this story shows, their legality is in question.
There is really no question, they operate according to Russian law. Now the law may change, and then their business must change, too. However that will not change the fact that they are now legal and have been legal in the past.
Anyone can file a suit against anyone else, so if that happens it should not be taken as an indication that the accuser is right.
No it won't. Power plants turn off generators when they don't need them. Electric utilities don't switch off generators for every little fluctuation in consumption, that's correct. However they ramp production up and down in order to track the demand curve (predicting the demand curve is actually an interesting research subject). Also while generators turn at a fixed frequency they require less fuel to do so if the load on the generator is smaller. You can try that with a toy hand-cranked generator - it's easy to turn without a load, but once you hang a few lightbulbs on it, it takes a lot of effort to keep the number of revolutions constant.
Typically an electric utility in Europe maintains about a 5% reserve online - i.e. generators are not generating to their maximum capacity but at about 95%. This is to take care of sudden increases in consumption. The rest of generators are offline when they are not needed. Not all power plants are built to do a lot of ramping up and down, typically some plants are reserved for that job, while others are intended to stay online continously.
I used to work for an electric utility company as a student, the task of the division I was working in was to decide when to switch power-plants online, when to buy power from neighbouring utilities and the like.
Wind power currently accounts for 23% of energy production in Denmark, 6% in Germany. Wind power is the fastest growing energy technology http://www.sffe.no/vind/wind.htm . It may well be interesting to look at the Dutch decision, however to conclude from their decision that wind power is inviable is invalid. With the same (actually slightly better) justification you could look at all the other countries which expand it's use and conclude it must be viable.
Anyway the whole article seems to center around "hydrogen is not a primary energy source". Which is typically true, but kinda obvious.
The applications for hydrogen which are investigated, usually use hydrogen as a kind of battery. So if you use wind or solar power as primary energy sources you could use hydrogen to store excess production and burn it later when you have less wind or less sun. It's possible that hydrogen is not the ideal solution for that, but the article offers no rationale for that, it's just an assortment of wild claims that it will not be feasable. That the energy efficiency will not reach 100% is obvious - this will be true for any battery.
The next unfounded claim is that the future will be an "electron economy" (like we don't have one in the present...). Meaning that all power will first be converted to electricity, then delivered to the consumer. Of course this doesn't solve the battery problem at all, unless you want to fix every car with an extension cord. On top of that, it may make a lot more sense to generate electricity locally and deliver gas or oil to the consumer, since in this case the heat generated by burning it can be used to supply the heat for a house. Heat generated in remote power plants is usually just "thrown away", so that's inefficient too.
I agree, of course he wasn't money laundering. However what I was trying to point out is that it's very reasonable to have the suspicion given the circumstances.
Is it? I suspect that Japan isn't the only country where money laundering is something the police takes an interest in. If someone on a student visa (who normally wouldn't have an income) transfers over $1 million, it's reasonable to be suspicious. In all likelyhood he committed tax fraud, btw.
Another poster suggested that deporting might be the only option - I doubt that. They can probably fine him or just ask him to pay taxes on his income. If I'd made $1.3 million I'd be less concerned about being deported and more about being made to pay about $500k taxes....
This may not be what you want, since it's a Flash Player, and considering the thread you probably want something harddrive based. However I think it's a cool piece of hardware with actually good sound quality (based on own bias, not measurements:I D=IO-Z3-1GBWH&ProcessType=1 (don't know where you buy this in the US).
http://www.gadgets.com.au/processtype.asp?Product
It plays mp3, wma and ogg.
This simple average comparison is a bit unfair to Republican Presidents though. Given inflation a dollar borrowed in 1950 is a lot worse than one borrowed in 2006. In the timeframe since 1946 all Presidents (no matter what party) have decreased the national debt as a percentage of the GDP. With the notable exception of Reagan, Bush and G.W. Bush.
Here are some good graphs: http://zfacts.com/p/318.html the site has a clear bias though, so I doubt you'd want to accept the data without checking. There is confirming material availabe here though: http://www.marktaw.com/culture_and_media/TheNation alDebt.html - This is not quite as illustrative but provides the links to the official government information regarding debt, so you can verify the information.
I'd disagree - Christianity for example is testable. It makes a variety of claims (like prophets stopping the sun) which can be disproven (e.g. by finding no mentioning of this event in other cultures). (Lots of other things like age of the world, creation of animals etc.) It's contradictory in itself, too - hence can not be true as a whole in the first place. Yet you can see that many people continue believing, even going out of their way to avoid knowledge of their supposed core religious text (how many Christians actually read the bible?) just to avoid facing the contradictions. People continue believing since this belief is important to them, a key point of world view, because it makes them feel safe and part of a community and many other reasons like that. Their capacity to put up with their belief being demonstratable false seems high.
It's just a way of lowering average wages.
From that you argued it's either A or C - I disagree.
Further: a country which is under occopation by a foreign army doesn't have a democratic government, since the government doesn't have control over it's territory. It's governed by a foreign army.
As for the civil government failing when you walk away - yes likely, but that doesn't mean it will work if you stay. Using more violence against the population, or against the populations livelyhood will not help that government to gain more support.
There are historical examples where the population of an insurgent country has been controlled by violence. That's feasable. However you'd make a complete mockery of the alleged government which had to stand by, powerless to protect it's citizens. (Let's recall: you've specifically suggested to destroy the homes and risk the deaths of bystanders!)
It's easy to claim that military action will eventually lead to victory as long as you don't pull out. If you don't put a time limit on that - no matter whether it takes years or decades, you can never be proven wrong, you can always argue that yet another 5 years would have made the difference. No matter how ruthless you've already been, you can always claim that being even less caring, being even more violent would have done the trick.
However as long as you can present no evidence in favour of that, I don't see why that course of action should be considered.
That's too bad, relying on random anecdotical evidence of a few acquaintances isn't a very sensible basis to make decisions on.
If that's what happens, it's because there's too many people like you who want it to happen.
First : don't blame me for Bush's mistakes, he had many years to run this war unopposed, at least hold put the blame on those who are responsible for the failure. Second: I stated quite clearly what I want to happen: apologize, pay reparations, put the criminals on trial. You restrict your options to two, because you can't stomach that one. Third: for your approach to make strategic sense you need to come up with a plan to go from military victory to democracy. You did not present such a plan. Going into this without a plan was a major contributor to the disaster in the first place, as you'll remember.
As I pointed out already - colonial style war and occupation can work, there are historical examples. However that does not give you a point in time when you can leave, you need to keep up the occupation and you need to keep up a ruthless regime. If you do that well, you may even be able to turn this into a source of revenue, expoiting natural resources etc. However that's a political pipe dream, the US won't have the stomach to become a ruthless colonial power, either.
Each time you kill Iraqis - be it by collateral damage or by killing enemy soldiers - you'll create more enemies among their family. Whether that's fair or not, whether it's your fault or the other guy's.
For the strategy you suggest, you need to deal with that. An enormous amount of violence would eventually lead to the population giving up - an amount bigger than the several 100,000 who are already dead.
This approach can work, and it has worked in the past in colonial wars. However it's not clear how you get from there to democracy. Unlike in Germany or Japan you have no lever to somehow justify your actions, so you won't be able to convince the population that your presence there was appropriate. You'll also have tainted everything which sounds democratic. You could find a local dictator to take over and keep up a totalitarian regime, but there would have been an easier approach to get to that state of affairs.
Another alternative would be to try and undo the damage already wrought. You'd need to repair the reputation of the US, and re-establish the credibility of democracy. For that you first need to admit you were wrong, and that your presence in Iraq can only be justified as part of paying a debt incurred. You'd explain to your troops that their role there is no longer that of soldiers but of policemen. You'd make it clear to them that their job is to protect the Iraqi population, and that they are expected to risk their lives for civilians if necessary - just as a policeman would. You'd also issue an apology to the Iraqi people in order to re-establish credibility, and you'd start sending the Bush-clique to the Hague to be tried for the war crimes they commited. With all that, maybe you stand a chance of drying up support for the insurgents and enter into peace negotiations.
Of course, this option would require actual courage, a lot more than sending more US soldiers to their death, killing more Iraqis and frittering away tax money. I doubt there is a single politician in the US with that kind of courage. The American people can not stomach the thought that they were the bad guys in this.
What's actually going to happen is this: The US will pull out, make some empty promises to support the elected government, and watch the resulting ethnic and religious civil war. Bush will be too much of a coward to implement this himself, so we'll have to wait for the next president to abort the disaster. In the meantime congress will press for troop reductions and withdrawal schedules. And many Americans will continue to delude themselves with absurd claims that some good had come from this, and attempt to console themselves that "at least Saddam has been removed".
Sending other people to war doesn't show you have a backbone, torturing people is not bravery. Admitting you were wrong requires courage - I'm not holding my breath.
Not sure I get it yet - they can only make this deal on source they themselves create, right? So if I create a piece of code which Novel is distributing, I can still sue MS if they violate the copyright. Or are the convenants structured so that their customer's can't sue? I didn't see that in the article.
Similarly, if I'm into S&M or something like that - I have no interest in my workplace knowing about these activities. This would potentially stretch into the "looking bad" category, but then the solution "avoid looking bad" makes no sense whatsoever. If that's what I'm into, than I have no interest in avoiding it - regardless what my (potentially) stick-in-the-ass employer thinks, or what my fundi christian neighbours have to say to that.
It seems like we are counting mining accidents and plant accidents to get the total number of accidents. That seems reasonable, however I don't see numbers for uranium mining accidents. It might be a lower number, but I don't think that can be zero. Using similar equipment and performing similar tasks I'd expect there should be accidents in uranium mines, too.
Ok, I don't play WoW, but what kind of idiot would install a keylogger to get access to some other guy's game account? I can understand the motivation to steal someone's bank info - it's immoral, but there is the recognizable purpose of obtaining the money. However if you aren't playing according to the rules, what's be the point in playing a game? You could just as well print yourself a nice certifcate "You have won" and save your time. So maybe people don't pay much attention to these things because they overestimate the intelligence of their fellow citizens...
Ok, but in manufacturing the components this sort of thing could become useful knowledge. The snapping of pieces could (in some process) be an efficient way to get to pieces of a certain length etc.
I guess ear plugs would do the trick. Headphones may work too - many of the people in that age group have those readily available with their iPods.
Also it occured to me that maybe there are useful applications, too. Maybe this could be used to prevent little kids to approach areas which are dangerous to them, while not obstructing access to maintenance personnel. Could be handy for a farmer with lots of machinery and a few small children.
So that does suggest something going on which is not related to the caging, since they were caged and observed during the whole year.