Usually, these sort of studies assume that the only reason anyone would go to college is to improve their lifetime earning potential and then compare the average change in earning to the cost of the university. While this is an important consideration, it shouldn't be the prevailing one, and more importantly it shouldn't be translated into the only potential thing of value that might come out of a university education. We are all not mindless money generating machines that simply wish to take the quickest route to a buck.
Clearly you didn't learn any economics in college!
Split among 10 people, that's $35 pp for 100 Mbit. How much does your cable, DSL, or fiber provider charge for 100 mbit service? Do they even offer it?
It's actually even better than 100Mbps per person sharing it, as long as each of the 10 persons uses it in a reasonably intermittent fashion. Everybody can get more than their share some of the time as long as nobody gets their whole share all the time.
This setup however, will simply assume that not all users will saturate their 1gbps pipe all of the time...
Which is, incidentally, the assumption that all shared networks (like, e.g., the Internet) make anyway. That's the whole point; they wouldn't be shared networks otherwise!
There's also the whole thing that a sun-centered model is based on universal laws of physics, while earth-centered models were constructed just to describe the motion of heavenly bodies and had no universality.
I'm not sure that's true. Ptolemaic astronomy had Aristotelian mechanics on its side. For example, in Ptolemaic astronomy, the Earth is the center of the universe; in Aristotelian mechanics, it defines a reference frame that is truly at rest.
For some reason I have a problem with low quality audio such as AM and telephones. While other people have no problem hearing what's said all I hear is something that's recognizable as a human voice, but doesn't seem to be saying anything comprehensible. I've had my hearing tested and it's actually above average.
I wouldn't assume that your result on the hearing test rules out all types of hearing problems. It depends on what the hearing test actually tests for--there may be perceptual issues that it just can't catch, and that sounds like it could be one. An analogous example from vision: there are people who can mostly see fine but can't recognize faces. If you gave them an eye exam, their problem wouldn't influence the result.
So, it could be a rare impediment where you can't understand voices without some frequency information that the phone strips out. Or perhaps you're just odd. Or both--it's not obvious how to distinguish one from the other!
My experience with Skype, VOIP, and even to a lesser degree cell phones is that they all have latency worse than landlines. Is this actually true? We were considering switching our business phone lines over to Time Warner voip. I talked to one of their people on the phone. My side was landline, theirs was time warner voip. The delay was awful. We kept talking over each other.
Well, I don't know about worse, but I've experienced latency like that on long-distance calls over landlines many times over the past 10 years or so.
See, your girlfriend's dad should be (and probably is) incorporated as a business. Then, all that income the business earns would be counted toward the business, and then the business would pay the salaries of the employees.
Incorporation might be a good idea for all I know, but it's strictly speaking unnecessary for the tax issues. Sole proprietorship businesses are entitled to the same business expense tax deductions as corporations.
Let me give you an example. My girlfriend's parents are very well-off. Her father is a dentist who owns his own practice, which employs about 30 other people. It's taken him years of hard work to accomplish this. He didn't start off well-off, he worked his ass off, took risks, and today does very well, and provides a decent living and health insurance for many employees. If you took the money he worked so hard to make to give it to others who did not earn it, he wouldn't be able to help those he helps with a competitive practice and good stable jobs. Have you ever gotten a job where you boss was dirt poor? If they don't have money, they can't hire other people and create more jobs.
Abcd1234 covered this in his reply, but I think it's worth seconding it: employee wages are business expenses, and as such, tax deductible. Your girlfriend's father pays zero taxes on the money he pays his employees. Raising taxes on his business doesn't affect his ability to hire people in the direct manner you imply. He just gets to keep less of the profits.
I used to think the same thing, but that was before I ever had to solve a no-trivial problem. What do I think now? Basically that business logic belongs in a domain layer, but that shouldn't mean that the database is treated like a black box.
Well, you're both right. Business logic belongs in the database--but our databases are too weak when it comes to integrating with general-purpose programming languages, which is the whole reason why we have domain layers. Our relational databases come from the world of COBOL, and it shows in their built-in languages (e.g., SQL, PL/SQL).
We'd be better served by a relational database system that embedded its features inside a good programming language. I'll be bold and sneak in the suggestion that this ought to be a functional language; after all, the relational algebra is a simple kind of functional language.
The papers named Hooman Karamian (TheDirty.com guy) and Dirty World Entertainment Recordings (company that runs TheDirt.com). So, TheDirt.com were named in the lawsuit, indisputably. At most they can say that the fact that the suit names Karamian is evidence that there is an error in it, and grounds for dismissal.
Because a judge should be able to think for him/herself and be able to make logical conclusions based on evidence.
This part of the legal process deliberately foregoes consideration of evidence. At this point in the process, you have a plaintiff that has a complaint against a defendant, and gets a chance to state their case. The defendant is legally bound to respond to the complaint. If we didn't have it this way, defendants would just systematically ignore complaints against them and keep doing whatever the hell they wanted; plaintiffs wouldn't bother bringing complaints before the courts, and would take justice in their own hands; and instead of erroneous lawsuits, you'd have erroneous justice killings.
Besides, what do you expect the judge to do in this one case? S/he has a complaint filed by the plaintiff, who was harmed by A, but erroneously names B as the defendant. How is the judge supposed to figure this out on the bench? The judge is a mediator, not an investigator, and we don't have public investigators that look into civil complaints; that 's something that the parties to the dispute are supposed to do. We'd need something like a Civil Police that investigates civil complaints instead of criminal ones.
Yeah, it kinda sucks that some random schmoe can sue you erroneously and you have to respond. But again, it sure beats having some random schmoe physically attack you for something that he erroneously thinks you did. No legal system is going to remove the fact that random people can have illegitimate disputes with you, and that such disputes can inconvenience you greatly.
And where is the innocent before proven guilty, it sounds like the court system is designed around you are guilty unless you prove to the judge that you are innocent.
That's criminal law, where the accused can be deprived of their liberty (or life). Civil law works differently.
I dunno. If I got a summons and complaint for A, and I'm B, I don't think I have to respond. IOW, if the right defendant was named, but the summons and complaint sent to the wrong address, B was not sued. A lost this case. Of course, if B was improperly named, and properly served, then, yeah, B has to respond.
The case we're discussing here is the last one: B was improperly named, and (we assume) properly served. GGP suggested that B should ignore the summons, wait until default judgement is awarded against them, and then sue somebody for the "damages" that were caused to them by the erroneous suit and award. That is, as I was trying to put mildly, really fucking stupid, because in that case B transparently allows the "damages" to happen so that he can sue.
You first argued that we should have a civil courts system where somebody who has been erroneously served as a defendant should be able to ignore the court summons. I answered with an argument that while that is not wonderful, it is a lot better than the realistic alternatives, which involve getting erroneously shot instead of erroneously sued.
Do you have something to respond to that, or are you just going to randomly rant at stuff that you don't really understand but pisses you off because somebody else like you has told you it should?
You do realize that this happens often enough -- that the wrong person or company gets served -- that there are established court procedures for dealing with it?
All of them requiring time, money and effort on the part of those who did no wrong. Ignoring something like this IS the right thing to do. The problem is the fucked up laws do not see it that way.
You're being very shortsighted about this. Let me explain.
The civil court system exists in order to peacefully mediate disputes between private parties and produce fair solutions to them. In societies that do not have a civil court system or a similar institution, such disputes must be resolved between the parties themselves. This often means violence. I.e., without courts, if Joe mistakenly believes that you took 10 of his goats, and no matter how much evidence you show him he continues to believe so, there's a good chance you're going to find yourself in a violent confrontation with Joe, and will have to defend yourself and your property.
So yeah, in our civil court system, any old Joe can raise a complaint against you, and you're compelled to respond and defend yourself, even if there are some pretty blatant errors in the complaint. This is a big drag, yes, but it sure beats having to be constantly prepared to respond to any old Joe trying to ambush and shoot you dead for an equivalently erroneous complaint.
If they had shown up, could they have demanded that the plaintiff pay for their expenses?
Possibly. You're failing to see this from the most productive angle: TheDirt.com should have contacted the plaintiff's lawyer right after receiving the summons, pointed out that they had served the wrong company, and asked them to withdraw the complaint or amend it to point at the right guys. The plaintiff then should have verified this response to their satisfaction, and complied with the request. It is not in the interest of the plaintiff to sue the wrong folks, after all; and if the plaintiffs insisted on taking it to court, and TheDirt.com showed in court that they clearly demonstrated to the plaintiff that they were the wrong party, then the plaintiff could be in trouble, and TheDirt.com could likely collect expenses (if not more) from them.
The problem is that if you don't even bother to go to the court date, much less call the plaintiff's lawyer and talk to them, you're not going to be in a good position to demand that your expenses be paid. So, for example, if you get on a plane, fly to California with your lawyer to make the court date, and there demand to have the plaintiff pay your expenses, you're going to be asked why the heck didn't you just call the plaintiff and solve this problem outside the court.
No, by not doing that, they set themselves up for a countersuit for fraudulently suing them in the first place. Which may earn them a lot more money than their website does.
I really suspect that failing to respond to the court summons would fuck up their chances of winning such a lawsuit. You can't really get a court to take seriously your demand of $$$ for being wrongly sued if you didn't even bother to give the plaintiff a damn phone call telling them that you were the wrong guy. It's just not a good faith attempt to solve the dispute.
Yeah, that seems kind of odd to me. Failing to use a condom for the second time isn't rape unless she withheld consent from that time.
Not so sure about this. It depends on the laws of the jurisdiction in question, but there are jurisdictions where using certain types of deception or fraud to obtain consent to sex is rape. The classic examples are deceiving a woman as to your identity (e.g., if her boyfriend's twin brother were to impersonate him), or making her believe it's a necessary part of a medical procedure (yes, this has happened). The most infamous recent case: a Palestinian man convicted of rape because he told the woman that he was Jewish.
It's not a stretch to say that it's rape if a man obtains consent for sex by falsely telling her he will wear a condom.
By that logic, if a woman insist on using a condom each time then after several months of a committed relationship and several STI tests they have sex without he could be brought up on rape charges.
Well, you know, having sex with somebody against their consent is rape. Unlike what your comment implies, there is no magic moment where, once you've fucked her long enough, you no longer need her consent or to respect her conditions for that consent. If you've got a problem with her insistence on the condom you're not entitled to disregard them and have things your own way by either force or deception.
That's what I thought I read in early reviews, but a review on photo.net says it can record 12 minutes in HD or 29 minutes, 59 seconds in SD. Being able to record 12 minutes, you should be able to break up scenes into small enough segments to record all of it, so maybe with the right accessories maybe it can be a decent movie camera.
The EU defines devices that can record 30 minutes or more of continuous video as "camcorders", and subjects them to special taxation. This is the reason for the 29:59 limit on SD.
The alternate solution ceoyoyo is talking about requires a different kind of sensor. Imagine if you had two kinds of pixel sensors, one sensitive and the other insensitive. You'd alternate them on your sensor, perhaps in a checkerboard pattern, but basically pairing adjacent sensitive/insensitive pixels. Now, if your sensitive pixel registers too high a value, then it's probably blown out so use the value from the insensitive one (which is by definition not as bright). If the insensitive one registers too low a value, then it's probably too dark, so use the sensitive one (by definition not as dark). The crucial difference here is that you choose one over the other, and never average.
But if you do this, half of the area of your sensor at any given time is not recording light. You've effectively made your sensor perform like one with just half the area.
You may want to read this page. But basically, the way I see it, Foveon is stuck with very unpopular cameras (Sigma) that get passed over for reasons that mostly have nothing to do with the sensor tech; and because of this, there is less money invested into improving it, which means that it lags compared to advanced Bayer designs.
Getting rid of leap seconds in the representation would be a mistake in the long run. A much superior fix would be to have computers keep track of TAI internally and then convert to UTC with a leap second table, much the same way we convert to local time with a time zone table.
The problem with this has been pointed out a gazillion times: updating the leap second table requires either connectivity or manual intervention, which are not available in all applications where people want to use UTC.
Yes, the question is more if there's more or less hassle to have summer and winter opening hours than to change "time" itself.
Oh, it's definitely no hassle as long as the correct measures are taken.
First, you need to make sure that you standardize the summer and winter hours across the whole nation, so that everybody switches over on the same date. It would be very confusing to have to call every business you deal with in order to ask whether they've already switched over to winter time.
Second, you should probably amend all local laws that specify specific times of the day so that they specify different times for summer and winter. You know, if my neighborhood bar opens at 8pm in summer and 7pm in winter, I would be pissed if a law that forces bars to close at 2am went unamended. I'd get one fewer bar hour in summer, and that's clearly unacceptable.
Third, in addition to amending all the laws, you have to make sure that you redo all the street signs that mention specific hours, so that that "free parking after 6pm" sign now lists separate summer and winter hours.
Fourth, whenever you schedule a late or early appointment in your calendar at a significant time ahead, make sure you take care to check whether the day you're scheduling it for is not past the switchover date, and you accidentally schedule the appointment for a non-laborable time for that season. Hey, we should probably redesign paper agendas so that the lines showing the working hours change for the seasons.
So you see, yes, it's definitely no hassle at all, as long as you take all of these measures, and any other ones that I may have forgotten.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly you didn't learn any economics in college!
Ever since Gates and Zuckerberg are and you're not, sucka.
It's actually even better than 100Mbps per person sharing it, as long as each of the 10 persons uses it in a reasonably intermittent fashion. Everybody can get more than their share some of the time as long as nobody gets their whole share all the time.
Which is, incidentally, the assumption that all shared networks (like, e.g., the Internet) make anyway. That's the whole point; they wouldn't be shared networks otherwise!
I'm not sure that's true. Ptolemaic astronomy had Aristotelian mechanics on its side. For example, in Ptolemaic astronomy, the Earth is the center of the universe; in Aristotelian mechanics, it defines a reference frame that is truly at rest.
I wouldn't assume that your result on the hearing test rules out all types of hearing problems. It depends on what the hearing test actually tests for--there may be perceptual issues that it just can't catch, and that sounds like it could be one. An analogous example from vision: there are people who can mostly see fine but can't recognize faces. If you gave them an eye exam, their problem wouldn't influence the result.
So, it could be a rare impediment where you can't understand voices without some frequency information that the phone strips out. Or perhaps you're just odd. Or both--it's not obvious how to distinguish one from the other!
Well, I don't know about worse, but I've experienced latency like that on long-distance calls over landlines many times over the past 10 years or so.
Incorporation might be a good idea for all I know, but it's strictly speaking unnecessary for the tax issues. Sole proprietorship businesses are entitled to the same business expense tax deductions as corporations.
Abcd1234 covered this in his reply, but I think it's worth seconding it: employee wages are business expenses, and as such, tax deductible. Your girlfriend's father pays zero taxes on the money he pays his employees. Raising taxes on his business doesn't affect his ability to hire people in the direct manner you imply. He just gets to keep less of the profits.
Well, you're both right. Business logic belongs in the database--but our databases are too weak when it comes to integrating with general-purpose programming languages, which is the whole reason why we have domain layers. Our relational databases come from the world of COBOL, and it shows in their built-in languages (e.g., SQL, PL/SQL).
We'd be better served by a relational database system that embedded its features inside a good programming language. I'll be bold and sneak in the suggestion that this ought to be a functional language; after all, the relational algebra is a simple kind of functional language.
The papers named Hooman Karamian (TheDirty.com guy) and Dirty World Entertainment Recordings (company that runs TheDirt.com). So, TheDirt.com were named in the lawsuit, indisputably. At most they can say that the fact that the suit names Karamian is evidence that there is an error in it, and grounds for dismissal.
This part of the legal process deliberately foregoes consideration of evidence. At this point in the process, you have a plaintiff that has a complaint against a defendant, and gets a chance to state their case. The defendant is legally bound to respond to the complaint. If we didn't have it this way, defendants would just systematically ignore complaints against them and keep doing whatever the hell they wanted; plaintiffs wouldn't bother bringing complaints before the courts, and would take justice in their own hands; and instead of erroneous lawsuits, you'd have erroneous justice killings.
Besides, what do you expect the judge to do in this one case? S/he has a complaint filed by the plaintiff, who was harmed by A, but erroneously names B as the defendant. How is the judge supposed to figure this out on the bench? The judge is a mediator, not an investigator, and we don't have public investigators that look into civil complaints; that 's something that the parties to the dispute are supposed to do. We'd need something like a Civil Police that investigates civil complaints instead of criminal ones.
Yeah, it kinda sucks that some random schmoe can sue you erroneously and you have to respond. But again, it sure beats having some random schmoe physically attack you for something that he erroneously thinks you did. No legal system is going to remove the fact that random people can have illegitimate disputes with you, and that such disputes can inconvenience you greatly.
That's criminal law, where the accused can be deprived of their liberty (or life). Civil law works differently.
The case we're discussing here is the last one: B was improperly named, and (we assume) properly served. GGP suggested that B should ignore the summons, wait until default judgement is awarded against them, and then sue somebody for the "damages" that were caused to them by the erroneous suit and award. That is, as I was trying to put mildly, really fucking stupid, because in that case B transparently allows the "damages" to happen so that he can sue.
Which sounds unreasonable until you realize that the alternative to this system would be a lot worse.
So, tell me, where's the judge's mistake?
You first argued that we should have a civil courts system where somebody who has been erroneously served as a defendant should be able to ignore the court summons. I answered with an argument that while that is not wonderful, it is a lot better than the realistic alternatives, which involve getting erroneously shot instead of erroneously sued.
Do you have something to respond to that, or are you just going to randomly rant at stuff that you don't really understand but pisses you off because somebody else like you has told you it should?
You're being very shortsighted about this. Let me explain.
The civil court system exists in order to peacefully mediate disputes between private parties and produce fair solutions to them. In societies that do not have a civil court system or a similar institution, such disputes must be resolved between the parties themselves. This often means violence. I.e., without courts, if Joe mistakenly believes that you took 10 of his goats, and no matter how much evidence you show him he continues to believe so, there's a good chance you're going to find yourself in a violent confrontation with Joe, and will have to defend yourself and your property.
So yeah, in our civil court system, any old Joe can raise a complaint against you, and you're compelled to respond and defend yourself, even if there are some pretty blatant errors in the complaint. This is a big drag, yes, but it sure beats having to be constantly prepared to respond to any old Joe trying to ambush and shoot you dead for an equivalently erroneous complaint.
Possibly. You're failing to see this from the most productive angle: TheDirt.com should have contacted the plaintiff's lawyer right after receiving the summons, pointed out that they had served the wrong company, and asked them to withdraw the complaint or amend it to point at the right guys. The plaintiff then should have verified this response to their satisfaction, and complied with the request. It is not in the interest of the plaintiff to sue the wrong folks, after all; and if the plaintiffs insisted on taking it to court, and TheDirt.com showed in court that they clearly demonstrated to the plaintiff that they were the wrong party, then the plaintiff could be in trouble, and TheDirt.com could likely collect expenses (if not more) from them.
The problem is that if you don't even bother to go to the court date, much less call the plaintiff's lawyer and talk to them, you're not going to be in a good position to demand that your expenses be paid. So, for example, if you get on a plane, fly to California with your lawyer to make the court date, and there demand to have the plaintiff pay your expenses, you're going to be asked why the heck didn't you just call the plaintiff and solve this problem outside the court.
I really suspect that failing to respond to the court summons would fuck up their chances of winning such a lawsuit. You can't really get a court to take seriously your demand of $$$ for being wrongly sued if you didn't even bother to give the plaintiff a damn phone call telling them that you were the wrong guy. It's just not a good faith attempt to solve the dispute.
Not so sure about this. It depends on the laws of the jurisdiction in question, but there are jurisdictions where using certain types of deception or fraud to obtain consent to sex is rape. The classic examples are deceiving a woman as to your identity (e.g., if her boyfriend's twin brother were to impersonate him), or making her believe it's a necessary part of a medical procedure (yes, this has happened). The most infamous recent case: a Palestinian man convicted of rape because he told the woman that he was Jewish.
It's not a stretch to say that it's rape if a man obtains consent for sex by falsely telling her he will wear a condom.
Well, you know, having sex with somebody against their consent is rape. Unlike what your comment implies, there is no magic moment where, once you've fucked her long enough, you no longer need her consent or to respect her conditions for that consent. If you've got a problem with her insistence on the condom you're not entitled to disregard them and have things your own way by either force or deception.
The EU defines devices that can record 30 minutes or more of continuous video as "camcorders", and subjects them to special taxation. This is the reason for the 29:59 limit on SD.
But if you do this, half of the area of your sensor at any given time is not recording light. You've effectively made your sensor perform like one with just half the area.
You may want to read this page. But basically, the way I see it, Foveon is stuck with very unpopular cameras (Sigma) that get passed over for reasons that mostly have nothing to do with the sensor tech; and because of this, there is less money invested into improving it, which means that it lags compared to advanced Bayer designs.
The problem with this has been pointed out a gazillion times: updating the leap second table requires either connectivity or manual intervention, which are not available in all applications where people want to use UTC.
Oh, it's definitely no hassle as long as the correct measures are taken.
First, you need to make sure that you standardize the summer and winter hours across the whole nation, so that everybody switches over on the same date. It would be very confusing to have to call every business you deal with in order to ask whether they've already switched over to winter time.
Second, you should probably amend all local laws that specify specific times of the day so that they specify different times for summer and winter. You know, if my neighborhood bar opens at 8pm in summer and 7pm in winter, I would be pissed if a law that forces bars to close at 2am went unamended. I'd get one fewer bar hour in summer, and that's clearly unacceptable.
Third, in addition to amending all the laws, you have to make sure that you redo all the street signs that mention specific hours, so that that "free parking after 6pm" sign now lists separate summer and winter hours.
Fourth, whenever you schedule a late or early appointment in your calendar at a significant time ahead, make sure you take care to check whether the day you're scheduling it for is not past the switchover date, and you accidentally schedule the appointment for a non-laborable time for that season. Hey, we should probably redesign paper agendas so that the lines showing the working hours change for the seasons.
So you see, yes, it's definitely no hassle at all, as long as you take all of these measures, and any other ones that I may have forgotten.