Yeah, I don't think they should have to pay either. Even if the policy specifically covered digital attacks, Sony still would have had to do their due diligence.
Most (all?) of the attacks I heard about were silly things Sony shouldn't have been vulnerable to, like SQL injections. This is an absolutely massive company, there is no excuse for not having proper penetration testing and security audits done on their sites, and making the insurance pay out in this case is kind of like trying to make insurance pay for a wheel barrel of money you left on your front porch.
Why are you focusing on the "group of 12 people" part of jury duty rather than the much more important "put in charge of this task by the courts in order to try to maintain fairness" part?
Likely the reason it's 12 people is because they don't want to have too few people or the jury would be representative enough. Too many people and you'd deadlock too easily. The number 12 was simply the number people ended up with... it's not magic.
The "can ignore the law" part is (in this context) an ability of it being a jury, not it being a group of 12 people.
Add the stupidly low monthly caps forced on us by the ISPs (my download+upload cap is 35GB) and Netflix isn't an attractive alternative*.
I recommend seeing if teksavvy is available in your area:
http://teksavvy.com/en/residential.asp
Click 'cable' then click the 'order now' link beside one of the 15Mbps packages. That'll bring you to a page where you can check availability. If the 15Mbps w. unlimited cap or 300GB cap aren't available, check the DSL packages. If you're not from southern Ontario, then you might have other options but I wouldn't be familiar with them.
Note about teksavvy: They don't lure you in with package deals or bundles, and they seem expensive at first because you have to pay a setup fee and maybe buy a modem. But they offer good service (I usually get an actual 15Mbps on my cable modem), have good tech support, and even if you don't care about the larger bandwidth caps their per-month prices are cheaper than similar speeds from the big competitors like Rogers.
I've been with them for 9 or 10 months now, and am quite happy with them. I didn't like Rogers or Bell. They would lure me in with cheap introductory offers, but then their service was poor and their speeds weren't as advertised.
Microsoft has merely done the due diligence that those citizens should have.
I don't expect my grandmother to do any real 'due diligence' when she buys a computer product. Is your grandmother really going to do more than compare prices, and maybe a feature or two?
I still want my grandmother's rights and privacy to be protected, though.
#1 Priority - "Just make everything work."
#1 Priority - "Keep everything safe."
#1 Priority - "Give the users what they want."
#1 Priority - "Protect the network from rogue users doing bad things."
#1 Priority - "Make the VP's latest toy cell phone plug in to everything."
Well, thats nice that you believe an outright liar
I believe he already said he didn't care about Gore. I have no idea about what Gore lied about (I'm really not familiar with the guy), but you do know that just because someone lies doesn't mean you should paint everything that says something similar with the same brush.
and call me names for your ignorance.
He called you a Coward. Capital C. As in Anonymous Coward. It wasn't an insult, it was your name.
There, you want science, there is NO PROVABLE GLOBAL WARMING despite $20 million and manipulation of data to prove it.
From the linked article:
E - How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
I think this is a very plain English question and answer, which should be completely understandable to everyone. If this is the expert you want to use, he is saying in no uncertain terms that A) there is climate warming, and B) humans are likely the cause.
If you want to find an expert to support your claims, keep looking.
Reason was originally for figuring out how to make sharp sticks and poke them into animals. After that stopped being such a problem, it was for poking sharp sticks into your neighbors. Put simply, better ideas meant better technology, which meant you could out-compete everything else.
Ideas are the root thing that reason enables, not debate. Debate might help the process along, but at the end of the day debate isn't about reason, debate is about making your group cohesively strive towards a single set of goals. Winning debates isn't just about reason, it's about charisma... the ability to persuade people to your side of the issue.
Just because we often use reasoning when we debate doesn't mean that reason is only for debate. That's simplistic. It's for all forms of conflict.
When there are no employees left, how will humans earn the money to buy products with?
Taking you literally here:
Creativity. Art. Entertainment.
Imagine a world where almost everything is so automated that the cost of living is basically free. Obviously we don't need much of a service industry any more... that's all automated. No production industry... automated. About the only real industry left would be development of the automation... programming and designing new automation.
So what's that leave for the rest of the 99% of the population? Mainly entertainment. Super fancy restaurants with real live waiters. Being really good at games and sports. Traditional art like paintings and sculpting. Designing interesting places to live. Stuff like that.
There would be significant growing pains to be sure, but if tomorrow it was announced that a new robot was on the market that could do almost anything from construction to house work, and it only cost $1 per robot... well, you'd suddenly have a ton of people out of work. The economy wouldn't just go through changes... it'd go through an entire redesign. But as long as we don't turn to killing as our new daily pastime, it's not like it would destroy civilization.
Beyond a reasonable doubt, and juries of your peers are both for criminal cases. You're not going to jail just for running a red light.
Most likely if you go talk to a court about a traffic ticket you won't even have a lawyer, and I imagine the burden of proof that would be used would be the same level as in civil suits. That is, not "beyond a reasonable doubt" but rather a "preponderance of evidence". Really all that means is it needs to be convincing. You walk into the court house, sit down with a judge (not even necessarily in a court room) and tell him you were getting out of the way of emergency vehicles, or that your friend was driving, or that your car was stolen. If you're convincing, then the judge will make it go away.
Disclaimer: I'm not from the US. I have no real insights into US law.
You're right, dropping the charges isn't the same as saying he's innocent... but that's kind of splitting hairs, isn't it? As for the bit about not wanting to use classified material, that smells like an excuse to me. If they're unwilling to go to court based on classified material, then how do you ever deal with people who commit crimes with classified material? There must be a way, because otherwise all you'd need to do to get away with anything would be to make sure it's classified.
No, I think their case was simply too weak with or without the classified material. Maybe they could have gotten more than they did with the plea, but at some point they had to sit down and think "you know, this just isn't worth dragging through the court for the one or two counts we'll end up getting where the judge will likely just hand out a minor penalty." So no, it's not the same as saying he's innocent... but IMO it is saying they couldn't have pinned anything major on him.
I would assume you'll run into jurisdiction and cost-effectiveness issues. Let's say you're law enforcement in the US and you find a spammer that you can 100% verify lives and works in Canada, a very friendly nation. To go to the effort of getting Canadian authorities to let you do something about it, wouldn't the spammer have to be operating in (at least!) the tens of thousands of dollars?
Now, what if you can't 100% verify who it is? Or what if you can, but they're in some developing nation with a barely pronounceable name and poor relations? Or what if they only do $5k of business a year? Now how about all of the above?
Ask the same way you'd ask for any raise, just add something like "I really like where this company is going, and I was wondering if I could get the raise in stock or stock options" or somesuch.
I think a lot of people are over-analysing it. Regardless of how you look at it, you're not walking away from the bargaining table with a 30% cut of the company or anything like that as a bonus. However, a more realistic number would be to take the raise you would get and convert that to equity at a reasonably favourable rate.
Depending on the attitude of the employer, they might think this is a great idea. Employees having a small (but big enough to be relevant to them) slice of the pie means they feel they have a stake in the company and are more likely to work hard. At least, that's the attitude my employer has, and if yours has a similar attitude he might be surprisingly easy to convince.
Not that dangerous, did you read the post I replied to?
"No, the crackheads that keep robbing houses will."
Yes, I did. My point was that I don't think some "jacked up motherfucker" is going to "come charging at you and your kids at 3am" unless you live in the very worst of the worst neighborhoods. Yeah, it does happen, but how often?
Ok, let's do some napkin math for New York. First, let's assume you live in an "average" area which might be unreasonable because the crime might be concentrated in a few high crime areas. But whatever. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City there were about 580 violent crimes committed per 100k people.
So what does that mean? If you live in New York and where you live is statistically average for crime, you have about a.6% chance of being a victim of a violent crime of some sort that year. In 20 years at that rate you have about a 12.3% chance of being a victim of a violent crime.
So if violent crime rates aren't that high, why should he be afraid of some crackhead breaking in and raping up the place? He shouldn't be. It's just perception.
Frankly I dont trust most people to walk around with a gun safely, never mind keep it an a manner that stops it from being stolen.
Well ok, I have to admit I wouldn't trust most people to walk around with a gun safely either. But that's simply because most people are mutton heads, not because I think they're going to try to shoot me. As for it being stolen... seriously, weapons are easy to come by. If you want to go on a killing spree, you sure as heck don't need a gun. A car would work just fine. Or a knife. Or a baseball bat. Or some sort of toxic substance.
The reason you don't see killing sprees all the time isn't a lack of gear... it's a lack of motivation. The vast majority of people simply don't want to kill anyone.
Assuming you're suggesting printing vast sums of money to cover the debt:
Because there are economic repercussions to printing vast sums of money. The US dollar would suddenly drop in value, and inflation would kick into overdrive. Consider that the US imports a very large amount of goods. Let's say the US dollar dropped to 50% of it's current value (because that makes the math easy). Prices of many of your goods would then double.
I'm not an economist or financial expert (and neither are 99% of the people who make "authoritative" comments on these subjects), but I think this would cause the US economy to tank for several years. Recessions and depressions are pretty painful, so people try to avoid them (sometimes too hard... it's possible that trying to avoid a small or moderate recession is going to cause a worse one later).
I feel very sorry that you live in a place so dangerous, and violent you need to carry a gun.
I don't think they do live in places that dangerous. Ok, so maybe there are specific neighborhoods that are that bad, but the great majority of people in the US don't live anywhere more dangerous than I live in. But there's a perception that they do.
I think one of the major problems in the US is their media. When I turn on my tv and watch the news, I get... news. But when I visited the states (it's been a few years) and I turned on the news, I got... fear mongering. I'm sure that all the murders they reported on weren't made up or anything, but the sheer emphasis on it was beyond anything I'd gotten at home. If that were my daily dose of "how the world is going" I'd have a pretty bleak outlook too.
I'm not sure what the difference was. Maybe it's partly a population density thing and so they were reporting 10 crimes for every crime back home because there were 10x the people. Or maybe it was that the news shows found out that scaring people got good ratings and so started playing it up. What I do know is that from my point of view one of the big things that is wrong with the US is simply their news media.
Frankly, I don't have a serious problem with people being able to walk around with weapons. The majority of people are pretty reasonable, and the ones that are going to flip out... well, let's just say that just because having a weapon is illegal doesn't mean it's that hard to get ahold of one. Outlawing some of the more dangerous weapons might help a bit, but it would only be a bit.
No, the problem isn't guns or not-guns, it's the perceived need for them. It's the state of constant low-key fear that a significant number of people live in.
Surprisingly, the laws in different countries are different. For example, in Canada there are some drugs which are completely legal to sell without a prescription whereas in the states you would need a prescription.
FTA:
The federal investigation has examined whether Google knowingly accepted ads from online pharmacies, based in Canada and elsewhere, that violated U.S. laws, according to the people familiar with the matter.
So it looks like this is more of a cross-border shopping issue than anything else. People are going online and buying from Canadian companies things that are completely legal to buy and sell in Canada, but happen to be illegal where they are.
I'm not entirely sure why you didn't get this, since the article itself points it out, AND the comment you responded to points it out.
I disagree. I think appliances have distinct and identifiable energy signatures, and depending on the detail the meter records this could easily translate to dependable information about you and your habits.
See regular spikes over the year on weekdays, starting at 7am which end at 8am? Your routine involves waking up at 7am, and leaving for work at 8am.
Regular spikes starting at 7am that last throughout the day (but level off at 8am)? Your routine is waking up at 7am, and working from home.
700 watt spike most mornings for 30 seconds? Your toast.
Likewise, your water heater will have a particular wattage and they could use that to tell when you shower.
Thing is, maybe they don't know what the specifics are for your appliances... until they care. Once someone cares, they can make a profile of energy signatures (1100 watt spike for.1 seconds followed by constant usage of 1500w for at least 10 seconds? Hey, that's the pattern for a brand X model 1a1 water heater!), and then start data mining. Yes, I'm sure they'd make mistakes, but overall they could form a pretty accurate portrait of your daily life.
I think either A) you are underestimating the amount of usable data you can get by data mining or B) you are assuming that the smart meters must be limited to a rather coarse granularity such as total usage per hour... where in fact there's nothing stopping it from recording usage per second or even microsecond.
No. He's merely pointing out that bullies target defenseless people... not people who can fight back. And Google can not only fight back, they're bigger, stronger, and have a history of standing up for principles on occasion.
Exactly the kind of opponent the RIAA doesn't want to fight.
The future of music, with music labels crushed and Google dictating how musicians are paid, is bright.
So, you're in favor of the old payola system? (Hint: Even if Google is precisely as bad as you seem to think, it's not going to be worse than the music labels have been in the past.)
Just because party A and party B are both anonymous doesn't mean they're the same party. It just means you can't pick either of them out of a crowd.
The Anonymous group which has been anti-Sony recently is huge, amorphous organization with goals that change from day to day depending on what they feel like doing that day. Think of Anonymous as an online flash mob.
The anonymous group that hacked Sony? Who knows. They could be highly organized under a feudal system where failure is rewarded with the opportunity to commit seppuku. Although this group is anonymous, they may have none of the attributes that make Anonymous what it is.
I guess the problem you're having is that you're equating anonymous with Anonymous. One is a description and the other is the name of an organization which happens to be descriptive.
If (as we suspect) Anonymous had nothing to do with the hack, then all Sony is doing is trying to vilify an organization that opposes it. In other words they're putting the blame on someone they don't like in the hopes of lowering public opinion of them.
"If not, you're still wrong" - means you were incorrect about something... perhaps you answered a question wrong or took the wrong turn. It's not specific to an action, and is much more likely to be informational. There is little to no blame attached in this context, as it's frequently just an honest mistake.
"If not, you're still in the wrong" - means you did something which is morally bad... perhaps you stole something or made racist remarks to someone. It is specifically a morally wrong action, and there is blame attached. You should have known better.
Hi! Meet my friend "they should be responsible for the replacement value of the product when it died, not the replacement value of the product three years later."
Because Sweden is about the size of California, and has a population of 9 million (about 1/300th of the population of the US.)
It's much easier to do things when you only have.3% of the customers.
How exactly does that make sense? Aren't they making money off of the customers in Sweden? And if they're making money, shouldn't it be *better* to be able to sell your product to 300x the customers? Sure... there might be rollout delays as you expand your business to have the manpower to service 300x the customers, but overall shouldn't economies of scale mean that you're actually making MORE money per customer when operate on that volume?
I had a discussion about this with a coworker just a few hours ago.
The problem is that forming blocks of votes is too strong. People are going to naturally form parties and vote in blocks regardless of whether you allow it or make it official. Here, let me illustrate:
Let's say we have a small three person group, and we regularly vote on things. You and I agree to vote as a block on issues that we don't strongly disagree on. So if I feel strongly about something and you don't really care, you vote with me. Likewise the opposite. I'm sure you can see how this would promote our agendas at the expense of the third person.
Even if you outright ban them, these kinds of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" deals will happen, and the "blocks" will tend to get larger and larger.
I'd absolutely adore it if we were able to just vote in a rep and he'd vote how to represent us. Honestly I'd love it if we got some sort of proportional representation system too. I don't expect either though.
Even if the NDP (which is the only party who wants proportional representation, that I know of) gets elected, there's no chance of a majority government. And let's face it, this is a pretty major change that a lot of people just won't understand. So getting it through would be... painful. I just don't see it happening until the election after this one.
Agreed. It's easy enough to change your password if you care, but you can't change your mother's maiden name and a lot of sites with the question/answer interrogations use the same questions.
I can remember calling up a bank on the phone, looking to reset my password. They were very helpful... maybe too helpful. We walked through almost the entire list of "security" questions before we found one I could remember what I had put down for an answer. If someone knew my mother's maiden name, and that had happened to be on the list, I can pretty much guarantee they'd have been able to reset my password and gain access to my bank account.
Other than the obvious answer of having sites allow you to put in custom questions (and them allowing it isn't really under your control), the only thing that occurs to me would be to provide fake answers. But heck, there are tons of those questions and remembering fake answers to them all would be terrible.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I don't think they should have to pay either. Even if the policy specifically covered digital attacks, Sony still would have had to do their due diligence. Most (all?) of the attacks I heard about were silly things Sony shouldn't have been vulnerable to, like SQL injections. This is an absolutely massive company, there is no excuse for not having proper penetration testing and security audits done on their sites, and making the insurance pay out in this case is kind of like trying to make insurance pay for a wheel barrel of money you left on your front porch.
Why are you focusing on the "group of 12 people" part of jury duty rather than the much more important "put in charge of this task by the courts in order to try to maintain fairness" part?
Likely the reason it's 12 people is because they don't want to have too few people or the jury would be representative enough. Too many people and you'd deadlock too easily. The number 12 was simply the number people ended up with... it's not magic.
The "can ignore the law" part is (in this context) an ability of it being a jury, not it being a group of 12 people.
Following your argument, humans can successfully mate with a tiger, since we at some point originated from the same primordial soup
No, following his logic you could shoot a tiger with an elephant gun. Just the gun wouldn't work as well on a tiger as it works on an elephant.
Add the stupidly low monthly caps forced on us by the ISPs (my download+upload cap is 35GB) and Netflix isn't an attractive alternative*.
I recommend seeing if teksavvy is available in your area:
http://teksavvy.com/en/residential.asp
Click 'cable' then click the 'order now' link beside one of the 15Mbps packages. That'll bring you to a page where you can check availability. If the 15Mbps w. unlimited cap or 300GB cap aren't available, check the DSL packages. If you're not from southern Ontario, then you might have other options but I wouldn't be familiar with them.
Note about teksavvy: They don't lure you in with package deals or bundles, and they seem expensive at first because you have to pay a setup fee and maybe buy a modem. But they offer good service (I usually get an actual 15Mbps on my cable modem), have good tech support, and even if you don't care about the larger bandwidth caps their per-month prices are cheaper than similar speeds from the big competitors like Rogers.
I've been with them for 9 or 10 months now, and am quite happy with them. I didn't like Rogers or Bell. They would lure me in with cheap introductory offers, but then their service was poor and their speeds weren't as advertised.
Microsoft has merely done the due diligence that those citizens should have.
I don't expect my grandmother to do any real 'due diligence' when she buys a computer product. Is your grandmother really going to do more than compare prices, and maybe a feature or two?
I still want my grandmother's rights and privacy to be protected, though.
#1 Priority - "Just make everything work."
#1 Priority - "Keep everything safe."
#1 Priority - "Give the users what they want."
#1 Priority - "Protect the network from rogue users doing bad things."
#1 Priority - "Make the VP's latest toy cell phone plug in to everything."
That might make a nice t-shirt. :D
Well, thats nice that you believe an outright liar
I believe he already said he didn't care about Gore. I have no idea about what Gore lied about (I'm really not familiar with the guy), but you do know that just because someone lies doesn't mean you should paint everything that says something similar with the same brush.
and call me names for your ignorance.
He called you a Coward. Capital C. As in Anonymous Coward. It wasn't an insult, it was your name.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511670.stm
There, you want science, there is NO PROVABLE GLOBAL WARMING despite $20 million and manipulation of data to prove it.
From the linked article:
E - How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
I think this is a very plain English question and answer, which should be completely understandable to everyone. If this is the expert you want to use, he is saying in no uncertain terms that A) there is climate warming, and B) humans are likely the cause.
If you want to find an expert to support your claims, keep looking.
Reason was originally for figuring out how to make sharp sticks and poke them into animals. After that stopped being such a problem, it was for poking sharp sticks into your neighbors. Put simply, better ideas meant better technology, which meant you could out-compete everything else.
Ideas are the root thing that reason enables, not debate. Debate might help the process along, but at the end of the day debate isn't about reason, debate is about making your group cohesively strive towards a single set of goals. Winning debates isn't just about reason, it's about charisma... the ability to persuade people to your side of the issue.
Just because we often use reasoning when we debate doesn't mean that reason is only for debate. That's simplistic. It's for all forms of conflict.
When there are no employees left, how will humans earn the money to buy products with?
Taking you literally here:
Creativity. Art. Entertainment.
Imagine a world where almost everything is so automated that the cost of living is basically free. Obviously we don't need much of a service industry any more... that's all automated. No production industry... automated. About the only real industry left would be development of the automation... programming and designing new automation.
So what's that leave for the rest of the 99% of the population? Mainly entertainment. Super fancy restaurants with real live waiters. Being really good at games and sports. Traditional art like paintings and sculpting. Designing interesting places to live. Stuff like that.
There would be significant growing pains to be sure, but if tomorrow it was announced that a new robot was on the market that could do almost anything from construction to house work, and it only cost $1 per robot... well, you'd suddenly have a ton of people out of work. The economy wouldn't just go through changes... it'd go through an entire redesign. But as long as we don't turn to killing as our new daily pastime, it's not like it would destroy civilization.
Most likely if you go talk to a court about a traffic ticket you won't even have a lawyer, and I imagine the burden of proof that would be used would be the same level as in civil suits. That is, not "beyond a reasonable doubt" but rather a "preponderance of evidence". Really all that means is it needs to be convincing. You walk into the court house, sit down with a judge (not even necessarily in a court room) and tell him you were getting out of the way of emergency vehicles, or that your friend was driving, or that your car was stolen. If you're convincing, then the judge will make it go away.
You're right, dropping the charges isn't the same as saying he's innocent... but that's kind of splitting hairs, isn't it? As for the bit about not wanting to use classified material, that smells like an excuse to me. If they're unwilling to go to court based on classified material, then how do you ever deal with people who commit crimes with classified material? There must be a way, because otherwise all you'd need to do to get away with anything would be to make sure it's classified.
No, I think their case was simply too weak with or without the classified material. Maybe they could have gotten more than they did with the plea, but at some point they had to sit down and think "you know, this just isn't worth dragging through the court for the one or two counts we'll end up getting where the judge will likely just hand out a minor penalty." So no, it's not the same as saying he's innocent... but IMO it is saying they couldn't have pinned anything major on him.
I would assume you'll run into jurisdiction and cost-effectiveness issues. Let's say you're law enforcement in the US and you find a spammer that you can 100% verify lives and works in Canada, a very friendly nation. To go to the effort of getting Canadian authorities to let you do something about it, wouldn't the spammer have to be operating in (at least!) the tens of thousands of dollars?
Now, what if you can't 100% verify who it is? Or what if you can, but they're in some developing nation with a barely pronounceable name and poor relations? Or what if they only do $5k of business a year? Now how about all of the above?
Well, here's my two cents:
Ask the same way you'd ask for any raise, just add something like "I really like where this company is going, and I was wondering if I could get the raise in stock or stock options" or somesuch.
I think a lot of people are over-analysing it. Regardless of how you look at it, you're not walking away from the bargaining table with a 30% cut of the company or anything like that as a bonus. However, a more realistic number would be to take the raise you would get and convert that to equity at a reasonably favourable rate.
Depending on the attitude of the employer, they might think this is a great idea. Employees having a small (but big enough to be relevant to them) slice of the pie means they feel they have a stake in the company and are more likely to work hard. At least, that's the attitude my employer has, and if yours has a similar attitude he might be surprisingly easy to convince.
Not that dangerous, did you read the post I replied to?
"No, the crackheads that keep robbing houses will."
Yes, I did. My point was that I don't think some "jacked up motherfucker" is going to "come charging at you and your kids at 3am" unless you live in the very worst of the worst neighborhoods. Yeah, it does happen, but how often?
.6% chance of being a victim of a violent crime of some sort that year. In 20 years at that rate you have about a 12.3% chance of being a victim of a violent crime.
Ok, let's do some napkin math for New York. First, let's assume you live in an "average" area which might be unreasonable because the crime might be concentrated in a few high crime areas. But whatever. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City there were about 580 violent crimes committed per 100k people.
So what does that mean? If you live in New York and where you live is statistically average for crime, you have about a
So if violent crime rates aren't that high, why should he be afraid of some crackhead breaking in and raping up the place? He shouldn't be. It's just perception.
Frankly I dont trust most people to walk around with a gun safely, never mind keep it an a manner that stops it from being stolen.
Well ok, I have to admit I wouldn't trust most people to walk around with a gun safely either. But that's simply because most people are mutton heads, not because I think they're going to try to shoot me. As for it being stolen... seriously, weapons are easy to come by. If you want to go on a killing spree, you sure as heck don't need a gun. A car would work just fine. Or a knife. Or a baseball bat. Or some sort of toxic substance.
The reason you don't see killing sprees all the time isn't a lack of gear... it's a lack of motivation. The vast majority of people simply don't want to kill anyone.
Assuming you're suggesting printing vast sums of money to cover the debt: Because there are economic repercussions to printing vast sums of money. The US dollar would suddenly drop in value, and inflation would kick into overdrive. Consider that the US imports a very large amount of goods. Let's say the US dollar dropped to 50% of it's current value (because that makes the math easy). Prices of many of your goods would then double.
I'm not an economist or financial expert (and neither are 99% of the people who make "authoritative" comments on these subjects), but I think this would cause the US economy to tank for several years. Recessions and depressions are pretty painful, so people try to avoid them (sometimes too hard... it's possible that trying to avoid a small or moderate recession is going to cause a worse one later).
I feel very sorry that you live in a place so dangerous, and violent you need to carry a gun.
I don't think they do live in places that dangerous. Ok, so maybe there are specific neighborhoods that are that bad, but the great majority of people in the US don't live anywhere more dangerous than I live in. But there's a perception that they do.
I think one of the major problems in the US is their media. When I turn on my tv and watch the news, I get... news. But when I visited the states (it's been a few years) and I turned on the news, I got... fear mongering. I'm sure that all the murders they reported on weren't made up or anything, but the sheer emphasis on it was beyond anything I'd gotten at home. If that were my daily dose of "how the world is going" I'd have a pretty bleak outlook too.
I'm not sure what the difference was. Maybe it's partly a population density thing and so they were reporting 10 crimes for every crime back home because there were 10x the people. Or maybe it was that the news shows found out that scaring people got good ratings and so started playing it up. What I do know is that from my point of view one of the big things that is wrong with the US is simply their news media.
Frankly, I don't have a serious problem with people being able to walk around with weapons. The majority of people are pretty reasonable, and the ones that are going to flip out... well, let's just say that just because having a weapon is illegal doesn't mean it's that hard to get ahold of one. Outlawing some of the more dangerous weapons might help a bit, but it would only be a bit.
No, the problem isn't guns or not-guns, it's the perceived need for them. It's the state of constant low-key fear that a significant number of people live in.
FTA:
The federal investigation has examined whether Google knowingly accepted ads from online pharmacies, based in Canada and elsewhere, that violated U.S. laws, according to the people familiar with the matter.
So it looks like this is more of a cross-border shopping issue than anything else. People are going online and buying from Canadian companies things that are completely legal to buy and sell in Canada, but happen to be illegal where they are.
I'm not entirely sure why you didn't get this, since the article itself points it out, AND the comment you responded to points it out.
I disagree. I think appliances have distinct and identifiable energy signatures, and depending on the detail the meter records this could easily translate to dependable information about you and your habits.
.1 seconds followed by constant usage of 1500w for at least 10 seconds? Hey, that's the pattern for a brand X model 1a1 water heater!), and then start data mining. Yes, I'm sure they'd make mistakes, but overall they could form a pretty accurate portrait of your daily life.
See regular spikes over the year on weekdays, starting at 7am which end at 8am? Your routine involves waking up at 7am, and leaving for work at 8am.
Regular spikes starting at 7am that last throughout the day (but level off at 8am)? Your routine is waking up at 7am, and working from home.
700 watt spike most mornings for 30 seconds? Your toast.
Likewise, your water heater will have a particular wattage and they could use that to tell when you shower.
Thing is, maybe they don't know what the specifics are for your appliances... until they care. Once someone cares, they can make a profile of energy signatures (1100 watt spike for
I think either A) you are underestimating the amount of usable data you can get by data mining or B) you are assuming that the smart meters must be limited to a rather coarse granularity such as total usage per hour... where in fact there's nothing stopping it from recording usage per second or even microsecond.
Marvelous. Buying the law.
No. He's merely pointing out that bullies target defenseless people... not people who can fight back. And Google can not only fight back, they're bigger, stronger, and have a history of standing up for principles on occasion.
Exactly the kind of opponent the RIAA doesn't want to fight.
The future of music, with music labels crushed and Google dictating how musicians are paid, is bright.
So, you're in favor of the old payola system? (Hint: Even if Google is precisely as bad as you seem to think, it's not going to be worse than the music labels have been in the past.)
Of course there's a difference.
Just because party A and party B are both anonymous doesn't mean they're the same party. It just means you can't pick either of them out of a crowd.
The Anonymous group which has been anti-Sony recently is huge, amorphous organization with goals that change from day to day depending on what they feel like doing that day. Think of Anonymous as an online flash mob.
The anonymous group that hacked Sony? Who knows. They could be highly organized under a feudal system where failure is rewarded with the opportunity to commit seppuku. Although this group is anonymous, they may have none of the attributes that make Anonymous what it is.
I guess the problem you're having is that you're equating anonymous with Anonymous. One is a description and the other is the name of an organization which happens to be descriptive.
If (as we suspect) Anonymous had nothing to do with the hack, then all Sony is doing is trying to vilify an organization that opposes it. In other words they're putting the blame on someone they don't like in the hopes of lowering public opinion of them.
"If not, you're still wrong" - means you were incorrect about something... perhaps you answered a question wrong or took the wrong turn. It's not specific to an action, and is much more likely to be informational. There is little to no blame attached in this context, as it's frequently just an honest mistake.
"If not, you're still in the wrong" - means you did something which is morally bad... perhaps you stole something or made racist remarks to someone. It is specifically a morally wrong action, and there is blame attached. You should have known better.
Does that clear it up?
Hi! Meet my friend "they should be responsible for the replacement value of the product when it died, not the replacement value of the product three years later."
Because Sweden is about the size of California, and has a population of 9 million (about 1/300th of the population of the US.) It's much easier to do things when you only have .3% of the customers.
How exactly does that make sense? Aren't they making money off of the customers in Sweden? And if they're making money, shouldn't it be *better* to be able to sell your product to 300x the customers? Sure... there might be rollout delays as you expand your business to have the manpower to service 300x the customers, but overall shouldn't economies of scale mean that you're actually making MORE money per customer when operate on that volume?
The problem is that forming blocks of votes is too strong. People are going to naturally form parties and vote in blocks regardless of whether you allow it or make it official. Here, let me illustrate:
Let's say we have a small three person group, and we regularly vote on things. You and I agree to vote as a block on issues that we don't strongly disagree on. So if I feel strongly about something and you don't really care, you vote with me. Likewise the opposite. I'm sure you can see how this would promote our agendas at the expense of the third person.
Even if you outright ban them, these kinds of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" deals will happen, and the "blocks" will tend to get larger and larger.
I'd absolutely adore it if we were able to just vote in a rep and he'd vote how to represent us. Honestly I'd love it if we got some sort of proportional representation system too. I don't expect either though.
Even if the NDP (which is the only party who wants proportional representation, that I know of) gets elected, there's no chance of a majority government. And let's face it, this is a pretty major change that a lot of people just won't understand. So getting it through would be... painful. I just don't see it happening until the election after this one.
I can remember calling up a bank on the phone, looking to reset my password. They were very helpful... maybe too helpful. We walked through almost the entire list of "security" questions before we found one I could remember what I had put down for an answer. If someone knew my mother's maiden name, and that had happened to be on the list, I can pretty much guarantee they'd have been able to reset my password and gain access to my bank account.
Other than the obvious answer of having sites allow you to put in custom questions (and them allowing it isn't really under your control), the only thing that occurs to me would be to provide fake answers. But heck, there are tons of those questions and remembering fake answers to them all would be terrible.