The football team hefted the parts upstairs, if I remember correctly. Compared to what they encounter out on the field, I think any injury would be considered minor in comparison.
And taking apart a car and putting it back together is something many mechanics do on a daily basis.
"If it's true, of course it's controversial" -> it's their own website. They are free to promote or not promote whomever or whatever they life. They are a business...it would be like forcing McDonalds to show advertisements for Burger King.
"not to mention anti-competitive and therefore illegal. It's all about context" -> most competition is anti-competitive. By their very nature, companies are always trying to outmaneuver other companies.
"The vast majority of content on the internet is found via search engines" -> so write your own search engine, and do not promote your own services over others. They're aren't magic, and can be created to be fairly awesome with a few thousand lines of code. I'm planning on writing my own, as it happens, because I have become so dissatisfied with Google's results as of late; I will probably share it with the public, and have it run off of BitCoins (to pay for the servers and whatnot); when the balance hits zero, the public gets cut off. And there is a lot more to the internet than the world wide web, but I digress that the younger generation lacks the attention span or technological understanding to experience all that's hidden; the world wide web has always been nothing more than the tip of the iceberg.
"Clearly, using their market position as the gate keeper of all things internet to push their plethora of other services is very anti-competitive and hugely controversial." -> they aren't the gate-keeper of all things. Yahoo, Bing, Baidu and so forth all offer competition. It's just that for the English-speaking search engine market, Google has been kicking the snot out of its competitors for a few generations. There have been others, ranging from Netscape, Altavista, Excite, Lycos, and so forth. When someone came along with a better search engine, the other companies started hemorrhaging money; given Google's insistence on natural language queries (as of late) and switch to boolean ORs over ANDs for standard queries, they should be dead or at least diminished in a generation or two. Marketing has gone insane inside that company, meaning it's nearing its end. Does anyone know what Google's founders are doing these days?
Reminds me of my senior year in high school -> the Administration had somehow convinced the students that while pranks were acceptable, they had to be approved before being implemented. Suffice to say, the quality of pranks has since dropped.
Placing a bunch of chairs out on the quad does not compare with dismantling and reassembling a teacher's car on one of the higher levels of the library.
Honestly? Because that $1,800 / year will never make it so far as to pay off the deficit. They'll institute the new tax, like they always do, then something else of political importance will capture the populace's attention, and a decision will be made to divert the funds to deal with this new problem. Some people will cry out, like they always do, that the funds are being diverted, that these funds are not being used for the stated purpose that they were collected, and other people will say that the immediate crisis outweighs the danger of a growing deficit.
So, in this way, the deficit will never be paid off, yet taxes will continuously be increased, and the ever-present (and sometimes realized) threat of currency devaluation / government bankruptcy remains. The people's income will continuously be decreased, until they are returned to their natural habitat, as serfs, living off the land that their lords provide for them to work on. The trick, of course, is ensuring that people have an interest in keeping things going, as opposed to stopping them, even though they may be better off with stopping them.
Look forward to a new tax, in 5-10 years time, to help pay off the deficit, if this one manages to pass. The same, sad caricatures will be trotted out again to shake down the populace for even more money, with more rhetoric that if the rich / wealthy / everyone would just contribute a little more, we could pay it off in 2 / 5 / 10 / 20 years.
Just look at your phone bill, next time you receive it. Look at how much you pay in taxes, then look up the taxes themselves, when they were passed, and what that money was supposed to pay for. Wars that have long since ended, yet the tax for munitions for them still remain. And so on.
Reminds me of the Ferengi saying (from ST:DS9) for when dealing with people -> "Once you have their money, never give it back!"
The decision sounds somewhat reasonable. Forcing the infringer to become fully-compliant with licensing, at the standard going rate for licensing appears to be a good idea. It should have the nice side effect of reducing some of the ridiculous fees that the lawyers are looking for (which are far in excess of the defendant's ability to pay), reduce the number of these incidents (as it's no longer immensely profitable to run a law firm based off of this design), and force businesses to look at their models (in much the same way that Steam has helped reduced game piracy, perhaps a tweak on the business model might reduce this variation of piracy).
At the end of the day, you can't take money from someone who has none. *shrugs*
Interesting. Were I a judge, I'd let the lawyers nerf whoever they wanted, let them spend 5 minutes with their hand-picked jury, then nerf that jury, and bring back in all the people they nerfed to sit as the actual jury.
I wouldn't mind seeing what kind of decision a jury filled with lawyers, scientists, engineers, and doctors might come to. It might be worth the amount of bitching I'd hear from all of them about how they're losing money being there, and are needed elsewhere. Given the current state of law, I'd care to make sure the normally insulated people of society knew damn well how badly things are going, even if they have to learn about it first hand.
So, you offer instead to block them from using this service, and drive them underground, where they would be harder to 'monitor'?
At least this way you have an idea what their arguments are for their cause, and can easily offer a counter-argument (to their current or would-be followers). Offering a counter-argument for something you have no knowledge of, and whose members / followers are not readily identified / reached is a challenge to say the least.
You have two ways of heading off potential problems -> allow an open forum where anyone can say whatever they want (no wiretapping necessary) but you have to put up with people saying things you disagree with / hate / consider morally objectionable, or have a closed one, where you have to wiretap the populace to ensure that the opinions / groups you disagree with aren't starting something. An open forum to air grievances / differing opinions, of course, tends to make a government last longer, and costs a lot less than wiretapping everything while providing better results.
Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will scatter; strike the wrong shepherd, however, and a thousand shepherds will rise in his place. Suppression tends to work like that, like ablative armor. It works excellently at first, but through constant use begins to degrade and fail asymptotically. The US is over-quota for shepherds (they've reached their bag limit), so to speak, and are seeing the pendulum swing the other way. Yet, they insist on pushing even harder, apparently unaware of this trade-off effect.
You assume the courts require evidence to convict you these days.
A number of the more insane judges recently ruled that an office can now charge you with speeding violations based off of eye-sight alone. That's right, an office need only think you are speeding, using no radar / laser / timing method, just straight eye-balling the speed, and you can get a ticket. I hope these people get cancer, that it meta-sizes to every one of their organs, that they spend months trying to battle it with chemotherapy and radiation, and that their loved ones weep when they die.
Indeed. The current rule of law appears to exist only in the minds of the judges / president / congressmen currently in office.
They do whatever they want, and as a citizen, you come in second place. It's not your position to know the law, only to obey those who will gleefully interpret it for you, to their advantage.
Dude, it's time to admit it: the Constitution is no longer the supreme law of the land. With all the shit flowing through Congress recently, can you doubt it?
I think not. The cost of additional wiretapping, for legitimate (non-LEO / non-security) businesses, is having a detrimental effect on profit.
Imagine if you were a high frequency trader, and the NSA's wiretapping added an extra second to the execution of each trade. The government's boys and their toys are getting in the way of business, and that would make me extremely unhappy. Like un-electing any senator giving them support. ^_^
They considered selling off their hardware business (accounting for 33% of their revenue), and now they don't want to take a loss selling a company that they bought and ran into the ground.
The maximum amount of energy that can be captured from a square meter has already been calculated (allowing for a theoretical 100% efficiency). What more, solar cells tend to be easily damaged, and need a direct line of sight to the sun in order to provide energy.
Would you have them inside, or outside of a base? If they inside a base, in order to power all the equipment, you would need to fill every nook and cranny. If they are outside the base, they are prone to sabotage.
Yes, it is an Ad Hominem attack: you made various insinuations that I am disconnected from reality, and then, if the previous slur could be considered ambiguous, you went so far as to suggest I had a substance abuse problem, and it was affecting my judgement. You did not, however, attempt to address my argument in a meaningful manner.
Ad Hominem -> "An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it."
Finally, my statement pointed out that while ~$40 billion is the amount quoted by Wikipedia for the cost of the space program, other sources have indicated that the cost, in current dollars and as a measure of our GDP, would be cost prohibitive today -> the cost is much higher than reported. I do not mind the use of Wikipedia in an argument, but its accuracy tends to wax and wane (especially when dealing with numbers) more than other sources.
"It's not trolling to point out that you're utterly clueless." -> but is is trolling to purposefully misread / miss the point of my argument, in order to prolong a discussion and / or elicit an emotional response.
Fast food, last I checked, had adequate levels of macro nutrients, but suffers from a lack of micro nutrients (the levels are too low to be considered 'good' enough as the sole source of food).
Here's a study detailing fast food / its lack of micro-nutrients and its effects on rats -> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18718129
Granted, these are lab rats, which ave plenty enough problems as they are, but it does support my argument.
As for the 'vitamin industry,' I can assure you that I am a scientist, and view their claims with less credibility than you do (goes in the same pile as homeopathy or various cures for cancer via Royal Rife machines).
Yes, but their argument is that it still counts as a choice, and that there is a world of difference between death by guillotine vs. death by a bullet to the brain.
Think about it. A guillotine would employ several different people, from the blacksmith who castes the blade, to the carpenter who makes the stand, to the weaver who makes the basket for your head to fall into, to the tailor who makes the rope that hoists the blade, to the executioner who pulls the lever. It works out pretty well for the proletariat working class (it helps that royalty have been routinely executed via guillotine, so the two are somewhat associated).
Now, a bullet is the weapon of choice if someone favors the bourgeois. At the very least you need to employ a blacksmith for the gun and bullets. But the gunpowder itself must be made by a chemist, and the gun's design typically a physicist. What more, the firing squad has historically been used to oppress the peasantry.
So, you see, there is a world of difference between the two.
Possibly. There is, of course, always the possibility that no one has come up with a large enough bribe to convince them that it's truly in their own best interests to change things.
Slashdot Mirror
The football team hefted the parts upstairs, if I remember correctly. Compared to what they encounter out on the field, I think any injury would be considered minor in comparison.
And taking apart a car and putting it back together is something many mechanics do on a daily basis.
"If it's true, of course it's controversial" -> it's their own website. They are free to promote or not promote whomever or whatever they life. They are a business...it would be like forcing McDonalds to show advertisements for Burger King.
"not to mention anti-competitive and therefore illegal. It's all about context" -> most competition is anti-competitive. By their very nature, companies are always trying to outmaneuver other companies.
"The vast majority of content on the internet is found via search engines" -> so write your own search engine, and do not promote your own services over others. They're aren't magic, and can be created to be fairly awesome with a few thousand lines of code. I'm planning on writing my own, as it happens, because I have become so dissatisfied with Google's results as of late; I will probably share it with the public, and have it run off of BitCoins (to pay for the servers and whatnot); when the balance hits zero, the public gets cut off. And there is a lot more to the internet than the world wide web, but I digress that the younger generation lacks the attention span or technological understanding to experience all that's hidden; the world wide web has always been nothing more than the tip of the iceberg.
"Clearly, using their market position as the gate keeper of all things internet to push their plethora of other services is very anti-competitive and hugely controversial." -> they aren't the gate-keeper of all things. Yahoo, Bing, Baidu and so forth all offer competition. It's just that for the English-speaking search engine market, Google has been kicking the snot out of its competitors for a few generations. There have been others, ranging from Netscape, Altavista, Excite, Lycos, and so forth. When someone came along with a better search engine, the other companies started hemorrhaging money; given Google's insistence on natural language queries (as of late) and switch to boolean ORs over ANDs for standard queries, they should be dead or at least diminished in a generation or two. Marketing has gone insane inside that company, meaning it's nearing its end. Does anyone know what Google's founders are doing these days?
Reminds me of my senior year in high school -> the Administration had somehow convinced the students that while pranks were acceptable, they had to be approved before being implemented. Suffice to say, the quality of pranks has since dropped.
Placing a bunch of chairs out on the quad does not compare with dismantling and reassembling a teacher's car on one of the higher levels of the library.
Honestly? Because that $1,800 / year will never make it so far as to pay off the deficit. They'll institute the new tax, like they always do, then something else of political importance will capture the populace's attention, and a decision will be made to divert the funds to deal with this new problem. Some people will cry out, like they always do, that the funds are being diverted, that these funds are not being used for the stated purpose that they were collected, and other people will say that the immediate crisis outweighs the danger of a growing deficit.
So, in this way, the deficit will never be paid off, yet taxes will continuously be increased, and the ever-present (and sometimes realized) threat of currency devaluation / government bankruptcy remains. The people's income will continuously be decreased, until they are returned to their natural habitat, as serfs, living off the land that their lords provide for them to work on. The trick, of course, is ensuring that people have an interest in keeping things going, as opposed to stopping them, even though they may be better off with stopping them.
Look forward to a new tax, in 5-10 years time, to help pay off the deficit, if this one manages to pass. The same, sad caricatures will be trotted out again to shake down the populace for even more money, with more rhetoric that if the rich / wealthy / everyone would just contribute a little more, we could pay it off in 2 / 5 / 10 / 20 years.
Just look at your phone bill, next time you receive it. Look at how much you pay in taxes, then look up the taxes themselves, when they were passed, and what that money was supposed to pay for. Wars that have long since ended, yet the tax for munitions for them still remain. And so on.
Reminds me of the Ferengi saying (from ST:DS9) for when dealing with people -> "Once you have their money, never give it back!"
The decision sounds somewhat reasonable. Forcing the infringer to become fully-compliant with licensing, at the standard going rate for licensing appears to be a good idea. It should have the nice side effect of reducing some of the ridiculous fees that the lawyers are looking for (which are far in excess of the defendant's ability to pay), reduce the number of these incidents (as it's no longer immensely profitable to run a law firm based off of this design), and force businesses to look at their models (in much the same way that Steam has helped reduced game piracy, perhaps a tweak on the business model might reduce this variation of piracy).
At the end of the day, you can't take money from someone who has none. *shrugs*
Interesting. Were I a judge, I'd let the lawyers nerf whoever they wanted, let them spend 5 minutes with their hand-picked jury, then nerf that jury, and bring back in all the people they nerfed to sit as the actual jury.
I wouldn't mind seeing what kind of decision a jury filled with lawyers, scientists, engineers, and doctors might come to. It might be worth the amount of bitching I'd hear from all of them about how they're losing money being there, and are needed elsewhere. Given the current state of law, I'd care to make sure the normally insulated people of society knew damn well how badly things are going, even if they have to learn about it first hand.
*Looks around* So, what's keeping this one?
We're exceedingly overdue.
My one, and only, question -> is election by popularity our best metric for choosing a 'good' leader?
So, you offer instead to block them from using this service, and drive them underground, where they would be harder to 'monitor'?
At least this way you have an idea what their arguments are for their cause, and can easily offer a counter-argument (to their current or would-be followers). Offering a counter-argument for something you have no knowledge of, and whose members / followers are not readily identified / reached is a challenge to say the least.
You have two ways of heading off potential problems -> allow an open forum where anyone can say whatever they want (no wiretapping necessary) but you have to put up with people saying things you disagree with / hate / consider morally objectionable, or have a closed one, where you have to wiretap the populace to ensure that the opinions / groups you disagree with aren't starting something. An open forum to air grievances / differing opinions, of course, tends to make a government last longer, and costs a lot less than wiretapping everything while providing better results.
Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will scatter; strike the wrong shepherd, however, and a thousand shepherds will rise in his place. Suppression tends to work like that, like ablative armor. It works excellently at first, but through constant use begins to degrade and fail asymptotically. The US is over-quota for shepherds (they've reached their bag limit), so to speak, and are seeing the pendulum swing the other way. Yet, they insist on pushing even harder, apparently unaware of this trade-off effect.
You assume the courts require evidence to convict you these days.
A number of the more insane judges recently ruled that an office can now charge you with speeding violations based off of eye-sight alone. That's right, an office need only think you are speeding, using no radar / laser / timing method, just straight eye-balling the speed, and you can get a ticket. I hope these people get cancer, that it meta-sizes to every one of their organs, that they spend months trying to battle it with chemotherapy and radiation, and that their loved ones weep when they die.
Well, that's because it's hard to control innocent men without having some crime to charge them with.
As the saying goes, if you can't find a crime to charge someone with, keep inventing new laws until you can.
In your opinion, has the United States ever been engaged in an illegal or otherwise unlawful war?
Indeed. The current rule of law appears to exist only in the minds of the judges / president / congressmen currently in office.
They do whatever they want, and as a citizen, you come in second place. It's not your position to know the law, only to obey those who will gleefully interpret it for you, to their advantage.
Dude, it's time to admit it: the Constitution is no longer the supreme law of the land. With all the shit flowing through Congress recently, can you doubt it?
I think not. The cost of additional wiretapping, for legitimate (non-LEO / non-security) businesses, is having a detrimental effect on profit.
Imagine if you were a high frequency trader, and the NSA's wiretapping added an extra second to the execution of each trade. The government's boys and their toys are getting in the way of business, and that would make me extremely unhappy. Like un-electing any senator giving them support. ^_^
They considered selling off their hardware business (accounting for 33% of their revenue), and now they don't want to take a loss selling a company that they bought and ran into the ground.
Who, exactly, is running this company, and why?
The maximum amount of energy that can be captured from a square meter has already been calculated (allowing for a theoretical 100% efficiency). What more, solar cells tend to be easily damaged, and need a direct line of sight to the sun in order to provide energy.
Would you have them inside, or outside of a base? If they inside a base, in order to power all the equipment, you would need to fill every nook and cranny. If they are outside the base, they are prone to sabotage.
Yes, it is an Ad Hominem attack: you made various insinuations that I am disconnected from reality, and then, if the previous slur could be considered ambiguous, you went so far as to suggest I had a substance abuse problem, and it was affecting my judgement. You did not, however, attempt to address my argument in a meaningful manner.
Ad Hominem -> "An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it."
Finally, my statement pointed out that while ~$40 billion is the amount quoted by Wikipedia for the cost of the space program, other sources have indicated that the cost, in current dollars and as a measure of our GDP, would be cost prohibitive today -> the cost is much higher than reported. I do not mind the use of Wikipedia in an argument, but its accuracy tends to wax and wane (especially when dealing with numbers) more than other sources.
"It's not trolling to point out that you're utterly clueless." -> but is is trolling to purposefully misread / miss the point of my argument, in order to prolong a discussion and / or elicit an emotional response.
Fast food, last I checked, had adequate levels of macro nutrients, but suffers from a lack of micro nutrients (the levels are too low to be considered 'good' enough as the sole source of food).
Here's a study detailing fast food / its lack of micro-nutrients and its effects on rats -> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18718129
Granted, these are lab rats, which ave plenty enough problems as they are, but it does support my argument.
As for the 'vitamin industry,' I can assure you that I am a scientist, and view their claims with less credibility than you do (goes in the same pile as homeopathy or various cures for cancer via Royal Rife machines).
I said outrun Death, not delay him.
Yes, but they're the really terrible years, where you're stuck in an adult diaper and can't remember what the names of your children are.
Yes, but they know how to get elected (win a popularity contest), and that's the sole metric that's used to award them their office.
Yes, but their argument is that it still counts as a choice, and that there is a world of difference between death by guillotine vs. death by a bullet to the brain.
Think about it. A guillotine would employ several different people, from the blacksmith who castes the blade, to the carpenter who makes the stand, to the weaver who makes the basket for your head to fall into, to the tailor who makes the rope that hoists the blade, to the executioner who pulls the lever. It works out pretty well for the proletariat working class (it helps that royalty have been routinely executed via guillotine, so the two are somewhat associated).
Now, a bullet is the weapon of choice if someone favors the bourgeois. At the very least you need to employ a blacksmith for the gun and bullets. But the gunpowder itself must be made by a chemist, and the gun's design typically a physicist. What more, the firing squad has historically been used to oppress the peasantry.
So, you see, there is a world of difference between the two.
Gitmo?
Possibly. There is, of course, always the possibility that no one has come up with a large enough bribe to convince them that it's truly in their own best interests to change things.