The same applies here. In "raising the bar" you don't need to stop everyone. You just have to make ripping you off hard enough that the majority doesn't bother.
No, because only one person in the entire world has to bother to rip the video/audio. Once one person does that and puts it online, no-one else has to. They just download it off the net like any other file.
Which is why the whole thing is so futile. Even if you "raise the bar" so that 99.9% of the people no longer rip video or audio, the other 0.1% is all that is needed to "seed" a P2P network with an already-ripped, ready-to-play copy. At which point it just spreads as if the "raised bar" never existed in the first place. And if people used to buy DVDs/CDs to rip them into a more convenient format and the "raised bar" means they no longer can, they're just going to hop online and get the version someone else already ripped in the format they want...
It's left as an exercise to the reader to guess whether or not those people will bother buying the original DVD/CD at that point.
I agree. I think I've even seen a package of "Assorted resistors" (no specification as to what voltage or resistance rating) for sale at Radio Shack. Uh, yeah, any 'ol resistor will do, let me just buy a pack of "assorted" resistors.
I also agree that Digikey is the way to go. It's just annoying when you realize you're short a single '125 and you'd really just like to drive a mile and pick one up NOW rather than ordering it today for delivery tomorrow (plus then you usually need to order another 50 dollars worth of stuff you don't really need so that the shipping cost is worthwhile... so all the sudden a 50-cent '125 became a $50 order; or a 50 cent part plus $5 handling plus $15 shipping charge for a total of $20.50 for a 50-cent part which is still more expensive than the @2 Radio Shack would probably charge for it).
As long as integrated circuits can be purchased and people can build circuits, any attempt to close the analog hole is doomed to failure. Granted, it might raise the bar a bit so that the hardware will either be sold in the "black market" of the Internet or will force people to build their own, but there's no way short of draconian controls on purchasing raw electronics that Hollywood can ever hope to close the analog hole.
An unintended side effect might be that it might respark the true electronic hacker culture that has rather deteriorated over the last couple of decades. It used to be someone would build a radio or some electronic device from scratch based on ICs, capacitors, etc. Now some geeks think they're cool because they can attach a few IDE cables, insert some memory, and claim to have "built" a computer. Nonsense... that's not building a computer. This change in culture is why Radio Shack now sells things like cell phones, wireless phones, computers, and stereos and resistors and capacitors gets a few square feet of shelf space in the back.
But I digress... the point is that as long as resistors, capacitors, ICs, and soldering irons are sold, the analog hole will never be closed. Now, if we ever see RIAA/MPAA suceed at getting the soldering iron declared a "circumvention device", be worried--be very worried.:)
Perhaps you weren't paying attention, but up to September 11, 2001, the biggest Bush administration story was the unprecedented level of secrecy they demanded.
Hmmm, I seem to remember the biggest Bush administration story being about when our plane bumped into a Chinese plane and our men and woman were held hostage for a period of time. Maybe that was just "wag the dog" so we wouldn't notice all the secrecy stories, right?:)
Just a month prior to 9/11, the top story was Cheney's drafting energy policy with his old business cronies and claiming it was a state secret.
Sure, the discussions could be. Why should they be made public? It's not like the energy policy was going to be implemented without public discussion and congressional approval. Do you think you have a right to sit in the White House and listen in on every conversation that goes on there?
Information on the composition of a group which advised the administration on stem cell research in April of that year was a closely guarded secret.
Again, who cares? He could listen to his mom, his brother, his daughter, or Jesus Christ. His policy proposal has to be made public before it's implemented. Why do you think you need to sit in on every conversation that helps the administration define a policy?
Earlier that year, there were complaints that important parts of the Administration's trade policies were being kept secret.
Like what parts? Please tell me how trade policy can be implemented and a secret at the same time? Implementation of trade policy is a very public thing. It can't be kept secret. Or are you again suggesting that we should have a right to sit in on every conversation that the administration has while it's coming up with its own coherent position on issues?
There were countless smaller stories about how data on government decision was drying up.
Perhaps you could offer more than two examples before jumping to the "countless" adjective?
But this administration has always found the free flow of information to be intolerable.
Hillary Clinton's health care task force operated in virtual secrecy, too, and they were messing with an idea to socialize something like 20% of the American economy. So, again, there's nothing particularly special about what's going on now. It's just that someone you don't like is the one keeping the secrets.
I have read all the hoopla about how DST saves energy. It doesn't. What does save energy is people doing things earlier and quitting things earlier.
I couldn't care less if it saves energy. I'd just like more daylight at the end of the day. Oh, and I for one am not particularly fond of getting up early.:)
My wife took a college class on Office 2003, and it was obvious that the authors not only wrote the book in Word so they get points for eating their own dog food, but had split each chapter into a doc; so it appears that even the experts have trouble getting around this.
Heheh, I don't doubt it.
Actually, I've been meaning to investigate if there's some way in OO to put each chapter in its own document and then "compile" them into a single PDF at the end; of course, the trick is that the index, table of contents, and page numbering throughout the resulting PDF has to be seemless.
If there's some way to do this easily, I'd really like to do it. It's not because Writer has any trouble handling my 348-page book, it's just that it'd be a lot easier for me to have them separated into smaller logical units. When I'm working on chapter 14, I'm working on only chapter 14 99% of the time and all that other bulk just makes the scrollbar annoyingly small (i.e., dragging the scrollbar a little moves you 10 or 20 pages in your document).
And if the above is possible, it'd sure be great if there was a way to tell Writer that you want each new file (i.e. each chapter) to begin on a right-facing page.
If I could get these two things working, I'd be a very happy camper.
Re:If you can't patent it...
on
Patents vs. Secrecy
·
· Score: 1, Informative
the fact that the Pentagon is classifying things that the NSA believes should be public is an indication of how much secrecy has crept into government over the past few years.'"
What a load... "Over the past few years?" Come 'on, cut any silly implications that government secrecy is somehow something new with the Bush administration. The FOIA was passed for a reason and it was passed long before "a few years ago."
Government secrecy is nothing new... just the spin.
My experience has been that OpenOffice LOADS (i.e., itself) much slower than Microsoft Office--I'd dread having to open OpenOffice Writer and would usually wait for a few tasks to pile up so that I could make the most of the fact that I was opening up Writer. Microsoft Word would open up in just a couple seconds.
HOWEVER, once the application itself is running, I found that load times were not significantly different. Granted, I compared Writer to Word--I'm not a heavy spreadsheet user. I also find that the current version of OpenOffice (or whatever ships with Fedora Core 3) is faster in loading itself than whatever version of OpenOffice I was using before (1.0, perhaps?).
The comparison became irrelevant to me, though. I switched to OpenOffice last year when I was writing a book. The book was mostly text but did have its share of diagrams and graphics. Eventually, Word would just bomb out. I literally couldn't make progress on the book since Word would randomly crash out and I'd have to rewrite some amount... it'd happen several times a day and just plain annoying. So I tried OpenOffice. Took me about half a day to adjust for some formatting idiosyncracies that Writer had with the 200+ page Word document, but once those minor tweaks were done, I cruised on through writing the rest of the book. Writer SXW files are also much smaller than equivalent Word documents from what I've seen.
The book ended up with 348 pages... OpenOfffice Writer didn't crash even once for the remaining 10 months of writing and editing I did.
The speed comparison is irrelevant to me. The fact remains, I was able to author my book in OpenOffice Writer while Word constantly crashed once the document got to some filesize and/or some level of graphics.
I know you were just trolling (and not doing a very good job at it, really), but I have to ask...
Fuck the US and fuck the bullshit beurocracy. The US gov't pisses me off so much with idiotic rules which serve the wealthiest minorities, i want to puke.
Could you please let me know which wealthy minority is being served by this change to DST and, better yet, tell me which poor minority (or majority) is being hurt, and how?
For the record, I wish DST were in effect all year long. I'd especially like it in the winter when the days are too short as it is. Give me an extra hour at the end of the workday, I could care less whether or not I drive to work in the dark.
I daresay that major credit card issuers could issue smartcard readers to all their customers and make a profit off of the reduced fraud.
Huh? How often do major credit card issuers take a loss from fraud? Not often. I'm a CC merchant and if I get a chargeback, Visa/Mastercard doesn't eat the loss (even though they authorized the charge)... they just take the money back out of my account and stick me with, what, a $25 chargeback fee? Visa/Mastercard makes money off of fraud.
Visa/Mastercard is one of the biggest racketeering schemes in modern history... They get about 2% of every transaction, $25 off of every chargeback, and the merchant gets to run the risk of fraud... not Visa/Mastercard. What a scam!
If you say so. "Micro" usually refers to a "millionth" and this definition refers to "a penny or a fraction of a penny"...
In any case, 50 cents is hardly a "micropayment" to me and you can't very well ding a person's "micropayment" account for 50 cents a webview which, last time I checked, is where a lot of micropayment "benefits" were supposed to be had. And if the idea was to charge, say, a quarter of a penny for a webview or even less (a true micropayment), PayPayl's "micropayment" scheme is truly laughable.
Not that I care. I think micropayments would open the doors to a pay-as-yo-go-Internet that would lead to the death of free content where you were constantly checking the "account" as you surfed to know when you had to stop. I'd rather not go there.
But congratulations on your magazine articles. Like anyone really cares...
So, I can see why people would use MSN if you used video/voice extensivly, but I really do not think that most people do (I know maybe one person who uses video on occasion).
I would have thought the same until about a week ago when I was out of town and my wife got a hold of a Webcam. She immediately wanted me to get one so we could "see each other" over MSN. Of course not only did I need a camera, I needed a Windows machine to run MSN. So I got my hands on both and my wife was happy. Now, she uses the camera almost all the time when talking to almost anyone, especially her family.
Video is something that Gaim desperately needs. Nudges and winks are unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but at this point video and audio are basic.
""Imagine the Brazilians or the Chinese doing their own internet. That would be the end of the story."
And that'd be a bad thing? If those two countries would independently leave, they'd have done a huge public service in reducing hacking and spam for the rest of the world!:)
Habitual VeriSign customers using VeriSign to collect payments may be wise to abandon ship.
I've always hated Verisign and long-since jumped ship on their registar services. We've grudgingly continued to use them for payment services. We will very seriously consider moving to a new payment processor due to the fact that they're being acquired by eBay which associates them with PayPal.
using PayPal's 5% + $0.05 micropayments rate would reduce the total transaction fee charged to payments received below the value of $12 (per payment).
Hahah, that's not micropayments. A micropayment might be a penny (or a fraction of a penny) per webpage view. Assuming the site wants to charge half a penny per web view, they'd have to charge 5.5 cents per web view... of which PayPal would get about 5.02 cents, or 91% of the money paid by the customer!
1) Because New Orleans is the focal point for the shipping routes (rivers) for America's "hartland"?
So the people that benefit from those shipping routes (America's heartland) should pay for it. Or those costs should be factored into the cost of shipping. In any case, I don't see where that cost needs to be paid for by federal dollars absorbed from people in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, Boston, etc. who have plenty of low-risk shipping routes.
2) Do you own a car? Have you seen the gas prices? That's not only because of the damaged/missing oil platforms, but also to great extend because of the damaged processing facilities in.... [drum roll] New Orleans.
Prices are already falling in some parts of the country. In those places that aren't, the cost of gasoline reflects the cost of getting those facilities online. Again, no need for federal dollars absorbed from others.
3) Seeing the lists of cities you named I'm starting to guess you're being sarcastic. For example LA: earthquakes, NYC: terrorisme, Seattle: being so close to Redmond.
Hahah, yeah, right. My point wasn't sarcasm and the cities were chosen based on the fact that they're very far away from New Orleans.
There are some things the federal government has to do, just to make sure America can function as a country.
Yes, defend its borders. Not insure people that build buildings below sea level on the coast. Terrorism and war? That's a possibility. Floods in below-sea-level cities on the coast in a hurricane zone? That's inevitable.
Good idea. Now all New Orleans and Louisiana need to have done is invested the money to accomplish that instead of spending, what, $190 million on some pro-ball team?
Sorry, I just don't see where people in L.A., Seattle, NYC, etc. should have to pay the amazing amount of money that would be necessary to make New Orleans "hurricane-proof." If the people that live there are absolutely stubborn about living in a below-sea-level-and-sinking city on the coast, they should come up with the money to lower their own risk.
There are those that are trying to blame Bush for this; mind you, Bush and not any of the other presidents of the last four decades that also had an opportunity to spend more money on New Orleans.
I blame the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. The city had hundreds of school buses which could have been used to evacuate their poor, yet they went unused and are now part of the flood damage--and the mayor was out their shouting vulgarities after the flood, asking where the damn buses were. Well, they're parked in your flooded city, idiot!
Both New Orleans and Louisiana should have made this top priority... if you know you're at risk and someone else (the feds) aren't helping, do you just wait around until disaster arrives? NO! You take matters into your own hands and fix your own problem. This unhealthy dependency on the federal government as a solution to all problems has gone entirely too far.
I do feel for the victims and I'll be volunteering to assist in one of the refugee areas that has been established in San Antonio, but I also have to shake my head about the situation... This is a city that is mostly below sea level, built on the coast of the ocean between the largest river in the U.S., a large lake, and marshlands and is in an area of high-risk hurricane-wise. They were flooded four decades ago by Betsy... And now they are hit again and they're bewildered, unprepared, and looking once again for the federal government to help them. Why is it that someone in Seattle must pay for the bad decisions of someone in New Orleans?
Personally, I think the federal government at this point should clean up the mess, etc. However, there should be no federal assistance to rebuild unless the rebuilding is taking place at an elevation that is at least at sea level. I absolutely reject the idea of federal funding for reconstruction that will be destroyed again when the next major hurricane strikes.
And make no mistake, it doesn't matter how high or strong we make the levees... there will always be some storm that's going to be just a little bit bigger. Nature is funny that way and we are arrogant if we ignore that.
The decision to make the levees capable of handling a category 3 hurricane were made in the 1960's, after the flooding Hurricane Betsy caused in 1965.
This was 40 years ago. I wager it had very little to do with Iraq, especially since none of the funds that had been requested for levee work were for the sections of the levees that actually broke.
no, you did use liberal as an epithet. so i guess you don't know what liberal or epithet means.
Hmmm, no, I know what both liberal and epithet means and I most certainly didn't use the former as the latter. Unless you have some special insight into my original message that I, as the author, don't have, you really have no case. I used the word "liberal" to mean exactly what it means: a liberal. That would only be considered an epithet by someone that considers the word "liberal" to be offensive. Now who would that be? Ironically, it's usually the liberals.:)
i overestimated your intelligence, but i'm sure that's not a new experience for you.
This from the person who then writes...
you fuckers use liberal as an epithet constantly these days.
I'm glad you have such an awesome command of the English language. The fact that we call liberals liberals and that we do not agree with the liberals does not make the word "liberal" an epithet. It remains an accurate description of a group of people. That that group of people is offended by being called exactly what they are is very telling. So is the fact that you do resort to the use of epithets in your reply.
Frankly, if I were a liberal and someone called me a liberal I'd say, "Damn straight, you better believe I'm a liberal!" Sadly (though understandably), many liberals don't like to admit what they are. Strange, isn't it?:)
G'day, my uneducated, vulgar, and liberal anonymous coward.
I'm so sick of people--mostly conservative--trying to blame everything on someone, usually God.
Really? Got some examples? Conservatives generally don't blame God, except for a few wacky fanatical fundamental Christians that have a skewed view of Christianity.
Levees broke? That's because God is angry that nobody is stoning homosexuals. Big storm hit New Orleans? That's because God is angry that abortions happen.
Has anyone actually said this, or is this something you're just making up in a desperate attempt to have a point? If so, you've failed miserably.
It's so powerful, we shouldn't even try to control it. All hail mighty nature.
There's a difference between trying to adapt nature within reason and knowing when we're fighting a losing battle. Trying to rescue a below-sea-level-city on the coast nestled between a river, a lake, and swamplands is a losing battle.
Can you get away with "controling" nature? Sometimes, for awhile. Do you stand a chance when nature decides it doesn't want to be controlled? Nope.
You don't surf the net much do you. More and more sites are going for the whole flash-wankery look
I surf the net plenty and very seldom have run into something that needed Flash. In the few cases that that have happened, one of their competitors has always been Flash-free or at least Flash-optional.
Luckily, the Flash problem is rather self-correcting. Last I checked, Google still does a poor job (or no job) at indexing Flash-intensive sites. If the entire site is wrapped up in a Flash presentation, Google probably won't index it in the first place and won't even show up in the results. Perfect!
If Google starts effectively indexing Flash presentations, I hope they'll include an option "Ignore content from Flash presentations" so that my search results don't get polluted.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because only one person in the entire world has to bother to rip the video/audio. Once one person does that and puts it online, no-one else has to. They just download it off the net like any other file.
Which is why the whole thing is so futile. Even if you "raise the bar" so that 99.9% of the people no longer rip video or audio, the other 0.1% is all that is needed to "seed" a P2P network with an already-ripped, ready-to-play copy. At which point it just spreads as if the "raised bar" never existed in the first place. And if people used to buy DVDs/CDs to rip them into a more convenient format and the "raised bar" means they no longer can, they're just going to hop online and get the version someone else already ripped in the format they want...
It's left as an exercise to the reader to guess whether or not those people will bother buying the original DVD/CD at that point.
I also agree that Digikey is the way to go. It's just annoying when you realize you're short a single '125 and you'd really just like to drive a mile and pick one up NOW rather than ordering it today for delivery tomorrow (plus then you usually need to order another 50 dollars worth of stuff you don't really need so that the shipping cost is worthwhile... so all the sudden a 50-cent '125 became a $50 order; or a 50 cent part plus $5 handling plus $15 shipping charge for a total of $20.50 for a 50-cent part which is still more expensive than the @2 Radio Shack would probably charge for it).
An unintended side effect might be that it might respark the true electronic hacker culture that has rather deteriorated over the last couple of decades. It used to be someone would build a radio or some electronic device from scratch based on ICs, capacitors, etc. Now some geeks think they're cool because they can attach a few IDE cables, insert some memory, and claim to have "built" a computer. Nonsense... that's not building a computer. This change in culture is why Radio Shack now sells things like cell phones, wireless phones, computers, and stereos and resistors and capacitors gets a few square feet of shelf space in the back.
But I digress... the point is that as long as resistors, capacitors, ICs, and soldering irons are sold, the analog hole will never be closed. Now, if we ever see RIAA/MPAA suceed at getting the soldering iron declared a "circumvention device", be worried--be very worried. :)
Hmmm, I seem to remember the biggest Bush administration story being about when our plane bumped into a Chinese plane and our men and woman were held hostage for a period of time. Maybe that was just "wag the dog" so we wouldn't notice all the secrecy stories, right? :)
Just a month prior to 9/11, the top story was Cheney's drafting energy policy with his old business cronies and claiming it was a state secret.
Sure, the discussions could be. Why should they be made public? It's not like the energy policy was going to be implemented without public discussion and congressional approval. Do you think you have a right to sit in the White House and listen in on every conversation that goes on there?
Information on the composition of a group which advised the administration on stem cell research in April of that year was a closely guarded secret.
Again, who cares? He could listen to his mom, his brother, his daughter, or Jesus Christ. His policy proposal has to be made public before it's implemented. Why do you think you need to sit in on every conversation that helps the administration define a policy?
Earlier that year, there were complaints that important parts of the Administration's trade policies were being kept secret.
Like what parts? Please tell me how trade policy can be implemented and a secret at the same time? Implementation of trade policy is a very public thing. It can't be kept secret. Or are you again suggesting that we should have a right to sit in on every conversation that the administration has while it's coming up with its own coherent position on issues?
There were countless smaller stories about how data on government decision was drying up.
Perhaps you could offer more than two examples before jumping to the "countless" adjective?
But this administration has always found the free flow of information to be intolerable.
Hillary Clinton's health care task force operated in virtual secrecy, too, and they were messing with an idea to socialize something like 20% of the American economy. So, again, there's nothing particularly special about what's going on now. It's just that someone you don't like is the one keeping the secrets.
I couldn't care less if it saves energy. I'd just like more daylight at the end of the day. Oh, and I for one am not particularly fond of getting up early. :)
Heheh, I don't doubt it.
Actually, I've been meaning to investigate if there's some way in OO to put each chapter in its own document and then "compile" them into a single PDF at the end; of course, the trick is that the index, table of contents, and page numbering throughout the resulting PDF has to be seemless.
If there's some way to do this easily, I'd really like to do it. It's not because Writer has any trouble handling my 348-page book, it's just that it'd be a lot easier for me to have them separated into smaller logical units. When I'm working on chapter 14, I'm working on only chapter 14 99% of the time and all that other bulk just makes the scrollbar annoyingly small (i.e., dragging the scrollbar a little moves you 10 or 20 pages in your document).
And if the above is possible, it'd sure be great if there was a way to tell Writer that you want each new file (i.e. each chapter) to begin on a right-facing page.
If I could get these two things working, I'd be a very happy camper.
What a load... "Over the past few years?" Come 'on, cut any silly implications that government secrecy is somehow something new with the Bush administration. The FOIA was passed for a reason and it was passed long before "a few years ago."
Government secrecy is nothing new... just the spin.
HOWEVER, once the application itself is running, I found that load times were not significantly different. Granted, I compared Writer to Word--I'm not a heavy spreadsheet user. I also find that the current version of OpenOffice (or whatever ships with Fedora Core 3) is faster in loading itself than whatever version of OpenOffice I was using before (1.0, perhaps?).
The comparison became irrelevant to me, though. I switched to OpenOffice last year when I was writing a book. The book was mostly text but did have its share of diagrams and graphics. Eventually, Word would just bomb out. I literally couldn't make progress on the book since Word would randomly crash out and I'd have to rewrite some amount... it'd happen several times a day and just plain annoying. So I tried OpenOffice. Took me about half a day to adjust for some formatting idiosyncracies that Writer had with the 200+ page Word document, but once those minor tweaks were done, I cruised on through writing the rest of the book. Writer SXW files are also much smaller than equivalent Word documents from what I've seen.
The book ended up with 348 pages... OpenOfffice Writer didn't crash even once for the remaining 10 months of writing and editing I did.
The speed comparison is irrelevant to me. The fact remains, I was able to author my book in OpenOffice Writer while Word constantly crashed once the document got to some filesize and/or some level of graphics.
Fuck the US and fuck the bullshit beurocracy. The US gov't pisses me off so much with idiotic rules which serve the wealthiest minorities, i want to puke.
Could you please let me know which wealthy minority is being served by this change to DST and, better yet, tell me which poor minority (or majority) is being hurt, and how?
For the record, I wish DST were in effect all year long. I'd especially like it in the winter when the days are too short as it is. Give me an extra hour at the end of the workday, I could care less whether or not I drive to work in the dark.
Huh? How often do major credit card issuers take a loss from fraud? Not often. I'm a CC merchant and if I get a chargeback, Visa/Mastercard doesn't eat the loss (even though they authorized the charge)... they just take the money back out of my account and stick me with, what, a $25 chargeback fee? Visa/Mastercard makes money off of fraud.
Visa/Mastercard is one of the biggest racketeering schemes in modern history... They get about 2% of every transaction, $25 off of every chargeback, and the merchant gets to run the risk of fraud... not Visa/Mastercard. What a scam!
In any case, 50 cents is hardly a "micropayment" to me and you can't very well ding a person's "micropayment" account for 50 cents a webview which, last time I checked, is where a lot of micropayment "benefits" were supposed to be had. And if the idea was to charge, say, a quarter of a penny for a webview or even less (a true micropayment), PayPayl's "micropayment" scheme is truly laughable.
Not that I care. I think micropayments would open the doors to a pay-as-yo-go-Internet that would lead to the death of free content where you were constantly checking the "account" as you surfed to know when you had to stop. I'd rather not go there.
But congratulations on your magazine articles. Like anyone really cares...
I would have thought the same until about a week ago when I was out of town and my wife got a hold of a Webcam. She immediately wanted me to get one so we could "see each other" over MSN. Of course not only did I need a camera, I needed a Windows machine to run MSN. So I got my hands on both and my wife was happy. Now, she uses the camera almost all the time when talking to almost anyone, especially her family.
Video is something that Gaim desperately needs. Nudges and winks are unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but at this point video and audio are basic.
""Imagine the Brazilians or the Chinese doing their own internet. That would be the end of the story."
And that'd be a bad thing? If those two countries would independently leave, they'd have done a huge public service in reducing hacking and spam for the rest of the world! :)
I've always hated Verisign and long-since jumped ship on their registar services. We've grudgingly continued to use them for payment services. We will very seriously consider moving to a new payment processor due to the fact that they're being acquired by eBay which associates them with PayPal.
Hahah, that's not micropayments. A micropayment might be a penny (or a fraction of a penny) per webpage view. Assuming the site wants to charge half a penny per web view, they'd have to charge 5.5 cents per web view... of which PayPal would get about 5.02 cents, or 91% of the money paid by the customer!
Micropayments my rear-end. :)
So the people that benefit from those shipping routes (America's heartland) should pay for it. Or those costs should be factored into the cost of shipping. In any case, I don't see where that cost needs to be paid for by federal dollars absorbed from people in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, Boston, etc. who have plenty of low-risk shipping routes.
2) Do you own a car? Have you seen the gas prices? That's not only because of the damaged/missing oil platforms, but also to great extend because of the damaged processing facilities in .... [drum roll] New Orleans.
Prices are already falling in some parts of the country. In those places that aren't, the cost of gasoline reflects the cost of getting those facilities online. Again, no need for federal dollars absorbed from others.
3) Seeing the lists of cities you named I'm starting to guess you're being sarcastic. For example LA: earthquakes, NYC: terrorisme, Seattle: being so close to Redmond.
Hahah, yeah, right. My point wasn't sarcasm and the cities were chosen based on the fact that they're very far away from New Orleans.
There are some things the federal government has to do, just to make sure America can function as a country.
Yes, defend its borders. Not insure people that build buildings below sea level on the coast. Terrorism and war? That's a possibility. Floods in below-sea-level cities on the coast in a hurricane zone? That's inevitable.
Sorry, I just don't see where people in L.A., Seattle, NYC, etc. should have to pay the amazing amount of money that would be necessary to make New Orleans "hurricane-proof." If the people that live there are absolutely stubborn about living in a below-sea-level-and-sinking city on the coast, they should come up with the money to lower their own risk.
Nah, just those costal areas that are below sea level!. It's just common sense.
I blame the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. The city had hundreds of school buses which could have been used to evacuate their poor, yet they went unused and are now part of the flood damage--and the mayor was out their shouting vulgarities after the flood, asking where the damn buses were. Well, they're parked in your flooded city, idiot!
Both New Orleans and Louisiana should have made this top priority... if you know you're at risk and someone else (the feds) aren't helping, do you just wait around until disaster arrives? NO! You take matters into your own hands and fix your own problem. This unhealthy dependency on the federal government as a solution to all problems has gone entirely too far.
I do feel for the victims and I'll be volunteering to assist in one of the refugee areas that has been established in San Antonio, but I also have to shake my head about the situation... This is a city that is mostly below sea level, built on the coast of the ocean between the largest river in the U.S., a large lake, and marshlands and is in an area of high-risk hurricane-wise. They were flooded four decades ago by Betsy... And now they are hit again and they're bewildered, unprepared, and looking once again for the federal government to help them. Why is it that someone in Seattle must pay for the bad decisions of someone in New Orleans?
Personally, I think the federal government at this point should clean up the mess, etc. However, there should be no federal assistance to rebuild unless the rebuilding is taking place at an elevation that is at least at sea level. I absolutely reject the idea of federal funding for reconstruction that will be destroyed again when the next major hurricane strikes.
And make no mistake, it doesn't matter how high or strong we make the levees... there will always be some storm that's going to be just a little bit bigger. Nature is funny that way and we are arrogant if we ignore that.
This was 40 years ago. I wager it had very little to do with Iraq, especially since none of the funds that had been requested for levee work were for the sections of the levees that actually broke.
Nice try, though.
Hmmm, no, I know what both liberal and epithet means and I most certainly didn't use the former as the latter. Unless you have some special insight into my original message that I, as the author, don't have, you really have no case. I used the word "liberal" to mean exactly what it means: a liberal. That would only be considered an epithet by someone that considers the word "liberal" to be offensive. Now who would that be? Ironically, it's usually the liberals. :)
i overestimated your intelligence, but i'm sure that's not a new experience for you.
This from the person who then writes...
you fuckers use liberal as an epithet constantly these days.
I'm glad you have such an awesome command of the English language. The fact that we call liberals liberals and that we do not agree with the liberals does not make the word "liberal" an epithet. It remains an accurate description of a group of people. That that group of people is offended by being called exactly what they are is very telling. So is the fact that you do resort to the use of epithets in your reply.
Frankly, if I were a liberal and someone called me a liberal I'd say, "Damn straight, you better believe I'm a liberal!" Sadly (though understandably), many liberals don't like to admit what they are. Strange, isn't it? :)
G'day, my uneducated, vulgar, and liberal anonymous coward.
Really? Got some examples? Conservatives generally don't blame God, except for a few wacky fanatical fundamental Christians that have a skewed view of Christianity.
Levees broke? That's because God is angry that nobody is stoning homosexuals. Big storm hit New Orleans? That's because God is angry that abortions happen.
Has anyone actually said this, or is this something you're just making up in a desperate attempt to have a point? If so, you've failed miserably.
Good.
We are powerless before nature.
Many times, yes.
It's so powerful, we shouldn't even try to control it. All hail mighty nature.
There's a difference between trying to adapt nature within reason and knowing when we're fighting a losing battle. Trying to rescue a below-sea-level-city on the coast nestled between a river, a lake, and swamplands is a losing battle.
Can you get away with "controling" nature? Sometimes, for awhile. Do you stand a chance when nature decides it doesn't want to be controlled? Nope.
I am going back into my cave to die now.
Later, I doubt you'll be missed.
I surf the net plenty and very seldom have run into something that needed Flash. In the few cases that that have happened, one of their competitors has always been Flash-free or at least Flash-optional.
Luckily, the Flash problem is rather self-correcting. Last I checked, Google still does a poor job (or no job) at indexing Flash-intensive sites. If the entire site is wrapped up in a Flash presentation, Google probably won't index it in the first place and won't even show up in the results. Perfect!
If Google starts effectively indexing Flash presentations, I hope they'll include an option "Ignore content from Flash presentations" so that my search results don't get polluted.