That's a good question, but most likely if you put the piece of paper up where people can see it and somehow the rights holder finds out about it, they'll probably sue for royalties. Just like how you can't play music from a radio to your customers without paying up, they'll claim that their content (somehow) added value to your product or service and therefore they deserve a cut.
I wonder though, what would happen if you claim you were using the piece of paper, and not the lyrics, poem, code, or whatever on it?
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but the problem is with copyright, not shrinkwrap licenses or CC or the GPL or anything else. Copyright law allows people to be "ambushed" like this, simply because everything is copyrighted unless explicitly stated otherwise.
If you found a penny on the ground, it would be near impossible for even the most overzealous attourney general to find something to convict you with for spending that penny. But, if you were to find a snippet of code or a line from a song just laying in the street, that's completely different, because even though you're holding that code or song, it really belongs to someone else (this must be that remaining 1/10). Even if there was no name or identifier of any kind to track this back to the actual owner, you are forbidden to use it because even though you have possession of it, it's not "yours".
Until people understand that, we'll continue to have people whine about being "ambushed" or how some license or another is "viral".
Because there was no nudity in the show, no sex in the show, no foul language in the show, and nothing that anyone could have pointed to in advance and said "this is obscene content".
We're sitting in a country where people try laws like this over and over, against the internet, against computer games, against music, against movies... so this is a taste of what our future rights online hold for us should the government succeed in having a post-facto Miller Test type law regarding content on the internet.
So much for being wiser. Record fines for a show about an orgy, without containing any sex or nudity or anything else. Just the fact that the orgy occurred in the plot of the show. This is where "Miller test"-like rules get you, fucked over for something you did because a reasonable person would not find shows that contained no sex or nudity offensive, but enough unreasonable people banded together to cost 111 stations a total of 3.6 million dollars.
The problem is that as it stands, the constitution is the highest law in the land, the most powerful rule of all, and yet it has no teeth. The first amendment reads "Congress shall make no law..." yet, there is absolutely nothing to stop Congress from making that law. If a majority of Representatives and Senators voted for it and the President signed it, then Constitution be damned, it IS a law, and nothing can be done to them for breaking the Constitution until the next ballot.
Worse, this rabbit hole goes deeper: Nothing is heard by the SCOTUS until after it's been heard by an appeals court. Nothing is heard by the appeals court until after it's been heard by a lower federal court. Nothing is heard in federal court until someone's been arrested for it, or someone begs the government for the right to sue over it. When a law is passed, it only goes through two branches of the government: the legislative and the executive. It is not until after harm is done that the judicial branch even has a say.
Now, think of the cost. Whether you're defending yourself or suing over the law, it costs a LOT of money just to reach the SCOTUS. It's just not going to happen if all you've got is some public defender who sleeps through your case. You've got at least three cases to argue, assuming nobody throws your case back down a level on a technicality. Furthermore, if you win at any point along the way, the government can simply walk away and refuse to appeal, which might get you out of jail, but in the grand scheme of things, you've lost.
So, is it that much of a disaster to give the judicial branch the same power of veto we give the executive branch, and to specify immediate impeachment for those who would run roughshod over our Constitution? Or maybe, rather than charging the unfortunate citizens of the state of Illinois, just an amendment to the shield that legislators now enjoy, so that the money can come out of the pockets of those who voted for this act?
I think it would be fascinating for some group (one person doing this would probably get blacklisted pretty quickly) to go around and get offers of employment from different companies, get copies of their default contracts, attempt to negotiate better contracts, and compile a report based on, say, the top 50 employers (in terms of # of employees) in the country. Just to see how much "choice" there really is in negotiating away meal breaks, overtime pay, and government holidays. How many companies will let you trade meals for better pay? How many companies will pay extra to make you work on Christmas? How many companies simply take away all of these in the default contract for no extra pay?
If this "secure eraser" is so awesome, then what trace was there that this "secure eraser" had been used? If someone hauls me in for a crime and my computer has no evidence, does that mean I must have used a "secure eraser" on it?
So then if I have nothing to hide, am I now hiding something?
God, our country needs yet another "Miller test" like I need a hole in my head.
The Miller test has long been a club for the government to threaten whoever it doesn't like at the time. So lets look at it in terms of games: Do you think your game is not "too violent"? The government thinks it is. So you trot out an average person who thinks its not too violent. The government trots out their well paid expert "more average than you" witness to claim it is. Uhoh, there goes part 1. If you've come this far, your game probably already has people being killed or wounded or maybe just gets a papercut. So, part 2. So now you start trotting out the expensive expert witnesses for part 3. Ebert and Kojima say games aren't art. Who do you have to convince the jury that games are, some kid with a website?
All of this... only after your game ships because it's impossible to know if something will offend someone until after you've offended them. The only safe thing to do in a world of Miller tests is "nothing".
Except now you have one million dead people. This is a benefit?
So anyways, next year, the 500k remaining citizens of C can produce 500k food or 250k cars, and 500k in D can produce 500K food or 125K cars... When does "benefit" stop meaning "both countries eventually starve to death"? When one gets down to zero citizens would you consider a country not having anything to trade being "in autarky"?
You asked for an example where the Comparative Advantage model didn't work. I'm so sorry that I pulled numbers out of my ass that you found to be "bizarre" and therefore somehow less valid than the ones you pulled out of your own ass. Since my prudish sense of requiring clothing appears to have confused you, substitute "food" for "clothing" where one unit of "food" is the minimum amount of subsistence diet a human can survive on for a year. Half a unit of "food" means you don't live through the year.
Now, lets start over, without unemployment this time, or all those other things. I'll pull some different "bizarre" numbers from my ass.
Tiny Island Country A, population 10 (I like my ass's numbers better) must have 10 "food" or people will die. If all 10 people gather food, they can get 4 "food" (2.5 man-years) or if they all gather metal, 2 cars (5 manyears). If they don't trade, then 6 people will die this year, 3 more the next year, and finally they'll be a deserted island. Giant Country B, population 80, can produce 40 cars (2 manyears) or 90 "food" (0.888 manyears).
Trade proceeds. In a totally socialst utopia, A would create cars and B would create "food", and A would give 2 cars for B's 10 extra "food", and everyone would subsist happily, and B would get two cars to share amongst everyone. To each, according to their needs.
In the comparative advantage world, we'll look at A: A can make 0, 1 or 2 cars. In each case, it makes 4,2 or 0 "food". We'll call these options 1 2 and 3 respectively. In option 1, A produces nothing to trade, and six people die. In option 2, A produces one car to trade, which in B's country is worth 2 man years. This gets them 2.25 "food" to go with the 2 they grew locally. Six people die. In option 3, A produces two cars to trade, for a total of 4 B man years. This gets them 4.5 "food". Six people die.
OK, so these are "bizarre" numbers, since I am using the fraction to scrape the bottom of the barrel, but let's try something else.
C has one million people. They can produce one million food or 500 thousand cars. D has one million people. They can produce one million food or 250 thousand cars. What trade will not be a fucking model example of trade being bad? And again, what happens to Comparative Advantage when not all goods are equal?
The problem is that nobody out there has the time to engender the trust they'd want from every single individual they come in contact with, and corporations certainly won't go out of their way to help. Can I really trust the "Organic" produce sellers to not take the ugliest fruit from the truck and slap the organic label on it so they can mark it up? Can I really trust my water utility to purify the water I'm drinking and not feed me any strange chemicals for research purposes? Can I really trust the power plant next door to the house I live in to follow all applicable safety regulations? Can I really trust the medicine I bought to not be placebo pills?
How would these entities go about convincing me to trust them? What do I do if nobody decides that my trust is all that important? What is my recourse for cases where entities build up trust over time specifically to pull off a couple of big scams (see: ebay)?
it is not the taxpayer's fault when someone is a lousy worker is too lazy to earn more.
Wow, too lazy to earn more. Couldn't have anything to do with the fact that WalMart does have a group health plan, and because of that they refuse to work employees over a certain number of hours because they are contractually required to enroll employees meeting that hourly limit on their plan. Not that Wal-mart is alone on this, they're just the most visible case since they're one of the largest employers in the country.
Also have to wonder what WalMart's policy on moonlighting is too. These days with many employers' contracts taking over the lives of employees after they've clocked out, I wouldn't put it past them to ban their employees from moonlighting either. I know I've had a company ask me to sign a contract that would have banned me from moonlighting (boilerplate "we own everything you think say or do 24 hours a day 7 days a week". I told them that I intended to work some evenings consulting for another company I had an existing relationship with, they took the contract back and I went home.)
You missed the point, China didn't have to give up squat. If they wanted more cars they had millions of unemployed people who could have made them.
they can give Trinidad 6.5 shirts in exchange
Also, what the hell is anyone going to do with a fractional shirt? Where would they get a fractional shirt to begin with, some guy keeled over dead mid-shirt and everyone else was too superstitious to finish it? I rounded down because I sure wouldn't stay employed long if I rounded people's change up at the till. And I did mention that all I'd have to do is add a real-world shipping cost to make it negative again. You can be sure that the captain wouldn't take anything less than a whole shirt.
less silk means more shirt production
Less suitable silk meant more work had to go into producing shirts from it. Rather than falling behind, more people were hired to keep production up, and afterwards China still had unemployed people. Sorry I didn't make that clear.
You're right, it cost them "nothing" because that's MY money!
MY money was being used to harass retired school teachers. That's MY money that could have been used to pay real cops a raise. That's MY money being used so that some DHS lackey can play Joe Friday and feel all detectivey. MY money could have gone towards having the army we wanted. MY money could have gone towards buying food for Wal-Mart employees (whoops, different rant).
But no, MY money was spent freezing the account of some little old man because he tried to pay his bill. MY money was spent to see if JC Penney was really a terrorist front. MY money was wasted.
What an amazing rebuttal! "Confusing myself with the numbers" indeed. If you think I used the wrong numbers, you'd better have some "right" numbers to show I'm wrong. You seem to be confused yourself, I only cited 30C to show that as things get warmer they expand... all of the other math was done from the density of freshwater at 0C and ice at 0C.
The essential truth that international trade is mutually beneficial does not depend on details
I proposed this in another branch and want to see what you think. I'll expand the example some more, as well.
Let's pretend we have two countries. The first is a tiny one... lets say we'll call it Trinidad. In this world, Trinidad has 10 people living on it. These 10 people need shirts and would also like to have cars. However, it takes a lot of work for these people to find enough washed up metal from shipwrecks to make a car, so in a whole year, all ten people working together can make two cars. Likewise, it takes a lot of work to strip fibers from palm fronds to make thread, and to weave them together into shirts, so in a whole year, all ten people working together can make six shirts. If they split up, 5 people could assemble one car while 5 people weave 3 shirts.
Well, surely they could trade with another country and benefit, right?
So, here's China. China has one billion people. They have plenty of metal, and factories, so 200,000,000 Chinese people can make 100,000,000 cars in a year (2 peopleyears per car). They have plenty of silk and other material, so 600,000,000 Chinese people can make a billion shirts a year (6 peopleyears per 10 shirts, or one person can make 1.666666 shirts). 200,000,000 people are unemployed.
Trinidad decides that it will forego the pleasure of puttering around its little island, and makes two cars to trade with China for 10 shirts. Now, to make 10 more shirts in a year, China only needs six more people. But those six people could have made 3 more cars, so if China accepts the deal, it's on the losing end. China sends them home with 6 shirts, same as Trinidad could have made on its own. But let's say Trinidad decides it could remake its image as a nudist colony, and make shirts to trade for cars: Their six shirts trade for 3.6 peopleyears of Chinese labor... not quite enough to make two cars. The best they can do is trade 4 shirts for one car, leaving them with two shirts and a car, one shirt less than if they had split the labor and traded nothing!
Now, let's give Trinidad a spinning wheel, thereby lifting it out of poverty. Now the 10 people of Trinidad can make 2 cars or 20 shirts (or one car and 10 shirts). Clearly, then, they can produce enough shirts for themselves and meet their own needs with enough left over for trade with China. However, 10 Chinese cars cost 20 manyears worth of work... the equivalent of 33.3 shirts. Their dream of a car on every beach is close, yet so far...
But then disaster strikes! Global warming has caused the silkworm to evolve to grow a thicker and more insulated cocoon, made from silk that is no longer quite as suitable for shirts as before. Now, the 600,000,000 people producing shirts are only able to make 800,000,000 shirts (three peopleyears per four shirts). The people of Trinidad think they have finally gotten their lucky break, only to have their trading convoy turned away at the border. Why? Because increased shirt demand has roused 150,000,000 of the unemployed from their wistful reverie, and they spring into action to produce the remaining 200,000,000 shirts needed to clothe China. Trinidad, hoping to capitalize on a shortage discovers that their 10 extra shirts are still only worth the 7.5 peopleyears of work it would have taken China to produce them, and they go home with 3 cars.
What happens in the Comparative Advantage world when some goods are less equal than others? What happens if a country cannot produce enough to support itself alone? What happens when an enormous country has a giant reserve of untapped resources, so that no matter what it chooses to produce, it has no opportunity cost? If I was a little less bored, I could have come up with numbers so that no matter what happened, they could never trade enough surplus shirts for cars to beat their own production.
Come up with a real fucking model example of trade being bad done.
because of the properties of ICE vs Liquid Water the melting of the Artic ice sheet actually lowers water world wide..
Errr... WHAT?
Time to do the math again, I guess. Every now and then this bit of ugly science rears its ugly head.
Useful numbers: Density of Seawater: 1025kg/m^3. Density of Freshwater: 1000kg/m^3 (rounded up from 999.98 at freezing point) Density of Ice: 916kg/m^3 [same source].
Things to know: The vast majority of icebergs are not frozen seawater, they break off from land glaciers and float out to sea. Buoyancy tells us that X will float in Y if X displaces a volume of Y where the mass of the displaced volume equals the mass of X. Hollowed out shapes can contain more volume than a solid block of mass (this is why metal boats float).
So, lets say we have a solid, convex iceberg floating in an ocean ever so slightly above freezing, consisting of exactly 1025kg of ice right about to melt. To float, this iceberg must displace 1025kg of saltwater, which by sheer coincidence is exactly one cubic meter. Thus, when this iceberg broke off the glacier and fell into the water, the sea level increased by the height of one cubic meter spread out really thin across the entire surface. If you lifted the iceberg out without letting it melt, that one cubic meter would come back and fill the hole where it was.
Naturally, the sea being ever so slightly above freezing and the ice being ever so slightly below, the ice absorbs heat from the ocean and melts. Thanks to wonderful conservation of mass, we know we now have 1025kg of fresh water at ever so slightly above freezing, with a density of 1000kg/m^3. Thus, we have 1.025 cubic meters of fresh water to fill that 1 cubic meter hole where the iceberg used to be.
So because the iceberg fell into the ocean and melted, the sea level is now 1.025 cubic meters (spread out real thin over the entire ocean) higher than it used to be. Even if the ice started in the ocean (as in the Arctic), it's still 0.025 cubic meters high! It gets worse if the ice is sitting on the bottom of the ocean (then there is more ice than displaced water)! Even if you assume that the seawater is less dense in the Arctic (a fallacy, as the freezing action actually increases the saline content of the water around the ice), as long as the density of the seawater is greater than the density of the water you get from melting the ice (almost always freshwater), you will get an increase in sea level from melting the ice.
Incidentially, arctic ice is not all frozen seawater, much of it is from precipitation falling on top of the frozen seawater, so you can't even claim that the water in the ice came directly from the ocean in the first place (not that that claim would really help any, because that water has been locked up for thousands and thousands of years, returning it to water would definitely raise the ocean level beyond anything in written history). Plus, once the water is liquid and continues to heat, it will continue to expand: at 30C freshwater is only 995.65kg/m^3.
Since I whipped out the math anyway, 1025kg of ice is 1025kg*(1m^3/916kg)=1.119 m^3. Since it's solid and convex we know that there must be 0.119 m^3 of ice above sea level. This shows that roughly 10% of the 1.119 m^3 of ice is above sea level, thereby supporting the old adage that 9/10 of the iceberg is below the waterline.
You might want to study "comparative advantage" some more, then.
For instance, comparative advantage only applies to economies running full tilt, pedal to the metal, maximum capacity. If you've got unused capacity, that's capacity that could be making more products and changing your advantage. If you've got a billion people and only 90% of them are employed, you've got 100 million people you have to employ before you can start talking about your comparative advantage. This is because comparative advantage is actually a study of opportunity costs. If you can make either A or B, then making A has an opportunity cost of not making B, and the "comparative advantage" comes from minimizing that opportunity cost.
Comparative Advantage also requires that the countries involved are able to provide a surplus in at least one good. Let's pick some tiny country at random, say... Trinidad. Let's claim Trinidad has 10 people, and they all want cars. Those 10 people working together can make 6 cars a year. They'd all like shirts too, and those 10 people working together can make 6 shirts a year. If they work half and half, they can make 3 cars and 3 shirts. No matter what Trinidad does, they can neither clothe everyone nor can everyone have a car.
Now, let's take China. China has a billion people. The richest want cars, so lets say they want 60,000 cars. China has more space and resources for factories, so with 200,000 people, they can make 60,000 cars. China also has silk and other resources for clothing, and with 600,000 people they can make a billion shirts. This leaves 200,000 unemployed people.
What can Trinidad do to trade with China to meet their needs? "I'll trade you 6 cars for 10 cars and 10 shirts"? Does that even make sense? Even if they could produce 11 cars and 6 shirts, if they went to China and said "I need 4 shirts, do you want a car?", China would simply employ another 50000 people and have their own car without paying any opportunity cost, as it would not affect their shirt production at all.
Wait, I thought we were talking about the money going to the low wage countries, not countries with wages even higher than the US (partially because of very high taxes)?
If they want to control what their employees do with their computer, then they should prevent the employees from installing any software that has not been pre-approved and probably also pre-configured.
It is not Google's fault that the CIO did not take "draconian" measures to prevent people from installing software that did "bad" things. If it wasn't google desktop, it would have been kazaa with C: shared or any of a myriad of other programs and trojans.
and can be done decades ahead of any commercialization or colonization.
See, here's the problem. We see it now with people patenting things they could never accomplish, paying a few thousand dollars in application and lawyer fees to obtain the property rights to things they'll never actually own.
Property rights in advance is foolish, stupid, dumb, idiotic, and any number of other names you can assign. Do you know why the Gold Rush was a Rush? Because people could go west and stake out a plot of land and own it. Do you want to know how to kill the Space Rush? Sell me 3554 Amun for a million dollars, so I can sit tight here and wait for someone to bring it back for me.
You want to see a space race? "Whoever sets foot there first, wins."
yes, but at the practice I go to they already have Chinese/English speaking doctors, as well as several others who are multilingual, which works fine.
For most clinics, it probably is more along the lines of "cool toy" than "useful tool" but with the number of languages it supports, I could see it being more useful in a downtown clinic in a big city like New York when someone who speaks Chinese comes in and all you've got on hand is English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Russian.
Personally, I'm surprised that they went to the trouble of having it translate to sign language, when with a display, wouldn't it have been easier to simply print the text in the language of choice?
What does it argue for? Is it an argument against something? What does it argue against?
Sorry, I wasn't aware that factual statements had to be arguments for or against anything.
I'm not the original poster so I cannot speak for him, but it appears to me that the original poster's point seems to be that he's losing the argument and needs to change the subject quick.
You, in turn, created a template fom his sentences and asked what it meant. I simply took the template you created, and plugged in a few more names as one would a function. In doing so, I discovered that the lessons history teaches us do not bode well for the outcome of this "war" (or whatever you and the other guy want to call it). The administration has not shown any evidence or shared any information with us to explain its apparent belief that this time, it will be different. That was my point, and that is what I believe the statement that "person XYZ was once associated with the US in some way and turned out bad" means.
What does "person XYZ was once associated with the US in some way and turned out bad" mean?
What does "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" mean? Can you name one government that we were involved in that turned out just peachy keen fine? Japan might be the best off, but now that we've taken away its military, North Korea's been lobbing their dummy missiles at it for shits and giggles while we're busy elsewhere. The Philippines would be my second choice, though I don't see anyone calling for the kind of scorched earth campaign and killing hundreds of thousands of men and boys (iirc, the famous order was "kill everyone over 10") that it took to get the Philippines under control, probably because levelling everything failed in Vietnam. I suppose South Korea's doing fine enough, even if they do share a border with an insane nuclear powered dictator, they aren't glowing rubble yet. Most of the people we propped up in South America are now either running for their lives or held democratic elections and got replaced by cocaine growers. The history of the Middle East is basically the history of Western failure since at least the time of the Crusades, though the page about the US supporting Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and even bin Laden has a picture captioned "this is the US, smacking the hornet's nest again and again and again".
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again... and expecting a different result." - Albert Einstein. What do you think that means?
or they might want to buy out your ports or anything
On the other hand, the UAE buyout of our ports as a security concern is a xenophobic strawman. Port security is maintained by the Coast Guard, so at the current rate (budget is up 8% from last year, which beats inflation), assuming that the budget increase yields an improvement in Coast Guard capability, security should improve this year.
Slashdot Mirror
You could put it up in a store window
That's a good question, but most likely if you put the piece of paper up where people can see it and somehow the rights holder finds out about it, they'll probably sue for royalties. Just like how you can't play music from a radio to your customers without paying up, they'll claim that their content (somehow) added value to your product or service and therefore they deserve a cut.
I wonder though, what would happen if you claim you were using the piece of paper, and not the lyrics, poem, code, or whatever on it?
I'm sure it's because I'm too simpleminded
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but the problem is with copyright, not shrinkwrap licenses or CC or the GPL or anything else. Copyright law allows people to be "ambushed" like this, simply because everything is copyrighted unless explicitly stated otherwise.
If you found a penny on the ground, it would be near impossible for even the most overzealous attourney general to find something to convict you with for spending that penny. But, if you were to find a snippet of code or a line from a song just laying in the street, that's completely different, because even though you're holding that code or song, it really belongs to someone else (this must be that remaining 1/10). Even if there was no name or identifier of any kind to track this back to the actual owner, you are forbidden to use it because even though you have possession of it, it's not "yours".
Until people understand that, we'll continue to have people whine about being "ambushed" or how some license or another is "viral".
Because there was no nudity in the show, no sex in the show, no foul language in the show, and nothing that anyone could have pointed to in advance and said "this is obscene content".
We're sitting in a country where people try laws like this over and over, against the internet, against computer games, against music, against movies... so this is a taste of what our future rights online hold for us should the government succeed in having a post-facto Miller Test type law regarding content on the internet.
So much for being wiser. Record fines for a show about an orgy, without containing any sex or nudity or anything else. Just the fact that the orgy occurred in the plot of the show. This is where "Miller test"-like rules get you, fucked over for something you did because a reasonable person would not find shows that contained no sex or nudity offensive, but enough unreasonable people banded together to cost 111 stations a total of 3.6 million dollars.
The problem is that as it stands, the constitution is the highest law in the land, the most powerful rule of all, and yet it has no teeth. The first amendment reads "Congress shall make no law..." yet, there is absolutely nothing to stop Congress from making that law. If a majority of Representatives and Senators voted for it and the President signed it, then Constitution be damned, it IS a law, and nothing can be done to them for breaking the Constitution until the next ballot.
Worse, this rabbit hole goes deeper: Nothing is heard by the SCOTUS until after it's been heard by an appeals court. Nothing is heard by the appeals court until after it's been heard by a lower federal court. Nothing is heard in federal court until someone's been arrested for it, or someone begs the government for the right to sue over it. When a law is passed, it only goes through two branches of the government: the legislative and the executive. It is not until after harm is done that the judicial branch even has a say.
Now, think of the cost. Whether you're defending yourself or suing over the law, it costs a LOT of money just to reach the SCOTUS. It's just not going to happen if all you've got is some public defender who sleeps through your case. You've got at least three cases to argue, assuming nobody throws your case back down a level on a technicality. Furthermore, if you win at any point along the way, the government can simply walk away and refuse to appeal, which might get you out of jail, but in the grand scheme of things, you've lost.
So, is it that much of a disaster to give the judicial branch the same power of veto we give the executive branch, and to specify immediate impeachment for those who would run roughshod over our Constitution? Or maybe, rather than charging the unfortunate citizens of the state of Illinois, just an amendment to the shield that legislators now enjoy, so that the money can come out of the pockets of those who voted for this act?
I think it would be fascinating for some group (one person doing this would probably get blacklisted pretty quickly) to go around and get offers of employment from different companies, get copies of their default contracts, attempt to negotiate better contracts, and compile a report based on, say, the top 50 employers (in terms of # of employees) in the country. Just to see how much "choice" there really is in negotiating away meal breaks, overtime pay, and government holidays. How many companies will let you trade meals for better pay? How many companies will pay extra to make you work on Christmas? How many companies simply take away all of these in the default contract for no extra pay?
If this "secure eraser" is so awesome, then what trace was there that this "secure eraser" had been used? If someone hauls me in for a crime and my computer has no evidence, does that mean I must have used a "secure eraser" on it?
So then if I have nothing to hide, am I now hiding something?
God, our country needs yet another "Miller test" like I need a hole in my head.
The Miller test has long been a club for the government to threaten whoever it doesn't like at the time. So lets look at it in terms of games: Do you think your game is not "too violent"? The government thinks it is. So you trot out an average person who thinks its not too violent. The government trots out their well paid expert "more average than you" witness to claim it is. Uhoh, there goes part 1. If you've come this far, your game probably already has people being killed or wounded or maybe just gets a papercut. So, part 2. So now you start trotting out the expensive expert witnesses for part 3. Ebert and Kojima say games aren't art. Who do you have to convince the jury that games are, some kid with a website?
All of this... only after your game ships because it's impossible to know if something will offend someone until after you've offended them. The only safe thing to do in a world of Miller tests is "nothing".
See? Trade benefits *both* parties.
Except now you have one million dead people. This is a benefit?
So anyways, next year, the 500k remaining citizens of C can produce 500k food or 250k cars, and 500k in D can produce 500K food or 125K cars... When does "benefit" stop meaning "both countries eventually starve to death"? When one gets down to zero citizens would you consider a country not having anything to trade being "in autarky"?
You asked for an example where the Comparative Advantage model didn't work. I'm so sorry that I pulled numbers out of my ass that you found to be "bizarre" and therefore somehow less valid than the ones you pulled out of your own ass. Since my prudish sense of requiring clothing appears to have confused you, substitute "food" for "clothing" where one unit of "food" is the minimum amount of subsistence diet a human can survive on for a year. Half a unit of "food" means you don't live through the year.
Now, lets start over, without unemployment this time, or all those other things. I'll pull some different "bizarre" numbers from my ass.
Tiny Island Country A, population 10 (I like my ass's numbers better) must have 10 "food" or people will die. If all 10 people gather food, they can get 4 "food" (2.5 man-years) or if they all gather metal, 2 cars (5 manyears). If they don't trade, then 6 people will die this year, 3 more the next year, and finally they'll be a deserted island. Giant Country B, population 80, can produce 40 cars (2 manyears) or 90 "food" (0.888 manyears).
Trade proceeds. In a totally socialst utopia, A would create cars and B would create "food", and A would give 2 cars for B's 10 extra "food", and everyone would subsist happily, and B would get two cars to share amongst everyone. To each, according to their needs.
In the comparative advantage world, we'll look at A:
A can make 0, 1 or 2 cars. In each case, it makes 4,2 or 0 "food". We'll call these options 1 2 and 3 respectively.
In option 1, A produces nothing to trade, and six people die.
In option 2, A produces one car to trade, which in B's country is worth 2 man years. This gets them 2.25 "food" to go with the 2 they grew locally. Six people die.
In option 3, A produces two cars to trade, for a total of 4 B man years. This gets them 4.5 "food". Six people die.
OK, so these are "bizarre" numbers, since I am using the fraction to scrape the bottom of the barrel, but let's try something else.
C has one million people. They can produce one million food or 500 thousand cars. D has one million people. They can produce one million food or 250 thousand cars. What trade will not be a fucking model example of trade being bad? And again, what happens to Comparative Advantage when not all goods are equal?
The problem is that nobody out there has the time to engender the trust they'd want from every single individual they come in contact with, and corporations certainly won't go out of their way to help. Can I really trust the "Organic" produce sellers to not take the ugliest fruit from the truck and slap the organic label on it so they can mark it up? Can I really trust my water utility to purify the water I'm drinking and not feed me any strange chemicals for research purposes? Can I really trust the power plant next door to the house I live in to follow all applicable safety regulations? Can I really trust the medicine I bought to not be placebo pills?
How would these entities go about convincing me to trust them? What do I do if nobody decides that my trust is all that important? What is my recourse for cases where entities build up trust over time specifically to pull off a couple of big scams (see: ebay)?
it is not the taxpayer's fault when someone is a lousy worker is too lazy to earn more.
Wow, too lazy to earn more. Couldn't have anything to do with the fact that WalMart does have a group health plan, and because of that they refuse to work employees over a certain number of hours because they are contractually required to enroll employees meeting that hourly limit on their plan. Not that Wal-mart is alone on this, they're just the most visible case since they're one of the largest employers in the country.
Also have to wonder what WalMart's policy on moonlighting is too. These days with many employers' contracts taking over the lives of employees after they've clocked out, I wouldn't put it past them to ban their employees from moonlighting either. I know I've had a company ask me to sign a contract that would have banned me from moonlighting (boilerplate "we own everything you think say or do 24 hours a day 7 days a week". I told them that I intended to work some evenings consulting for another company I had an existing relationship with, they took the contract back and I went home.)
China would have to give up
You missed the point, China didn't have to give up squat. If they wanted more cars they had millions of unemployed people who could have made them.
they can give Trinidad 6.5 shirts in exchange
Also, what the hell is anyone going to do with a fractional shirt? Where would they get a fractional shirt to begin with, some guy keeled over dead mid-shirt and everyone else was too superstitious to finish it? I rounded down because I sure wouldn't stay employed long if I rounded people's change up at the till. And I did mention that all I'd have to do is add a real-world shipping cost to make it negative again. You can be sure that the captain wouldn't take anything less than a whole shirt.
less silk means more shirt production
Less suitable silk meant more work had to go into producing shirts from it. Rather than falling behind, more people were hired to keep production up, and afterwards China still had unemployed people. Sorry I didn't make that clear.
which cost the supposed "victim" nothing
You're right, it cost them "nothing" because that's MY money!
MY money was being used to harass retired school teachers. That's MY money that could have been used to pay real cops a raise. That's MY money being used so that some DHS lackey can play Joe Friday and feel all detectivey. MY money could have gone towards having the army we wanted. MY money could have gone towards buying food for Wal-Mart employees (whoops, different rant).
But no, MY money was spent freezing the account of some little old man because he tried to pay his bill. MY money was spent to see if JC Penney was really a terrorist front. MY money was wasted.
What an amazing rebuttal! "Confusing myself with the numbers" indeed. If you think I used the wrong numbers, you'd better have some "right" numbers to show I'm wrong. You seem to be confused yourself, I only cited 30C to show that as things get warmer they expand... all of the other math was done from the density of freshwater at 0C and ice at 0C.
The essential truth that international trade is mutually beneficial does not depend on details
I proposed this in another branch and want to see what you think. I'll expand the example some more, as well.
Let's pretend we have two countries. The first is a tiny one... lets say we'll call it Trinidad. In this world, Trinidad has 10 people living on it. These 10 people need shirts and would also like to have cars. However, it takes a lot of work for these people to find enough washed up metal from shipwrecks to make a car, so in a whole year, all ten people working together can make two cars. Likewise, it takes a lot of work to strip fibers from palm fronds to make thread, and to weave them together into shirts, so in a whole year, all ten people working together can make six shirts. If they split up, 5 people could assemble one car while 5 people weave 3 shirts.
Well, surely they could trade with another country and benefit, right?
So, here's China. China has one billion people. They have plenty of metal, and factories, so 200,000,000 Chinese people can make 100,000,000 cars in a year (2 peopleyears per car). They have plenty of silk and other material, so 600,000,000 Chinese people can make a billion shirts a year (6 peopleyears per 10 shirts, or one person can make 1.666666 shirts). 200,000,000 people are unemployed.
Trinidad decides that it will forego the pleasure of puttering around its little island, and makes two cars to trade with China for 10 shirts. Now, to make 10 more shirts in a year, China only needs six more people. But those six people could have made 3 more cars, so if China accepts the deal, it's on the losing end. China sends them home with 6 shirts, same as Trinidad could have made on its own. But let's say Trinidad decides it could remake its image as a nudist colony, and make shirts to trade for cars: Their six shirts trade for 3.6 peopleyears of Chinese labor... not quite enough to make two cars. The best they can do is trade 4 shirts for one car, leaving them with two shirts and a car, one shirt less than if they had split the labor and traded nothing!
Now, let's give Trinidad a spinning wheel, thereby lifting it out of poverty. Now the 10 people of Trinidad can make 2 cars or 20 shirts (or one car and 10 shirts). Clearly, then, they can produce enough shirts for themselves and meet their own needs with enough left over for trade with China. However, 10 Chinese cars cost 20 manyears worth of work... the equivalent of 33.3 shirts. Their dream of a car on every beach is close, yet so far...
But then disaster strikes! Global warming has caused the silkworm to evolve to grow a thicker and more insulated cocoon, made from silk that is no longer quite as suitable for shirts as before. Now, the 600,000,000 people producing shirts are only able to make 800,000,000 shirts (three peopleyears per four shirts). The people of Trinidad think they have finally gotten their lucky break, only to have their trading convoy turned away at the border. Why? Because increased shirt demand has roused 150,000,000 of the unemployed from their wistful reverie, and they spring into action to produce the remaining 200,000,000 shirts needed to clothe China. Trinidad, hoping to capitalize on a shortage discovers that their 10 extra shirts are still only worth the 7.5 peopleyears of work it would have taken China to produce them, and they go home with 3 cars.
What happens in the Comparative Advantage world when some goods are less equal than others? What happens if a country cannot produce enough to support itself alone? What happens when an enormous country has a giant reserve of untapped resources, so that no matter what it chooses to produce, it has no opportunity cost? If I was a little less bored, I could have come up with numbers so that no matter what happened, they could never trade enough surplus shirts for cars to beat their own production.
Come up with a real fucking model example of trade being bad done.
because of the properties of ICE vs Liquid Water the melting of the Artic ice sheet actually lowers water world wide..
Errr... WHAT?
Time to do the math again, I guess. Every now and then this bit of ugly science rears its ugly head.
Useful numbers:
Density of Seawater: 1025kg/m^3.
Density of Freshwater: 1000kg/m^3 (rounded up from 999.98 at freezing point)
Density of Ice: 916kg/m^3 [same source].
Things to know:
The vast majority of icebergs are not frozen seawater, they break off from land glaciers and float out to sea.
Buoyancy tells us that X will float in Y if X displaces a volume of Y where the mass of the displaced volume equals the mass of X.
Hollowed out shapes can contain more volume than a solid block of mass (this is why metal boats float).
So, lets say we have a solid, convex iceberg floating in an ocean ever so slightly above freezing, consisting of exactly 1025kg of ice right about to melt. To float, this iceberg must displace 1025kg of saltwater, which by sheer coincidence is exactly one cubic meter. Thus, when this iceberg broke off the glacier and fell into the water, the sea level increased by the height of one cubic meter spread out really thin across the entire surface. If you lifted the iceberg out without letting it melt, that one cubic meter would come back and fill the hole where it was.
Naturally, the sea being ever so slightly above freezing and the ice being ever so slightly below, the ice absorbs heat from the ocean and melts. Thanks to wonderful conservation of mass, we know we now have 1025kg of fresh water at ever so slightly above freezing, with a density of 1000kg/m^3. Thus, we have 1.025 cubic meters of fresh water to fill that 1 cubic meter hole where the iceberg used to be.
So because the iceberg fell into the ocean and melted, the sea level is now 1.025 cubic meters (spread out real thin over the entire ocean) higher than it used to be. Even if the ice started in the ocean (as in the Arctic), it's still 0.025 cubic meters high! It gets worse if the ice is sitting on the bottom of the ocean (then there is more ice than displaced water)! Even if you assume that the seawater is less dense in the Arctic (a fallacy, as the freezing action actually increases the saline content of the water around the ice), as long as the density of the seawater is greater than the density of the water you get from melting the ice (almost always freshwater), you will get an increase in sea level from melting the ice.
Incidentially, arctic ice is not all frozen seawater, much of it is from precipitation falling on top of the frozen seawater, so you can't even claim that the water in the ice came directly from the ocean in the first place (not that that claim would really help any, because that water has been locked up for thousands and thousands of years, returning it to water would definitely raise the ocean level beyond anything in written history). Plus, once the water is liquid and continues to heat, it will continue to expand: at 30C freshwater is only 995.65kg/m^3.
Since I whipped out the math anyway, 1025kg of ice is 1025kg*(1m^3/916kg)=1.119 m^3. Since it's solid and convex we know that there must be 0.119 m^3 of ice above sea level. This shows that roughly 10% of the 1.119 m^3 of ice is above sea level, thereby supporting the old adage that 9/10 of the iceberg is below the waterline.
There has never been a time in the history of the world where it was easier to start your own business.
Less than 15 percent of all full-time, licensed businesses fail in the first year. About a third of all new businesses close their doors in the first three years.
Wow, history sure did suck.
You might want to study "comparative advantage" some more, then.
For instance, comparative advantage only applies to economies running full tilt, pedal to the metal, maximum capacity. If you've got unused capacity, that's capacity that could be making more products and changing your advantage. If you've got a billion people and only 90% of them are employed, you've got 100 million people you have to employ before you can start talking about your comparative advantage. This is because comparative advantage is actually a study of opportunity costs. If you can make either A or B, then making A has an opportunity cost of not making B, and the "comparative advantage" comes from minimizing that opportunity cost.
Comparative Advantage also requires that the countries involved are able to provide a surplus in at least one good. Let's pick some tiny country at random, say... Trinidad. Let's claim Trinidad has 10 people, and they all want cars. Those 10 people working together can make 6 cars a year. They'd all like shirts too, and those 10 people working together can make 6 shirts a year. If they work half and half, they can make 3 cars and 3 shirts. No matter what Trinidad does, they can neither clothe everyone nor can everyone have a car.
Now, let's take China. China has a billion people. The richest want cars, so lets say they want 60,000 cars. China has more space and resources for factories, so with 200,000 people, they can make 60,000 cars. China also has silk and other resources for clothing, and with 600,000 people they can make a billion shirts. This leaves 200,000 unemployed people.
What can Trinidad do to trade with China to meet their needs? "I'll trade you 6 cars for 10 cars and 10 shirts"? Does that even make sense? Even if they could produce 11 cars and 6 shirts, if they went to China and said "I need 4 shirts, do you want a car?", China would simply employ another 50000 people and have their own car without paying any opportunity cost, as it would not affect their shirt production at all.
Wait, I thought we were talking about the money going to the low wage countries, not countries with wages even higher than the US (partially because of very high taxes)?
The rich get richer...
If they want to control what their employees do with their computer, then they should prevent the employees from installing any software that has not been pre-approved and probably also pre-configured.
It is not Google's fault that the CIO did not take "draconian" measures to prevent people from installing software that did "bad" things. If it wasn't google desktop, it would have been kazaa with C: shared or any of a myriad of other programs and trojans.
and can be done decades ahead of any commercialization or colonization.
See, here's the problem. We see it now with people patenting things they could never accomplish, paying a few thousand dollars in application and lawyer fees to obtain the property rights to things they'll never actually own.
Property rights in advance is foolish, stupid, dumb, idiotic, and any number of other names you can assign. Do you know why the Gold Rush was a Rush? Because people could go west and stake out a plot of land and own it. Do you want to know how to kill the Space Rush? Sell me 3554 Amun for a million dollars, so I can sit tight here and wait for someone to bring it back for me.
You want to see a space race? "Whoever sets foot there first, wins."
yes, but at the practice I go to they already have Chinese/English speaking doctors, as well as several others who are multilingual, which works fine.
For most clinics, it probably is more along the lines of "cool toy" than "useful tool" but with the number of languages it supports, I could see it being more useful in a downtown clinic in a big city like New York when someone who speaks Chinese comes in and all you've got on hand is English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Russian.
Personally, I'm surprised that they went to the trouble of having it translate to sign language, when with a display, wouldn't it have been easier to simply print the text in the language of choice?
What does it argue for? Is it an argument against something? What does it argue against?
Sorry, I wasn't aware that factual statements had to be arguments for or against anything.
I'm not the original poster so I cannot speak for him, but it appears to me that the original poster's point seems to be that he's losing the argument and needs to change the subject quick.
You, in turn, created a template fom his sentences and asked what it meant. I simply took the template you created, and plugged in a few more names as one would a function. In doing so, I discovered that the lessons history teaches us do not bode well for the outcome of this "war" (or whatever you and the other guy want to call it). The administration has not shown any evidence or shared any information with us to explain its apparent belief that this time, it will be different. That was my point, and that is what I believe the statement that "person XYZ was once associated with the US in some way and turned out bad" means.
What does "person XYZ was once associated with the US in some way and turned out bad" mean?
What does "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" mean? Can you name one government that we were involved in that turned out just peachy keen fine? Japan might be the best off, but now that we've taken away its military, North Korea's been lobbing their dummy missiles at it for shits and giggles while we're busy elsewhere. The Philippines would be my second choice, though I don't see anyone calling for the kind of scorched earth campaign and killing hundreds of thousands of men and boys (iirc, the famous order was "kill everyone over 10") that it took to get the Philippines under control, probably because levelling everything failed in Vietnam. I suppose South Korea's doing fine enough, even if they do share a border with an insane nuclear powered dictator, they aren't glowing rubble yet. Most of the people we propped up in South America are now either running for their lives or held democratic elections and got replaced by cocaine growers. The history of the Middle East is basically the history of Western failure since at least the time of the Crusades, though the page about the US supporting Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and even bin Laden has a picture captioned "this is the US, smacking the hornet's nest again and again and again".
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again... and expecting a different result." - Albert Einstein. What do you think that means?
or they might want to buy out your ports or anything
On the other hand, the UAE buyout of our ports as a security concern is a xenophobic strawman. Port security is maintained by the Coast Guard, so at the current rate (budget is up 8% from last year, which beats inflation), assuming that the budget increase yields an improvement in Coast Guard capability, security should improve this year.