Increasingly, it looks like the U.S. is a republic in name only. These groups spend money on advertising because they believe it's effective and they are probably right. Effectively, the United States is allowing it's wealthiest citizens to buy the laws they favor.
Cutting back on government power will in turn cut back on corporate influence in government.
Only in so far as corporations will be making the rules instead of government. In some situations that might work out well. In many, probably most situations, it would range from poor to disastrous.
Yes, it's a business decision, but I'm not sure you've got the reason correct. I don't think multiplayer appeals to more than 50% of the audience. However, multiplayer is trivially "sticky" which means by spending a little time adding multiplayer you can keep people who do buy your game playing longer and talking about your game for longer. If people are playing longer that means you have a longer sales window before used copies start seriously competing with new copies of the game. If people are talking about it for longer you sell more copies as well.
It's a very good strategy for companies like EA which produce very similar games year after year because it doesn't require much creativity to create new iterations.
I know, just imagine a world where the U.S., Canada and Russia are among the most powerful countries in the world. Maybe they could form a group with a few friends and call it the G8 or something. Nah, that's just silly. They should call it the Arctic Superfriends League.
1) Warming is slow but steady. 2) Years are highly variable with several multi-year cycles. 3) Pretty much every year since 1995 has been warmer than 1995. 4) The statement there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995 hasn't been true since 1995. 5) 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record.
Scientific research shows that, for example, wearing a cycling helmet makes no difference. A helmet will not protect you in a serious accident and the slight increase in the risk taking behaviour you engage in by wearing one balances out the benefit you'd get from it, when compared to not wearing one when you're in a minor accident.
Actually, as I understand, scientific research shows that wearing a helmet has a tremendous benefit in prevent the sorts of injuries that leave people brain damaged for the rest of their lives. Apparently they reduce mortality rates by around 33%. The whole "you'll take more risks" thing sounds like neo-conservative pablum dolled out by idiots who care more about ratings than facts.
Actually, I have serious doubts that it is a crime. Mann's claim is that he wrote or co-wrote those papers, which he did. The people who made the grant are supposed to have enough brains to determine whether the papers have merit.
So what we have is a retired guy who worked as a mining analyst and an accused plagiarist against an accused fraudster and a lot of scientists. I don't think your argument from authority is as strong as you think it is.
The primary reason that I think it would be unethical is that it is being sold as a service primarily (exclusively?) to people who are buying a new PS3. Most of those customers probably don't know that the update is available for free and is very painless to install. If that is not made clear to the customer at the time of purchase then it could be considered deceptive advertising or maybe even fraudulent service.
If they are being clear about this being an entirely optional service and that you can download and install updates for free, there may be some value in the service because there are still some people who don't have internet, don't want to connect a game console to their internet connection, or don't know how to do that.
The central question is how they are promoting the service. Which, in all fairness, may depend more on the manager at each Best Buy than corporate policy.
"In eight years, we would have normally replaced them as part of normal activity," he said. "All these signs would have definitely come down." -- Seth Solomonow, spokesman for the city's Department of Transportation.
Because you know if they would have replaced all of the signs anyway in the next 8 years then it sounds like the cost is probably a lot less than $27 million, thus my "strawman" claim that $27 million might actually be close to the budget that's already allocated for sign replacement. How crazy of me, to infer that there might already be money allocated to replace signs that are scheduled to be replaced anyway. Of course, Mr. Solomonow could be lying, but I don't see a good reason to believe that.
However, I do apologize for the error I made in my previous post, it's estimated to cost $110 per sign not $1000 as I previously wrote (typed one too many zeros).
Yes, yes, it's a rule, so it must be done. Period.
That just points up the stupidity of the rules. Here's a novel idea: save $27 million by changing the rules.
Well, they actually do have to follow the rules, and while we could change the rules there seems to be pretty good reasoning behind the rules. Large, reflective, mixed case, with a good font signs are easier to read. This actually reduces the amount of attention that must be diverted by the driver to navigate and in the end reduces collisions caused by that distraction.
Of course, changing the rules arbitrarily could cost even more money, because then those people who are already in compliance would need to change to reflect the new rules.
And even more importantly, $27 million dollars sounds like it's the regular budget (or very close to) that the city spends on replacing signs anyway, and this is $27 million over 8 years so it's more than $3.5 million a year to replace signs.
Now that still does sound a little expensive for sign replacement. However, at ~35,000 signs a year, that's $1000 a sign to replace each sign including the cost of the sign. At this point, I don't know how that compares to replacement costs in other cities, and I'm not interested enough in being judgemental to bother trying to look that up.
The summary is (not so) subtly biased by injecting the sardonic "Having no other issues on the table" which is missing from the original article, and I think both the reporter and their source did themselves a disservice by not identifying clearly how much the price differential is between the old signs and new signs, if there even is one. The article would have been better if the journalist had mentioned that the signs would have been replaced anyway.
Maybe it's time to change my signature to "For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong."
Actually, it appeared to me that Honeyball was making a not-very-clear argument for internal firewalls to segregated departments and network segments. I think his primary point was that if you have to choose between segregating the network segments with internal firewalls or managing firewalls on desktops, you should probably choose segmentation.
But that's just what I read into the meandering article.
Yeah, when I read this, my first response was "What again?". I mean seriously, Microsoft was saying Blu Ray was dead before it was released. They won't stop saying it until even the gullible tech writers laugh at them for saying it or Blu Ray is actually dead, whichever comes first.
Actually, I think some earlier posts adequately demonstrated that there are, in fact, huge costs to using downloaded media. The thing is the costs are hidden and won't be paid upfront. By eliminating the resale market for movies and games, it will reduce competition and cut out video rental stores, game stores, and used movie and music stores. Everyone should understand that reduced competition almost always results in higher prices. That's not even taking into account the intangible costs of potential loss of freedoms.
Of course not. This is just one in dozens, if not hundreds of little actions to to move the government to the right. They've muzzled scientists, they muzzled our ambassadors who are no longer allowed to use the words "child" and "soldier" in the same sentence, lest it be used to refer to Omar Khadr. This a government that wants Canadians to be afraid to travel, so they literally refuse to help Canadians over seas if they run into trouble. This is a government that instructed it's member to have no dealings with opposition MPs on comittees. This is a government that has muzzled it's own MPs. They engineered a leave of absence for a pro-registry police chief to make sure he wouldn't be around to give his opinion when the issue came up. They've held back a government report from publication obstensibly "because we already know what it contains" when, in fact, it contains new information that directly contradicts the goverment's line on the long gun registry. This is a government that takes credit for policies they attempted to dismantle, that takes credit for good fiscal management when it has yet to do any. A government that tax cut and spent it's way into a deficit before the 2008 recession and then attempted to refuse to engage in any stimulus spending. When the opposition parties force the governments hand on it, they funnelled funds to ridings that voted conservative almost 2 to 1 over opposition ridings. This is government that has repeated refused to provide information it was required to present to Parliament on the grounds that Parliament couldn't be trusted with the information. I'm sure there are many more instances that I have neglected to list. A govenment that tried to cut funding for political parties because at that moment they had more money than the other parties. This is a disgraceful, conniving government that seeks one thing and only one thing: more power.
The Conservatives don't want to destroy society, merely tame it and make themselves our permanent masters. And to that end they're willing to blind and cripple society if it'll give them an advantage. Frankly, some costs are too great, and any decent man should have greater concerns that just the accumulation of power. Harper is not, by my measure, a decent man. It's sad. When he was first elected leader of the CPC, I had high hopes for him.
Doubtful, it's part of a patten of tightly controlling information. After all if you were going to dictate what these scientists were allowed to publish, first you would have to make sure they're not allowed to talk about that to the media. Frankly the Conservative Party of Canada is a lot like the Republican party. They've become an anti-fact, anti-truth party that likes to drive wedge issues to convince dumb or apathetic voters to vote against their actual interests over some inflammatory issue of the moment. They're slowly ripping the mechanism of government apart to appease their anti-tax, anti-government supporters and trying to stomp out opposition and free thought wherever they can within the government services.
They're even trying to set up their own Canadian version of Fox News.
Sorry, but that's not really it. The Prime Minister is silencing them because they might talk to the media about things he doesn't want them talking about. It's part of a pattern of hamfisted control freak behaviour. I mean most of the ministers that Harper has appointed aren't allowed to talk to the media without his direct approval of what they're to talk about and when they are allowed, they're given a script to memorize before hand. Only 1 or 2 of his most favoured cronies are allowed the freedom to speak the media without heavy censorship.
Maybe, but Fred Pierce at the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/02/hacked-climate-emails-flaws-peer-review) says the reviewers rejected it, and if you read the cited article from Wikipedia you might have noticed that Clare Goodess wrote this:
"The review process had apparently been correct, but a fundamentally flawed paper had been published. These flaws are described in an extended rebuttal to both Soon and Baliunas (2003) and Soon et al. (2003) published by Mike Mann and 11 other eminent climate scientists in July (Mann et al., 2003). Hans von Storch and I were also aware of three earlier Climate Research papers about which people had raised concerns over the review process. In all these cases, de Freitas had had editorial responsibility."
It appears that de Freitas was able to conceal the fact that the reviewers recommended rejecting the paper until some time after Goodess wrote that article in 2003.
Well it was reviewed, and the 4 recommendations that it be rejected based on egregious errors in methodology were ignored and it was published anyway.
"These scientists" didn't fight the publication, they didn't find out about the paper until after it had been published. In fact, at first they had planned to simply to let it pass. It wasn't until the Bush Administration attempted to force the use of the paper in EPA reports against the wishes of the authors of those very same reports that they decided they had to take action to correct the record.
You know what they did? They wrote a report enumerating all the problems with the paper and presented it to the editorial board. The chief editor, von Storch, a moderate sceptic of Global Warming then wrote an editorial admitting the paper should never have been published. The publisher refused to print the retraction and half the editorial board, including the chief editor resigned in protest. After the mass resignation the publisher relented and retracted the paper.
So, in the end, a climate sceptic forced the retraction of the paper, one who did not have any dealings with the CRU other than reading their complaint and had in fact opposed them previously. It just doesn't look at all like "suppressing dissent", however, it does look a lot like correcting an error.
Seriously? You're complaining that a bunch of scientists publically terminated their relationships with a journal that allowed a rogue editor to publish un-reviewed nonsense? That's you're smoking gun?
It's not only not sinister that they did so, it was their duty to do so. When a journal tarnishes it's reputation, it gets dropped by any self-respecting scientist. You don't cite unreliable sources in your work, and you don't publish to unreliable publishers. They did exactly what they're supposed to do in this position, the problem is you are only looking at one half of the story. The poor, poor, journal that the mean scientists picked on by refusing to include in their scientist games, huh?
Your signature calls into question the credibility of your thought processes, in general and in particular on partisan political questions. As an official partisan with a history of arguing against the facts, you're pretty much confirming that it is in fact happening, you'd just rather it wasn't.
I think Obama might have busy dealing with a few other issues. You know, I think there might have been something about health care and financial regulations.... I've heard it's hard to simultaneously fix everything.
Actually storing excess energy isn't that hard, I suspect most of the power conglomerates in the U.S. already do it. I did some contract work for Georgia's power conglomerates and they already store excess energy using a hydroelectric system (at low demand times excess energy is used to pump water into reservoirs, at high demand times the water is released). It may be a pain to do, but it's already being done and I'm sure new ways of storing and releasing electricity can be invented.
One of the easiest ways to incorporate solar energy into a strategy for fossil fuel use reduction is putting solar cells on the roofs of homes. So all those miles and miles of suburbs could be at least partially powered by solar energy.
Of course, the problem is that any effort to work in that direction would reduce the profits of corporations who generate electricity by reducing demand and therefore market price.
Slashdot Mirror
You spelled "plutocracy" incorrectly.
Increasingly, it looks like the U.S. is a republic in name only. These groups spend money on advertising because they believe it's effective and they are probably right. Effectively, the United States is allowing it's wealthiest citizens to buy the laws they favor.
Cutting back on government power will in turn cut back on corporate influence in government.
Only in so far as corporations will be making the rules instead of government. In some situations that might work out well. In many, probably most situations, it would range from poor to disastrous.
Yes, it's a business decision, but I'm not sure you've got the reason correct. I don't think multiplayer appeals to more than 50% of the audience. However, multiplayer is trivially "sticky" which means by spending a little time adding multiplayer you can keep people who do buy your game playing longer and talking about your game for longer. If people are playing longer that means you have a longer sales window before used copies start seriously competing with new copies of the game. If people are talking about it for longer you sell more copies as well.
It's a very good strategy for companies like EA which produce very similar games year after year because it doesn't require much creativity to create new iterations.
I know, just imagine a world where the U.S., Canada and Russia are among the most powerful countries in the world. Maybe they could form a group with a few friends and call it the G8 or something. Nah, that's just silly. They should call it the Arctic Superfriends League.
Let's put this simply so you can understand:
1) Warming is slow but steady.
2) Years are highly variable with several multi-year cycles.
3) Pretty much every year since 1995 has been warmer than 1995.
4) The statement there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995 hasn't been true since 1995.
5) 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record.
That's just a few quick notes on what's wrong with what you said you can get more in-depth explanations here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998.htm
Scientific research shows that, for example, wearing a cycling helmet makes no difference. A helmet will not protect you in a serious accident and the slight increase in the risk taking behaviour you engage in by wearing one balances out the benefit you'd get from it, when compared to not wearing one when you're in a minor accident.
Actually, as I understand, scientific research shows that wearing a helmet has a tremendous benefit in prevent the sorts of injuries that leave people brain damaged for the rest of their lives. Apparently they reduce mortality rates by around 33%. The whole "you'll take more risks" thing sounds like neo-conservative pablum dolled out by idiots who care more about ratings than facts.
Here's some links to educate yourself:
http://www.helmets.org/stats.htm
http://www.bhsi.org/henderso.htm
Fortunately, the kill-bots reset and go into passive mode once they've each killed 999,999 humans.
Actually, I have serious doubts that it is a crime. Mann's claim is that he wrote or co-wrote those papers, which he did. The people who made the grant are supposed to have enough brains to determine whether the papers have merit.
Hmm. Isn't Wegman under investigation for plagiarism?
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/10/old_claims_of_bad_climate_scie.html
So what we have is a retired guy who worked as a mining analyst and an accused plagiarist against an accused fraudster and a lot of scientists. I don't think your argument from authority is as strong as you think it is.
The primary reason that I think it would be unethical is that it is being sold as a service primarily (exclusively?) to people who are buying a new PS3. Most of those customers probably don't know that the update is available for free and is very painless to install. If that is not made clear to the customer at the time of purchase then it could be considered deceptive advertising or maybe even fraudulent service.
If they are being clear about this being an entirely optional service and that you can download and install updates for free, there may be some value in the service because there are still some people who don't have internet, don't want to connect a game console to their internet connection, or don't know how to do that.
The central question is how they are promoting the service. Which, in all fairness, may depend more on the manager at each Best Buy than corporate policy.
Yeah, I didn't cite a source for it. I just went off what this article (which someone else linked to below this comment in threaded view) says:
http://www.newschannel34.com/news/state/story/NYC-replacing-street-signs-to-meet-new-mandate/INaR6Gu2r0Cm-0FrjsyXLA.cspx
"In eight years, we would have normally replaced them as part of normal activity," he said. "All these signs would have definitely come down." -- Seth Solomonow, spokesman for the city's Department of Transportation.
Because you know if they would have replaced all of the signs anyway in the next 8 years then it sounds like the cost is probably a lot less than $27 million, thus my "strawman" claim that $27 million might actually be close to the budget that's already allocated for sign replacement. How crazy of me, to infer that there might already be money allocated to replace signs that are scheduled to be replaced anyway. Of course, Mr. Solomonow could be lying, but I don't see a good reason to believe that.
However, I do apologize for the error I made in my previous post, it's estimated to cost $110 per sign not $1000 as I previously wrote (typed one too many zeros).
Yes, yes, it's a rule, so it must be done. Period.
That just points up the stupidity of the rules. Here's a novel idea: save $27 million by changing the rules.
Well, they actually do have to follow the rules, and while we could change the rules there seems to be pretty good reasoning behind the rules. Large, reflective, mixed case, with a good font signs are easier to read. This actually reduces the amount of attention that must be diverted by the driver to navigate and in the end reduces collisions caused by that distraction.
Of course, changing the rules arbitrarily could cost even more money, because then those people who are already in compliance would need to change to reflect the new rules.
And even more importantly, $27 million dollars sounds like it's the regular budget (or very close to) that the city spends on replacing signs anyway, and this is $27 million over 8 years so it's more than $3.5 million a year to replace signs.
Now that still does sound a little expensive for sign replacement. However, at ~35,000 signs a year, that's $1000 a sign to replace each sign including the cost of the sign. At this point, I don't know how that compares to replacement costs in other cities, and I'm not interested enough in being judgemental to bother trying to look that up.
The summary is (not so) subtly biased by injecting the sardonic "Having no other issues on the table" which is missing from the original article, and I think both the reporter and their source did themselves a disservice by not identifying clearly how much the price differential is between the old signs and new signs, if there even is one. The article would have been better if the journalist had mentioned that the signs would have been replaced anyway.
Maybe it's time to change my signature to "For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong."
Actually, it appeared to me that Honeyball was making a not-very-clear argument for internal firewalls to segregated departments and network segments. I think his primary point was that if you have to choose between segregating the network segments with internal firewalls or managing firewalls on desktops, you should probably choose segmentation.
But that's just what I read into the meandering article.
Yeah, when I read this, my first response was "What again?". I mean seriously, Microsoft was saying Blu Ray was dead before it was released. They won't stop saying it until even the gullible tech writers laugh at them for saying it or Blu Ray is actually dead, whichever comes first.
Actually, I think some earlier posts adequately demonstrated that there are, in fact, huge costs to using downloaded media. The thing is the costs are hidden and won't be paid upfront. By eliminating the resale market for movies and games, it will reduce competition and cut out video rental stores, game stores, and used movie and music stores. Everyone should understand that reduced competition almost always results in higher prices. That's not even taking into account the intangible costs of potential loss of freedoms.
Of course not. This is just one in dozens, if not hundreds of little actions to to move the government to the right. They've muzzled scientists, they muzzled our ambassadors who are no longer allowed to use the words "child" and "soldier" in the same sentence, lest it be used to refer to Omar Khadr. This a government that wants Canadians to be afraid to travel, so they literally refuse to help Canadians over seas if they run into trouble. This is a government that instructed it's member to have no dealings with opposition MPs on comittees. This is a government that has muzzled it's own MPs. They engineered a leave of absence for a pro-registry police chief to make sure he wouldn't be around to give his opinion when the issue came up. They've held back a government report from publication obstensibly "because we already know what it contains" when, in fact, it contains new information that directly contradicts the goverment's line on the long gun registry. This is a government that takes credit for policies they attempted to dismantle, that takes credit for good fiscal management when it has yet to do any. A government that tax cut and spent it's way into a deficit before the 2008 recession and then attempted to refuse to engage in any stimulus spending. When the opposition parties force the governments hand on it, they funnelled funds to ridings that voted conservative almost 2 to 1 over opposition ridings. This is government that has repeated refused to provide information it was required to present to Parliament on the grounds that Parliament couldn't be trusted with the information. I'm sure there are many more instances that I have neglected to list. A govenment that tried to cut funding for political parties because at that moment they had more money than the other parties. This is a disgraceful, conniving government that seeks one thing and only one thing: more power.
The Conservatives don't want to destroy society, merely tame it and make themselves our permanent masters. And to that end they're willing to blind and cripple society if it'll give them an advantage. Frankly, some costs are too great, and any decent man should have greater concerns that just the accumulation of power. Harper is not, by my measure, a decent man. It's sad. When he was first elected leader of the CPC, I had high hopes for him.
Doubtful, it's part of a patten of tightly controlling information. After all if you were going to dictate what these scientists were allowed to publish, first you would have to make sure they're not allowed to talk about that to the media. Frankly the Conservative Party of Canada is a lot like the Republican party. They've become an anti-fact, anti-truth party that likes to drive wedge issues to convince dumb or apathetic voters to vote against their actual interests over some inflammatory issue of the moment. They're slowly ripping the mechanism of government apart to appease their anti-tax, anti-government supporters and trying to stomp out opposition and free thought wherever they can within the government services.
They're even trying to set up their own Canadian version of Fox News.
Sorry, but that's not really it. The Prime Minister is silencing them because they might talk to the media about things he doesn't want them talking about. It's part of a pattern of hamfisted control freak behaviour. I mean most of the ministers that Harper has appointed aren't allowed to talk to the media without his direct approval of what they're to talk about and when they are allowed, they're given a script to memorize before hand. Only 1 or 2 of his most favoured cronies are allowed the freedom to speak the media without heavy censorship.
Maybe, but Fred Pierce at the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/02/hacked-climate-emails-flaws-peer-review) says the reviewers rejected it, and if you read the cited article from Wikipedia you might have noticed that Clare Goodess wrote this:
"The review process had apparently been correct, but a fundamentally flawed paper had been published. These flaws are described in an extended rebuttal to both Soon and Baliunas (2003) and Soon et al. (2003) published by Mike Mann and 11 other eminent climate scientists in July (Mann et al., 2003). Hans von Storch and I were also aware of three earlier Climate Research papers about which people had raised concerns over the review process. In all these cases, de Freitas had had editorial responsibility."
It appears that de Freitas was able to conceal the fact that the reviewers recommended rejecting the paper until some time after Goodess wrote that article in 2003.
Well it was reviewed, and the 4 recommendations that it be rejected based on egregious errors in methodology were ignored and it was published anyway.
"These scientists" didn't fight the publication, they didn't find out about the paper until after it had been published. In fact, at first they had planned to simply to let it pass. It wasn't until the Bush Administration attempted to force the use of the paper in EPA reports against the wishes of the authors of those very same reports that they decided they had to take action to correct the record.
You know what they did? They wrote a report enumerating all the problems with the paper and presented it to the editorial board. The chief editor, von Storch, a moderate sceptic of Global Warming then wrote an editorial admitting the paper should never have been published. The publisher refused to print the retraction and half the editorial board, including the chief editor resigned in protest. After the mass resignation the publisher relented and retracted the paper.
So, in the end, a climate sceptic forced the retraction of the paper, one who did not have any dealings with the CRU other than reading their complaint and had in fact opposed them previously.
It just doesn't look at all like "suppressing dissent", however, it does look a lot like correcting an error.
Seriously? You're complaining that a bunch of scientists publically terminated their relationships with a journal that allowed a rogue editor to publish un-reviewed nonsense? That's you're smoking gun?
It's not only not sinister that they did so, it was their duty to do so. When a journal tarnishes it's reputation, it gets dropped by any self-respecting scientist. You don't cite unreliable sources in your work, and you don't publish to unreliable publishers. They did exactly what they're supposed to do in this position, the problem is you are only looking at one half of the story. The poor, poor, journal that the mean scientists picked on by refusing to include in their scientist games, huh?
Your signature calls into question the credibility of your thought processes, in general and in particular on partisan political questions. As an official partisan with a history of arguing against the facts, you're pretty much confirming that it is in fact happening, you'd just rather it wasn't.
I think Obama might have busy dealing with a few other issues. You know, I think there might have been something about health care and financial regulations.... I've heard it's hard to simultaneously fix everything.
Actually storing excess energy isn't that hard, I suspect most of the power conglomerates in the U.S. already do it. I did some contract work for Georgia's power conglomerates and they already store excess energy using a hydroelectric system (at low demand times excess energy is used to pump water into reservoirs, at high demand times the water is released). It may be a pain to do, but it's already being done and I'm sure new ways of storing and releasing electricity can be invented.
One of the easiest ways to incorporate solar energy into a strategy for fossil fuel use reduction is putting solar cells on the roofs of homes. So all those miles and miles of suburbs could be at least partially powered by solar energy.
Of course, the problem is that any effort to work in that direction would reduce the profits of corporations who generate electricity by reducing demand and therefore market price.