That would be nice. We've got two DVRs in our house. When I measured them on the killowatt, I found that they pull about 50 watts on or off. That's stupid. Even if they need to listen for programming changes, they should be able to spin down the drive or reduce the cpu clock or something.
I've taken to turning one of them off at night by pulling the plug (via power strip switch). Takes a while to warm up in the morning, but I don't care. But this 50 watts an hour is costing me $15/month per DVR at California's top rate of $0.46 per KWh. It's enough for me to seriously consider cutting my DirecTV subscription entirely.
And money. God awe full amounts of money. What ever they say it will cost, double or triple it. And double the schedule as well.
CA voters recently approved $10B in bonds for high speed rail. I'm pretty sure most of them didn't read the part about how paying those bonds off was going to cost $20B over thirty years. Nor did they likely read that the entire project was estimated to cost $55B. Triple that to $165B and ask how many passengers will it take to make that project worthwhile?
WA State had a light rail project back in the 80s that was supposed to extend from SeaTac to Everett. Most of the State voted no. They went forward anyway, choosing to tax a subset of the State to fund it. Years later, the train runs from Tacoma to Seattle, not quite the distance necessary. Cost overruns and several thousand passengers per day. At an investment cost of $400,000 per regular passenger.
I understand that the concept of high-speed travel between L.A. and S.F. is nice, but we already have planes and airports. And cars and roads for those of us who don't approve of the invasion of privacy required. These sort of public works projects that benefit few at an extraordinary cost to the many seem very wasteful and wrong-headed.
As for high-speed trains, they are able to travel 200mph due to extremely smooth and straight railways. If we put that sort of accuracy and stability into our freeway systems, along with long on/off ramps and appropriate barriers to prevent oncoming collisions, we could vastly increase the speeds on our interstates and cut down travel times in all directions. It just takes the will to act to benefit all of us.
Upmod parent to eleven, please. This was what I wanted to post.
Forget the shock that they want to track our locations. Forget that we already pay a road-use-tax via gasoline which is already levied more towards high mass inefficient vehicles than the low-mass efficient methods of travel. Let's focus our shock and outrage on the very idea that our government has evolved to the point where it cannot even propose a law without first undertaking a study funded by taxes which would otherwise employ several hundred people for a full year.
These are supposed to be our representatives. Unless you and a lot of other people I don't know have been calling them asking for more taxes on road use... preferably tracked by vehicle mile, they shouldn't be proposing this junk at all. As noted in the top post, the beneficiaries here are corporations. I suspect that the proposed study would be bid out to these same corporations to conclude that yes, it does seem to be a good idea.
We need to vote out every incumbent now. Turn over the entire cart and start fresh with no tolerance for this junk anymore.
Sounds like a good reason to move to [Sweden]. But here in the USA, our government is full of bureaucrats that do nothing but fuck things up. Everything they touch goes to crap. The quality goes to crap, the quantities go to crap and the prices go up and up and up.
The idea of giving our bureaucrats MORE taxes in the interest of fixing things is sheer lunacy.
Try this: ran iphone through clothes washer on accident for 30 minutes. Diagnosis: Completely Dead. Disassembled, immediately desoldered battery, separated logic boards, cleaned with sonicare toothbrush and vinegar followed by distilled water, blown dry with compressed air, reassembled, functional but screen has artifacts from water, return to apple store and claim ignorance, kids took it and probably got it wet, yea, that's the story. Thank the wonderful apple genius who cheerfully exchanges it gratis under apple care warranty and go home.
On the flip side, this was my seventh iphone. The first six failed in different ways for purely manufacturing defects. This latest one is still going strong and will probably survive the end of my apple care contract, which was obviously money well spent for such a fragile device.
By encoding the allowance to block illegal content, they provide a "reasonable" provision that no one in their right mind would disagree with and set the stage for all future battles. We already lost to the DMCA which declared quite a bit of information and sharing thereof illegal. That could be blocked. Next, we'll see anti-P2P legislation and then they can block all those protocols and ports. Then you can look at the illegal devices and please note Apple is trying to turn an unlocked iPhone into an illegal device so your hacked tivo or homebrewed mythtv is suddenly blockable.
This doesn't give us net neutrality, it just pacifies us while moving the game into the lobbyists hands.
Cables are a pain, but the real eyesore is cables going off in all different directions. Add the tripping hazard for your feet and accidentally unplugging something while you are working... or your kid does that while playing hide and seek under your desk... I have a simple solution: Zip Ties
That's right. Zip Ties.
Not velcro. Kids can undo velcro far too easily. Use zip ties to bundle your cables together every foot or so and secure them to table legs or what-not. Takes care of routing, tripping hazards and can even allow enough slack to remain on your desk for your mouse and keyboard. Extra lengths can be folded up and zip tied. Zip ties are cheap. A pair of dykes makes it really easy to remove them and redo.
As for all those power adapters sucking power when not in use, get a kill-o-watt meter and you'll find out what I did when I ganged up ten chargers on a large power-strip. Unused, they were sucking down two (2) watts total. Change ONE lightbulb to CFL and you've saved more power in a year than you will ever save over the life of all your current devices idle draw.
What is really amusing about this new hands free California law is that like other driving laws, the cops seem more than willing to ignore it whenever it pleases them. Sure, we had a month of people not using their phones while driving, but the fad has passed and now that talk and text just like before. The cops however never paused for a second.
Disclaimer: I'm generally against any nanny state laws since I really don't need someone else telling me what to do or how to behave. I prefer laws defining consequences for actions that affect others in a measurable way. As I've said elsewhere: driving distracted shouldn't be a crime, but causing an accident should be punished appropriately, more severely if you kill someone, and even more severely if we can prove you were being negligent at the time.
You know, the market has been speculating that without Jobs, Apple will fall apart and the parade of cool products will grind to a halt. Like it did back in the 80s and 90s when Scully was president. In that regard, Jobs provides thousands of people with JOBS, income, health care, etc.
I bet you would be hard pressed to find another person on the list more deserving on that scale.
Forgetting that, supposing that he bought his way to the top of a transplant list, where do you think that money went? Some black market organ dealer? Or as a size able donation to a hospital that provides health care to thousands of people? I'm just speculating here based on the press release from the hospital, but if his money allowed him to benefit by providing ongoing benefits to many, many others...
I bet you would be hard pressed to find another person on the list more deserving on that scale.
It is a simple case of seller's remorse. They lure you to the table with the advertising that you are buying a product. A physical good you can re-use, re-cycle, trade, sell, etc. And they make you pay a premium price for that product.
Then they whine that you are trading, re-using, selling and undermining their sales. What they really wanted was for you to pay a product price ($60) for a license.
It's pretty clear that the free market (blockbuster) has established the value of a license at $3-$5 per week. But I don't think the game studios would be happy if they sold ten million physical copies on launch day for $5 a pop either.
I used to manage a 22 rack cage that we leased from Internap at Fisher Plaza back in 2005. They really did build the place well. Massive diesel generators, independent well water, redundant cooling, etc. But it was designed to survive and continue broadcasting for a local news station for 18 days without resupply in the event of a major external disaster like an earthquake.
I imagine they are reviewing their DR procedures and designs now to minimize collateral damage from internal factors.
But let's not be too hard on them, it was one of the better colo facilities I've seen. There are far worse out there holding their pants up with three hands.
When it's not your money and you don't have to fight for every penny by convincing customers not to purchase the alternative (no alternative to taxes), then you have little incentive to curtail waste. That our government pads all numbers with nine zeros is very predictable given the incentives.
Sometimes social network sites are the most honest form of references you can find on an prospective candidate. And while some people express preferences or display aspects of their lives that put them in a protected class, one we're legal bound not to ask about, it is information that they choose to display in association with the name they use to seek employment. Personally, I try to ignore that stuff while I look for aspects of their life that may relate to their capability as an employee. If you are concerned that you might be denied employment because you <whatever>, use an alias.
On the flip side, some candidates reveal things that make it very easy to weed them from the process for reasons that, legal or not, are in the best interest of the company and staff. The most recent in our case was a candidate that wrote us a particularly angry letter about our interview process. A quick google revealed him to be a stalker who kept a record of threats he made and threats he received through chronicle of his life. We also found a separate site devoted to his lawsuit against a former employer over some other stalking/harassment type issue. Rather than apologize and try to correct our process, we bid him farewell.
Should we avoid learning all we can that is relevant to the job about someone we might consider hiring? Google provides levels of information previously only available through the use of a private eye and with the good comes the bad and unnecessary. So we have to ignore religion, age, race, gender, preferences, et cetera. But hiring managers have been doing that for years, this information often comes up or can be inferred during an interview.
This policy seems like a Luddite decision. It would probably be better for HR to do the research and then filter out the protected information so the hiring manager doesn't get tainted. Then the hiring can be done irrespective of protected class status and yet with full awareness of the relevant data.
First, I'm not talking about copying and reselling, competing directly with the distributors for their legal right of exclusive sale. Yes, we have laws against that and I tend to agree with them.
But I am talking about hearing a song on the radio and pressing "record" or the modern equivalent of borrowing a CD and pressing, "import".
I'm talking about the "for personal" use clause in older LAWS that permitted such things.
As for following the LAWS of society, well, those are just agreements between people and they change all the time. If you want to follow your argument to its ridiculous conclusion then we should still own slaves and grant the king the droit du seigneur that was his due and custom back in the day. History is full of LAWS that became outdated and revoked due to changes in peoples, perspective, technology, etc.
Why don't we have a right to copy some other's work?
If I come over to your house and see a table that you bought, do I not have a right to measure it, go home, buy some wood and a saw and build my own? Am I infringing on the work of the carpenter who designed and built yours?
If I go to a restaurant and buy an entree, then go home and attempt to recreate it with my own supplies and utensils, have I infringed on the rights of the chef? What if I then publish the recipe I reverse engineered on my blog? Would the chef sue me for "making available" his creation? Would he win?
If I borrow a CD you purchased and after enjoying it, make a reasonably accurate copy with my own polycarbonate, dye, and laser engraver, how is that any different than the above examples?
Music "piracy" is about consumers competing with a distribution business model based on scarcity of physical goods. It used to be very expensive to duplicate CDs ($50k for a writer in 1989 IIRC) and at 600MB, they held more information than people were willing to burn on HDD storage. Times have changed. Now it's virtually free. But the labels still want you to pay the same costs.
Music piracy cannot steal from the artist the labor they spent on creating their art. There is no way I can recreate the live performance of my favorite band. I would still have to pay for the privilege of enjoying that. And no one would pay me for my facsimile cover performance of their music. Money can still be made in music, but distribution for all purposes is now virtually free. The labels need to adapt or die, but prefer to seek government protectionism by suing their customers.
And let's not forget the two hour security prep time necessary before boarding, thanks to the TSA. That should eliminate all the advantage of the "high-speed" part, except for really long trips.
Our Federally regulated airlines provide a lot of insight into what to expect from high-speed rail.
A more apt comparison to the first amendment would be that by cooperating to shut-up at first, you've waived your right to speak up in the future.
This 5th amendment ruling seems wrong. Primarily because the so-called human rights defined in the BOR were not granted by the paper or the government; they are instead inalienable. They cannot be revoked because they are not granted. The BOR was the founder's attempt to remind future government that:
it is futile to attempt to restrict the speech of the people... they will find a way.
it is futile to attempt to infringe the RKBA, because those who want weapons will have them anyway.
it is futile to demand to quarter troops in the houses of the people... that leads to revolution
you better not breach a man's castle for unreasonable search and seizure... revolutions are begun this way
respect the property of the people or risk revolution. And respect their privacy because compelling someone to testify against themself dresses lies as truth.
trial by peers or revolution!
trial by jury over money or revolution!
be reasonable with bail and punishments or revolution!
without limitation
states rule, feds drool
The feds have obviously chosen to ignore all of these.
Really, Fermi's Paradox sounds like me saying that if I sit on a lonely beach for a week and don't find a bottle with a message in it in proper English, there are no other intelligent beings in the world.
You forgot to mention that he was throwing bottles out into the sea with "hello?" scrawled on a note inside each one the entire time.
In addition to the bad assumptions you mentioned, my favorite poor assumptions to fermi's paradox are the following:
7. Temporal convergence. Why must we assume they developed at the same time as us? There are far more years behind and ahead than the mere 50 or so we've been listening.
8. Why send a message when you can visit? Columbus didn't throw bottles in the ocean, he got in a ship and went.
9. Shouting out your location is wise. If ET is out there, then it's a virtual guarantee there's more than one. And where there is more than one, there will be conflict. It's altogether more likely than not that shouting out one's location in space is a nice way of getting one's entire species killed or enslaved. It's just a matter of time before the Zorg's hear our broadcast and send the slave ships to haul us away or blast us to smithereens so they can terraform our planet.
I don't understand why so many people want to pretend that space faring races are all flowers and ponies. That certainly hasn't been our experience here on Earth and we're all the same species!
I once worked for a company that built multi terabyte file systems. They tried to gloss over the difference between Mega and Mibibytes saying customers don't know or care. Then I had to explain that our 60TB system was actually only 54TiB and at $10k per TB, they might wonder where their extra $60K went.
No, the question is: should relatively wealthy people be forced to subsidize the health insurance for relatively less-wealthy people. That is essentially what is being proposed with universal health care here in the USA. The problems I have with it are the same problems that I have with all policies and promises of socialism:
a. Why should one person pay for any other? And,
b. What happens when we don't have sufficient resources?
It is possible to live a reasonably long life without ever going to the doctor. Yes, you might get sick or have an accident that could dramatically shorten that expectation, but such is life outside of a padded cell. If we want to declare that all life is sacred and equally deserving of achieving maximum potential length, health and satisfaction, then universal health care is only one of many axis upon which we should measure. What about other major contributors to health such as:
a. food, both the quality and quantity thereof
b. education
c. judgment, which we try to replace with legislation
d. shelter (free homes for all?)
e. clothing & shoes
I could probably go on, but people will claim I'm way down the slippery slope despite numerous programs already in place to provide exactly those things to the so-called needy; paid for with our tax dollars. The point is, providing all these things to any who cannot acquire them for themselves strains resources, which are finite for any given population, again running up against the two problems above.
Further, while providing resources for free to the needy makes the giver feel good, it's a false emotion since the recipient has a propensity to become dependent whether by hook, crook or habit. This measurable "effect" is why parents kick their children out of the nest either by design ("time to go, son") or biology ("I hate you, dad!") it helps them establish themselves as independent, self-sustaining creatures.
If we go the path of universal health care (and other liberal, feel good initiatives) the benefits will be immediate and positive... until the resources fail to meet demand and care for all dwindles away toward insufficient. At which point, we'll have health care for none and a society of dependents that cannot care for themselves. The consequences of socialism take decades to materialize, but are as predictable as the future of a 40-year-old child that lives in his mother's basement because he cannot, or will not, get a job and fend for himself. At some point, mom, the breadwinner, is going to stop supporting him whether by intent or death. In the meanwhile, he's got a girlfriend and a kid on the way.
I'm not saying people without health care deserve to die, especially not the children... those situations are tragic. But I am saying that tragedies are a necessary part of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They serve to remind us of the paths not taken, the consequences of our choices, and serve as warnings to others. It's important to remember that our Founding Fathers used the word "pursuit" rather than "receipt" or "achievement" or "entitlement" in our great nation's Declaration of Independence.
Except we don't live on the moon. If a tiny black hole is formed on Earth and its rate of evaporation is exceeded by the rate at which it collides with and absorbs matter on our planet, it will fall toward the center and gobble us up in time.
Of course, it could be debated how long that might take. Decades? Centuries? And we could debate whether we'd actually notice passing through the event horizon. But I think plate tectonics and volcanoes from a shrinking planet would kill us off long before those issues come to life.
David Brin wrote a fun novel with this concept tucked into the plot. It was called 'Earth'.
In addition to doing everything the iPhone does and more, they're also going to have to have a metal housing and a glass screen.
I've started seeing some full touch screen knock-offs, but they're plastic screens, plastic body and generally feel cheap. It's not just coincidence that the two hottest selling phones in recent history were metal (RAZR, iPhone) at least to start.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be nice. We've got two DVRs in our house. When I measured them on the killowatt, I found that they pull about 50 watts on or off. That's stupid. Even if they need to listen for programming changes, they should be able to spin down the drive or reduce the cpu clock or something.
I've taken to turning one of them off at night by pulling the plug (via power strip switch). Takes a while to warm up in the morning, but I don't care. But this 50 watts an hour is costing me $15/month per DVR at California's top rate of $0.46 per KWh. It's enough for me to seriously consider cutting my DirecTV subscription entirely.
Can you imagine the impact a mag 7+ quake would have on a bullet train traveling 200mph?
> It just takes willing
And money. God awe full amounts of money. What ever they say it will cost, double or triple it. And double the schedule as well.
CA voters recently approved $10B in bonds for high speed rail. I'm pretty sure most of them didn't read the part about how paying those bonds off was going to cost $20B over thirty years. Nor did they likely read that the entire project was estimated to cost $55B. Triple that to $165B and ask how many passengers will it take to make that project worthwhile?
WA State had a light rail project back in the 80s that was supposed to extend from SeaTac to Everett. Most of the State voted no. They went forward anyway, choosing to tax a subset of the State to fund it. Years later, the train runs from Tacoma to Seattle, not quite the distance necessary. Cost overruns and several thousand passengers per day. At an investment cost of $400,000 per regular passenger.
I understand that the concept of high-speed travel between L.A. and S.F. is nice, but we already have planes and airports. And cars and roads for those of us who don't approve of the invasion of privacy required. These sort of public works projects that benefit few at an extraordinary cost to the many seem very wasteful and wrong-headed.
As for high-speed trains, they are able to travel 200mph due to extremely smooth and straight railways. If we put that sort of accuracy and stability into our freeway systems, along with long on/off ramps and appropriate barriers to prevent oncoming collisions, we could vastly increase the speeds on our interstates and cut down travel times in all directions. It just takes the will to act to benefit all of us.
Upmod parent to eleven, please. This was what I wanted to post.
Forget the shock that they want to track our locations. Forget that we already pay a road-use-tax via gasoline which is already levied more towards high mass inefficient vehicles than the low-mass efficient methods of travel. Let's focus our shock and outrage on the very idea that our government has evolved to the point where it cannot even propose a law without first undertaking a study funded by taxes which would otherwise employ several hundred people for a full year.
These are supposed to be our representatives. Unless you and a lot of other people I don't know have been calling them asking for more taxes on road use... preferably tracked by vehicle mile, they shouldn't be proposing this junk at all. As noted in the top post, the beneficiaries here are corporations. I suspect that the proposed study would be bid out to these same corporations to conclude that yes, it does seem to be a good idea.
We need to vote out every incumbent now. Turn over the entire cart and start fresh with no tolerance for this junk anymore.
And by "junk" I mean bullshit.
Sounds like a good reason to move to [Sweden]. But here in the USA, our government is full of bureaucrats that do nothing but fuck things up. Everything they touch goes to crap. The quality goes to crap, the quantities go to crap and the prices go up and up and up.
The idea of giving our bureaucrats MORE taxes in the interest of fixing things is sheer lunacy.
Try this: ran iphone through clothes washer on accident for 30 minutes. Diagnosis: Completely Dead. Disassembled, immediately desoldered battery, separated logic boards, cleaned with sonicare toothbrush and vinegar followed by distilled water, blown dry with compressed air, reassembled, functional but screen has artifacts from water, return to apple store and claim ignorance, kids took it and probably got it wet, yea, that's the story. Thank the wonderful apple genius who cheerfully exchanges it gratis under apple care warranty and go home.
On the flip side, this was my seventh iphone. The first six failed in different ways for purely manufacturing defects. This latest one is still going strong and will probably survive the end of my apple care contract, which was obviously money well spent for such a fragile device.
By encoding the allowance to block illegal content, they provide a "reasonable" provision that no one in their right mind would disagree with and set the stage for all future battles. We already lost to the DMCA which declared quite a bit of information and sharing thereof illegal. That could be blocked. Next, we'll see anti-P2P legislation and then they can block all those protocols and ports. Then you can look at the illegal devices and please note Apple is trying to turn an unlocked iPhone into an illegal device so your hacked tivo or homebrewed mythtv is suddenly blockable.
This doesn't give us net neutrality, it just pacifies us while moving the game into the lobbyists hands.
Cables are a pain, but the real eyesore is cables going off in all different directions. Add the tripping hazard for your feet and accidentally unplugging something while you are working... or your kid does that while playing hide and seek under your desk... I have a simple solution: Zip Ties
That's right. Zip Ties.
Not velcro. Kids can undo velcro far too easily. Use zip ties to bundle your cables together every foot or so and secure them to table legs or what-not. Takes care of routing, tripping hazards and can even allow enough slack to remain on your desk for your mouse and keyboard. Extra lengths can be folded up and zip tied. Zip ties are cheap. A pair of dykes makes it really easy to remove them and redo.
As for all those power adapters sucking power when not in use, get a kill-o-watt meter and you'll find out what I did when I ganged up ten chargers on a large power-strip. Unused, they were sucking down two (2) watts total. Change ONE lightbulb to CFL and you've saved more power in a year than you will ever save over the life of all your current devices idle draw.
What is really amusing about this new hands free California law is that like other driving laws, the cops seem more than willing to ignore it whenever it pleases them. Sure, we had a month of people not using their phones while driving, but the fad has passed and now that talk and text just like before. The cops however never paused for a second.
Disclaimer: I'm generally against any nanny state laws since I really don't need someone else telling me what to do or how to behave. I prefer laws defining consequences for actions that affect others in a measurable way. As I've said elsewhere: driving distracted shouldn't be a crime, but causing an accident should be punished appropriately, more severely if you kill someone, and even more severely if we can prove you were being negligent at the time.
You know, the market has been speculating that without Jobs, Apple will fall apart and the parade of cool products will grind to a halt. Like it did back in the 80s and 90s when Scully was president. In that regard, Jobs provides thousands of people with JOBS, income, health care, etc.
I bet you would be hard pressed to find another person on the list more deserving on that scale.
Forgetting that, supposing that he bought his way to the top of a transplant list, where do you think that money went? Some black market organ dealer? Or as a size able donation to a hospital that provides health care to thousands of people? I'm just speculating here based on the press release from the hospital, but if his money allowed him to benefit by providing ongoing benefits to many, many others...
I bet you would be hard pressed to find another person on the list more deserving on that scale.
It is a simple case of seller's remorse. They lure you to the table with the advertising that you are buying a product. A physical good you can re-use, re-cycle, trade, sell, etc. And they make you pay a premium price for that product.
Then they whine that you are trading, re-using, selling and undermining their sales. What they really wanted was for you to pay a product price ($60) for a license.
It's pretty clear that the free market (blockbuster) has established the value of a license at $3-$5 per week. But I don't think the game studios would be happy if they sold ten million physical copies on launch day for $5 a pop either.
I used to manage a 22 rack cage that we leased from Internap at Fisher Plaza back in 2005. They really did build the place well. Massive diesel generators, independent well water, redundant cooling, etc. But it was designed to survive and continue broadcasting for a local news station for 18 days without resupply in the event of a major external disaster like an earthquake.
I imagine they are reviewing their DR procedures and designs now to minimize collateral damage from internal factors.
But let's not be too hard on them, it was one of the better colo facilities I've seen. There are far worse out there holding their pants up with three hands.
When it's not your money and you don't have to fight for every penny by convincing customers not to purchase the alternative (no alternative to taxes), then you have little incentive to curtail waste. That our government pads all numbers with nine zeros is very predictable given the incentives.
Sometimes social network sites are the most honest form of references you can find on an prospective candidate. And while some people express preferences or display aspects of their lives that put them in a protected class, one we're legal bound not to ask about, it is information that they choose to display in association with the name they use to seek employment. Personally, I try to ignore that stuff while I look for aspects of their life that may relate to their capability as an employee. If you are concerned that you might be denied employment because you <whatever>, use an alias.
On the flip side, some candidates reveal things that make it very easy to weed them from the process for reasons that, legal or not, are in the best interest of the company and staff. The most recent in our case was a candidate that wrote us a particularly angry letter about our interview process. A quick google revealed him to be a stalker who kept a record of threats he made and threats he received through chronicle of his life. We also found a separate site devoted to his lawsuit against a former employer over some other stalking/harassment type issue. Rather than apologize and try to correct our process, we bid him farewell.
Should we avoid learning all we can that is relevant to the job about someone we might consider hiring? Google provides levels of information previously only available through the use of a private eye and with the good comes the bad and unnecessary. So we have to ignore religion, age, race, gender, preferences, et cetera. But hiring managers have been doing that for years, this information often comes up or can be inferred during an interview.
This policy seems like a Luddite decision. It would probably be better for HR to do the research and then filter out the protected information so the hiring manager doesn't get tainted. Then the hiring can be done irrespective of protected class status and yet with full awareness of the relevant data.
First, I'm not talking about copying and reselling, competing directly with the distributors for their legal right of exclusive sale. Yes, we have laws against that and I tend to agree with them.
But I am talking about hearing a song on the radio and pressing "record" or the modern equivalent of borrowing a CD and pressing, "import".
I'm talking about the "for personal" use clause in older LAWS that permitted such things.
As for following the LAWS of society, well, those are just agreements between people and they change all the time. If you want to follow your argument to its ridiculous conclusion then we should still own slaves and grant the king the droit du seigneur that was his due and custom back in the day. History is full of LAWS that became outdated and revoked due to changes in peoples, perspective, technology, etc.
Why don't we have a right to copy some other's work?
If I come over to your house and see a table that you bought, do I not have a right to measure it, go home, buy some wood and a saw and build my own? Am I infringing on the work of the carpenter who designed and built yours?
If I go to a restaurant and buy an entree, then go home and attempt to recreate it with my own supplies and utensils, have I infringed on the rights of the chef? What if I then publish the recipe I reverse engineered on my blog? Would the chef sue me for "making available" his creation? Would he win?
If I borrow a CD you purchased and after enjoying it, make a reasonably accurate copy with my own polycarbonate, dye, and laser engraver, how is that any different than the above examples?
Music "piracy" is about consumers competing with a distribution business model based on scarcity of physical goods. It used to be very expensive to duplicate CDs ($50k for a writer in 1989 IIRC) and at 600MB, they held more information than people were willing to burn on HDD storage. Times have changed. Now it's virtually free. But the labels still want you to pay the same costs.
Music piracy cannot steal from the artist the labor they spent on creating their art. There is no way I can recreate the live performance of my favorite band. I would still have to pay for the privilege of enjoying that. And no one would pay me for my facsimile cover performance of their music. Money can still be made in music, but distribution for all purposes is now virtually free. The labels need to adapt or die, but prefer to seek government protectionism by suing their customers.
And let's not forget the two hour security prep time necessary before boarding, thanks to the TSA. That should eliminate all the advantage of the "high-speed" part, except for really long trips.
Our Federally regulated airlines provide a lot of insight into what to expect from high-speed rail.
To burn a tire, you just need to stuff it with some paper and soak with diesel. Light with match and get back.
A more apt comparison to the first amendment would be that by cooperating to shut-up at first, you've waived your right to speak up in the future.
This 5th amendment ruling seems wrong. Primarily because the so-called human rights defined in the BOR were not granted by the paper or the government; they are instead inalienable. They cannot be revoked because they are not granted. The BOR was the founder's attempt to remind future government that:
The feds have obviously chosen to ignore all of these.
Really, Fermi's Paradox sounds like me saying that if I sit on a lonely beach for a week and don't find a bottle with a message in it in proper English, there are no other intelligent beings in the world.
You forgot to mention that he was throwing bottles out into the sea with "hello?" scrawled on a note inside each one the entire time.
In addition to the bad assumptions you mentioned, my favorite poor assumptions to fermi's paradox are the following:
7. Temporal convergence. Why must we assume they developed at the same time as us? There are far more years behind and ahead than the mere 50 or so we've been listening.
8. Why send a message when you can visit? Columbus didn't throw bottles in the ocean, he got in a ship and went.
9. Shouting out your location is wise. If ET is out there, then it's a virtual guarantee there's more than one. And where there is more than one, there will be conflict. It's altogether more likely than not that shouting out one's location in space is a nice way of getting one's entire species killed or enslaved. It's just a matter of time before the Zorg's hear our broadcast and send the slave ships to haul us away or blast us to smithereens so they can terraform our planet.
I don't understand why so many people want to pretend that space faring races are all flowers and ponies. That certainly hasn't been our experience here on Earth and we're all the same species!
I once worked for a company that built multi terabyte file systems. They tried to gloss over the difference between Mega and Mibibytes saying customers don't know or care. Then I had to explain that our 60TB system was actually only 54TiB and at $10k per TB, they might wonder where their extra $60K went.
No, the question is: should relatively wealthy people be forced to subsidize the health insurance for relatively less-wealthy people. That is essentially what is being proposed with universal health care here in the USA. The problems I have with it are the same problems that I have with all policies and promises of socialism:
a. Why should one person pay for any other? And,
b. What happens when we don't have sufficient resources?
It is possible to live a reasonably long life without ever going to the doctor. Yes, you might get sick or have an accident that could dramatically shorten that expectation, but such is life outside of a padded cell. If we want to declare that all life is sacred and equally deserving of achieving maximum potential length, health and satisfaction, then universal health care is only one of many axis upon which we should measure. What about other major contributors to health such as:
a. food, both the quality and quantity thereof
b. education
c. judgment, which we try to replace with legislation
d. shelter (free homes for all?)
e. clothing & shoes
I could probably go on, but people will claim I'm way down the slippery slope despite numerous programs already in place to provide exactly those things to the so-called needy; paid for with our tax dollars. The point is, providing all these things to any who cannot acquire them for themselves strains resources, which are finite for any given population, again running up against the two problems above.
Further, while providing resources for free to the needy makes the giver feel good, it's a false emotion since the recipient has a propensity to become dependent whether by hook, crook or habit. This measurable "effect" is why parents kick their children out of the nest either by design ("time to go, son") or biology ("I hate you, dad!") it helps them establish themselves as independent, self-sustaining creatures.
If we go the path of universal health care (and other liberal, feel good initiatives) the benefits will be immediate and positive... until the resources fail to meet demand and care for all dwindles away toward insufficient. At which point, we'll have health care for none and a society of dependents that cannot care for themselves. The consequences of socialism take decades to materialize, but are as predictable as the future of a 40-year-old child that lives in his mother's basement because he cannot, or will not, get a job and fend for himself. At some point, mom, the breadwinner, is going to stop supporting him whether by intent or death. In the meanwhile, he's got a girlfriend and a kid on the way.
I'm not saying people without health care deserve to die, especially not the children... those situations are tragic. But I am saying that tragedies are a necessary part of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They serve to remind us of the paths not taken, the consequences of our choices, and serve as warnings to others. It's important to remember that our Founding Fathers used the word "pursuit" rather than "receipt" or "achievement" or "entitlement" in our great nation's Declaration of Independence.
I wouldn't like to be very near one due to its Hawking radiation (virtual photon creation near the event horizon...
Are you allergic to light?
Except we don't live on the moon. If a tiny black hole is formed on Earth and its rate of evaporation is exceeded by the rate at which it collides with and absorbs matter on our planet, it will fall toward the center and gobble us up in time.
Of course, it could be debated how long that might take. Decades? Centuries? And we could debate whether we'd actually notice passing through the event horizon. But I think plate tectonics and volcanoes from a shrinking planet would kill us off long before those issues come to life.
David Brin wrote a fun novel with this concept tucked into the plot. It was called 'Earth'.
In addition to doing everything the iPhone does and more, they're also going to have to have a metal housing and a glass screen.
I've started seeing some full touch screen knock-offs, but they're plastic screens, plastic body and generally feel cheap. It's not just coincidence that the two hottest selling phones in recent history were metal (RAZR, iPhone) at least to start.