The problem is that teachers don't (and shouldn't) have that kind of control over the end product: namely, their own students. At best they can guide and influence, but even in the best of situations, more often than not students will be affected by things completely beyond the teacher's ability to predict or control. It is thus grossly unfair to use student performance as a measure of teacher performance, simply because the ties between them are much too loose.
If you assign students to the various teachers randomly, and there are enough of them, then one can very easily test whether the differences in test scores between teachers is significant. Of course, there are always confounding factors -- the 9AM class might consistently do worse than the 1PM class (or vice versa, I have no idea), the class whose scheduling overlaps with the computer programming class might do worse because of adverse selection of the students -- but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to construct a meaningful evaluation. Science (including social science) is about doing the best we can to measure things that are difficult to measure and then stating what we know about them in terms of statistical confidence and unknown factors.
To put it plainly, if year after year teacher A's students score consistently worse than teacher B's (to wit, the means differ by twice the standard error of the mean), I would think that's very strong evidence that A is doing something right with respect to B. It's not proof, but after 5 years of seeing the same pattern, it starts to become a compelling reason to think that B should try another line of work.
Ditto that sentiment. I'm very sorry to tell my OSX/Linux using friends that, no, your brand new $2000 Macbook Pro cannot play this 1080P x264 file because the decoder will only use one core and it's not fast enough to keep up. Unfortunately, until the ffmpeg-mt branch becomes stable and gets merged back in (and now it will be months before that happens) you have to use Windows or wait for http://www.coreavc.com/ to be ported to your platform.
Even in the face of a preference for open source, just about everyone in the HD community will admit that you either need a really fast rig (C2D/AX2 ~2.4Ghz for 720p, ~3.0ghz for 1080p), some sort of GPU-offloading or a CoreAVC because it can do real multithreading (slice-based is fail). This is going to be very important if Linux based media-centers are going to have any punch in the living room.
It's a disappointing area for proponents of OSS, to say the least.
What isn't fine is selling service under one set of rules and then changing those rules with little notice (or apparently none if you view your bill online), especially when those changes concern your privacy.
The original contract spells out very specifically the mechanism by which the parties can amend the terms of the contract. This is the normal state of affairs. For instance, in my contract with my heating-oil company, the price isn't set out in advance but is determined on the date of shipment based on the cost to the company plus a premium. In theory, if the price of oil spikes and I don't call to cancel, I could be in for a huge bill; that result is clearly contemplated by the original contract.
I will concede this, Verizon should send each customer a real paper letter detailing the changes even if they are signed up for online billing. Such a requirement is in excess of their strict legal obligations (when you agree to online billing, you agree that all such changes will also be delivered electronically) but would still be a good thing to do.
Did you even read the summary of the article? Verizon will be selling things like billing info, technical info and location info, among other things.
Name ONE person that enjoys junk mail and unsolicited phone calls during supper about getting your windshield repaired, or refinancing their credit card debt, or unneeded car insurance.
Yours is an indefensible position. Nobody wants what Verizon is trying to do with their personal info, and every rational person knows that.
I can name a few thousand people that have signed up between my original post and this one (well, I can't name but I know they exist) so they must evidently think that this isn't such a big deal. I mean, normally when I see another human being, endowed as they are with free will, voluntarily agreeing to a contract, I make the leap of faith that they think the agreement is beneficial to them. That is to say, they think that they gain more in benefit than the cost.
One of the fallacies that you've engaged in is assuming that you can divorce Verizon's service from their policies, i.e. that you can just rewrite the terms to exclude the objectionable clauses. Of course, such a change would be to your benefit, so too would halving the price and doubling the number of minutes. IOW, I can always imagine how I could change my relationships with others in such a way to be more beneficial to me. Heck, the Chevy dealer can sell me a Corvette for $50 and I would be positively thrilled.
That's the not the analysis that's required here, however. What's required here is not a discussion of whether other contracts terms could have more benefits or less costs but whether the benefits of the contract as it exists outweigh the costs. If they do, then it's a good deal even if it could possibly be better because, as we've seen, any contract can always get better.
We believe that we have the right to negotiate the price of those apples or seek apples elsewhere. Reasonable people realise that it's unreasonable to expect anyone to part with anything without a fair exchange. We would only quibble over what constitutes fairness. Maybe you're the one being irrational? Isn't it a bit irrational to expect people not to negotiate for anything at all?
I negotiated with Verizon based on my perceived value of not having that information exported, $5/month. They declined, I opted out. Sounds exactly like a barter to me!
We would only quibble over what constitutes fairness.
Fairness is anything that two parties voluntarily agree to. If you feel that the terms under which I sell my apples are unfair, then you are free to either attempt to convince me to offer different terms or decline them altogether.
Case in point, I asked a bank teller if one of their fees was reasonable, and she promptly removed it after thinking about it herself. It's okay to want to negotiate.
Yup, I've done that too.
Rereading my OP, I can see that I wasn't clear -- I'm not against bartering over terms in any way. What I'm against is the idea that we have the right to forbid Verizon from making agreements such as this one. One of the very distant ancestors of this post mentioned that the UK has some sort of law that does exactly that -- prevents consumers and providers from bartering over the terms of their agreement.
We have contracts. I am a Verizon customer and I read this story and called up and now, I'm opted out (I offered to opt in for $5/month off my bill, about what I think that's worth, they declined). In the end-game, if VZ wouldn't agree to let me opt out, I'd consider other service providers, compare all my options, and pick the one I liked the most.
For the masses that don't care to opt-out, they don't care! Giving out personal information is not an injury to people that don't care. I know it's impossible for/.ers to imagine that other people might have more a different set of priorities than they do, but it's a fact that different people care about different sets of things. Even people that care about the same set of things assign different weights and will come up with different tradeoffs. What's nice about a system of voluntary associations is that those sets of priorities can be efficiently mapped into different contract terms instead of everyone getting a one-sized-fits-all solution.
I really cannot understand why some people believe that they have the right to dictate the terms under which someone sells them a service. If you went into the grocery store and saw a 6-pack of apples being sold for $1, would you demand (citing some clearly inalienable right) that they sell you a 5-pack of apples for $.80? If you don't want apples on the terms that the store is selling them, buy them from a different store. If no store has terms you approve of, then you have to admit the fact that no other human being will voluntarily give you his apples under those terms. Either change your terms, or start rationalizing to yourself your right to seize those apples from him involuntarily.
You shouldn't have to dig in about:config to disable a prominent feature.
The "options" dialogs should not include a billion elements each of which will be used by 5% of the userbase. There are basic UI limits to what can be graphically presented while still being reasonable navigable.
Firefox isn't leaking memory, it's storing lots of pages in its cache so that when you go back from slashdot.org/story to slashdot.org, it can satisfy the request out of cache. If you would like to disable this, navigate to about:config and set "browser.cache.memory.enable" to false. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.enable for information.
For my part, all of my machines have way more RAM that they can possibly use (4GB = $25, average usage ~50% even with Vista SuperFetch). RAM is cheap, network access is expensive -- it makes sense to use as much caching as possible.
I'm pretty sure that stupid/careless employees can leak sensitive information through P2P on any OS. I'm not aware that any of the OSX/nix installs search any less widely for shared folders than the Windows versions.
I don't know anything about the 5th Amendment, but I was under the impression that it was way stronger than this quote suggests. Just because I admitted that it's my laptop, I now can't take the 5th? In movies at least, that's not how it works:-)
Not quite, he admitted that it was his computer AND voluntarily showed content to an agent that plausibly determined that they were child pornography. It was the showing of the content, not the admission of ownership, that negated his 5A right because producing the unencrypted version would not give the government any new testimony they didn't already know. This is called the "foregone conclusion doctrine".
In conversational terms, his claim is "you can't tell me to reveal the password because that is testimony that proves that I had control over the child porn" to which the government essentially replies "we already knew that, so your admission doesn't tell us anything we don't know".
The solution, of course, is never to show or tell any Federal agent anything ever for any reason. Don't try to be clever.
I don't think any sane person can believe that Linux supports the same range of hardware that Windows does, especially in the graphics department. You can blame that on device manufacturers that only ship with Windows drivers, leaving the FOSS community to write the Linux ones, if you want.
And yet somehow Stickney gets modded as Flamebait for a truthful assertion about his experiences, one I've had myself (and now I'm smart enough to insist on Nvidia graphics for any machine that runs Linux).
As an experiment for those that doubt me, drop into your console and run the following commands glxinfo | grep "direct rendering" glxinfo | grep "pbuffer"
(a) Whoever produces any book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape, digital image, digitally- or computer-manipulated image of an actual human being, picture, or other matter which...
The word "produce" has a specific legal meaning that is not the same as "possess".
The only thing a court needs to convict you of possession of child pornography is 'reasonable suspicion' that the subject of the photo is underage and the pose is considered 'sexual.'
No, the law requires you to have proof of age if you distribute the photos to anyone else. If you don't, you aren't guilty of possession of child porn, you are guilty of distributing porn without the proper labeling. This is analogous to various laws that make it illegal to distribute things without adequate source documentation -- food and ingredient lists, drugs and dosages, clothes and country of origin, appliances and their wattage...
In order to get a conviction on private possession of CP the jury must be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that person did, in fact, possess child porn.
Please cite any authority to the contrary or stop spreading FUD.
Farmland isn't infinite. We will run out eventually. The actual timeframe will depend on what you think will happen with global warming.
No, but our output per hectare has more than doubled in the past 50 years and will likely double again with the right technology and impetus (right now, grain prices are pretty low so no one cares to really juice production). We have more food than we could possibly eat (so we turn tons of it into various processed junk) and agricultural technology, especially GMO, continue to improve. Meanwhile, global population growth is slowing and agriculture in the 3rd world is starting to adopt the successful practices we've had for decades (for instance, in Africa, Holstein cows are becoming more widespread, leading to a huge boom in the production of milk -- often much more than the local markets can handle).
Also (and entirely OT), I don't know what will happen with global warming, but last I saw there would actually be a fairly large increase in the amount of farmland due to the thawing out of Canada and Siberia.
You're absolutely right - if your definition of efficiency is dollars, and if your work base comes from underpaid black/grey market laborers, and if the cost of fuel is artificially low.
Efficiency isn't measured in dollars, value is. If diamonds are worth more dollars than rubies, for instance, that means that human beings value diamonds more than they value rubies -- we'd rather have the one than the other.
Efficiency comes in when there aren't enough diamonds and rubies to satisfy everyone's desires for them and we have to allocate them.
People pay far more for something than its value all the time. It doesn't make it any more valuable. I'm sure some goober might buy a penny for a nickel, but in the end, his penny is still worth a penny.
In my understanding, the value of an item is defined by what it can be sold for (caveats apply, complete functioning market, blah blah blah). The land on Manhattan is worth more than the Midwest land because human beings value it more. The evidence for that increased valuation is their willingness to pay more for it.
Ultimately, "value" is a subjective human concept that has no meaning outside what we think. There is no hidden true-value of that land that is distinct from what worth humans assign it in their negotiations for it.
Land on Manhattan remains some of the most valuable land on the planet. And he wants to use it for the most land-intensive production imaginable? For the price of an acre on Manhattan, you could buy 100 acres in the Midwest, plus the equipment and personnel to operate it, plus transportation of the final product to NYC. That's the market trying to give you a hint that allocating Manhattan real estate to agriculture is not the most efficient thing to do.
Even more damning, the whole damned point of having a civilization is to allow a small minority of farmers to produce enough food for everyone so that the rest of us can do things like engineering, science, art, law, politics, philosophy and all those other things that many of us find more satisfying than toiling in a field.
Disclosure: I have a garden in my backyard and I enjoy growing food in it. I don't, however, delude myself into thinking that it's anything other than a hobby -- one that is not economically sound (in the sense that I can buy the finished products much cheaper than I can grow them myself). Since I have to bring in soil, water and fertilizer, I'd be lucky if the whole thing was carbon neutral.
In Sweden, retroactive penal sanctions and other retroactive legal effects of criminal acts due the State are prohibited by chapter 2, section 10 of the Instrument of Government (Regeringsformen).
Out of curiosity, can you cite any particular European (or other, well-settled democracy) country that has passed a law that criminalized conduct ex post facto? Even more to the point, has anyone actually been punished for an activity that wasn't illegal at the time it was committed?
Unfortunately that may be true. This looks like one of those cases where if they don't win they will try again, all the while trying to change the rules to make it impossible to lose. It is starting to look like media sharing is the cannabis of the new millennium (or at least the first part:)).
Just a quibble, the elected government of Sweden has every right to "change the rules", pretty much whenever they want. They can't make the new rules retroactive to old conduct (ex post facto), but we all have to follow the new rules once they are made. Democratic government surely do make mistakes (they all do), but until we devise a better system of governance, I will continue to believe in the legitimacy of our current political process.
Which brings us to poison and trapping. It's not that they don't work. They work GREAT. If they're not working, it means you're not using enough. You need to come to the budgetary equilibrium where the amount you spend on extermination makes sense based on the cost of cable replacement.
The problem with poison is that sometimes the buggers decide to up and die in inaccessible locations. Then you have to think about how the heck you are going to get them out of there. The last thing you want is a rotting carcass stuck behind drywall or in the floorboards. Your contractor, on the other hand, will thank you.
We respect our users' ownership of and responsibility for the content they choose to share.
(Emphasis mine) One would hope that entailed at least a notice about why your posting was deleted.
I don't see how failure to provide notice about why your content was deleted can, in any way, be construed to disparage users' ownership of that content. I can think of many different cases in which a service provider could respect that a user owns some creative content and concurrently removes it from their service consistent with their terms.
The question of who owns some content and whether it is appropriate to be posted on some service are entirely different.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that teachers don't (and shouldn't) have that kind of control over the end product: namely, their own students. At best they can guide and influence, but even in the best of situations, more often than not students will be affected by things completely beyond the teacher's ability to predict or control. It is thus grossly unfair to use student performance as a measure of teacher performance, simply because the ties between them are much too loose.
If you assign students to the various teachers randomly, and there are enough of them, then one can very easily test whether the differences in test scores between teachers is significant. Of course, there are always confounding factors -- the 9AM class might consistently do worse than the 1PM class (or vice versa, I have no idea), the class whose scheduling overlaps with the computer programming class might do worse because of adverse selection of the students -- but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to construct a meaningful evaluation. Science (including social science) is about doing the best we can to measure things that are difficult to measure and then stating what we know about them in terms of statistical confidence and unknown factors.
To put it plainly, if year after year teacher A's students score consistently worse than teacher B's (to wit, the means differ by twice the standard error of the mean), I would think that's very strong evidence that A is doing something right with respect to B. It's not proof, but after 5 years of seeing the same pattern, it starts to become a compelling reason to think that B should try another line of work.
FWIW, Sprint has, on numerous occasions, allowed me to move my service onto a used phone (ebay/craigslist) without signing a new contract.
Ditto that sentiment. I'm very sorry to tell my OSX/Linux using friends that, no, your brand new $2000 Macbook Pro cannot play this 1080P x264 file because the decoder will only use one core and it's not fast enough to keep up. Unfortunately, until the ffmpeg-mt branch becomes stable and gets merged back in (and now it will be months before that happens) you have to use Windows or wait for http://www.coreavc.com/ to be ported to your platform.
Even in the face of a preference for open source, just about everyone in the HD community will admit that you either need a really fast rig (C2D/AX2 ~2.4Ghz for 720p, ~3.0ghz for 1080p), some sort of GPU-offloading or a CoreAVC because it can do real multithreading (slice-based is fail). This is going to be very important if Linux based media-centers are going to have any punch in the living room.
It's a disappointing area for proponents of OSS, to say the least.
What isn't fine is selling service under one set of rules and then changing those rules with little notice (or apparently none if you view your bill online), especially when those changes concern your privacy.
The original contract spells out very specifically the mechanism by which the parties can amend the terms of the contract. This is the normal state of affairs. For instance, in my contract with my heating-oil company, the price isn't set out in advance but is determined on the date of shipment based on the cost to the company plus a premium. In theory, if the price of oil spikes and I don't call to cancel, I could be in for a huge bill; that result is clearly contemplated by the original contract.
I will concede this, Verizon should send each customer a real paper letter detailing the changes even if they are signed up for online billing. Such a requirement is in excess of their strict legal obligations (when you agree to online billing, you agree that all such changes will also be delivered electronically) but would still be a good thing to do.
Did you even read the summary of the article? Verizon will be selling things like billing info, technical info and location info, among other things.
Name ONE person that enjoys junk mail and unsolicited phone calls during supper about getting your windshield repaired, or refinancing their credit card debt, or unneeded car insurance.
Yours is an indefensible position. Nobody wants what Verizon is trying to do with their personal info, and every rational person knows that.
I can name a few thousand people that have signed up between my original post and this one (well, I can't name but I know they exist) so they must evidently think that this isn't such a big deal. I mean, normally when I see another human being, endowed as they are with free will, voluntarily agreeing to a contract, I make the leap of faith that they think the agreement is beneficial to them. That is to say, they think that they gain more in benefit than the cost.
One of the fallacies that you've engaged in is assuming that you can divorce Verizon's service from their policies, i.e. that you can just rewrite the terms to exclude the objectionable clauses. Of course, such a change would be to your benefit, so too would halving the price and doubling the number of minutes. IOW, I can always imagine how I could change my relationships with others in such a way to be more beneficial to me. Heck, the Chevy dealer can sell me a Corvette for $50 and I would be positively thrilled.
That's the not the analysis that's required here, however. What's required here is not a discussion of whether other contracts terms could have more benefits or less costs but whether the benefits of the contract as it exists outweigh the costs. If they do, then it's a good deal even if it could possibly be better because, as we've seen, any contract can always get better.
We believe that we have the right to negotiate the price of those apples or seek apples elsewhere. Reasonable people realise that it's unreasonable to expect anyone to part with anything without a fair exchange. We would only quibble over what constitutes fairness. Maybe you're the one being irrational? Isn't it a bit irrational to expect people not to negotiate for anything at all?
I negotiated with Verizon based on my perceived value of not having that information exported, $5/month. They declined, I opted out. Sounds exactly like a barter to me!
We would only quibble over what constitutes fairness.
Fairness is anything that two parties voluntarily agree to. If you feel that the terms under which I sell my apples are unfair, then you are free to either attempt to convince me to offer different terms or decline them altogether.
Case in point, I asked a bank teller if one of their fees was reasonable, and she promptly removed it after thinking about it herself. It's okay to want to negotiate.
Yup, I've done that too.
Rereading my OP, I can see that I wasn't clear -- I'm not against bartering over terms in any way. What I'm against is the idea that we have the right to forbid Verizon from making agreements such as this one. One of the very distant ancestors of this post mentioned that the UK has some sort of law that does exactly that -- prevents consumers and providers from bartering over the terms of their agreement.
We have contracts. I am a Verizon customer and I read this story and called up and now, I'm opted out (I offered to opt in for $5/month off my bill, about what I think that's worth, they declined). In the end-game, if VZ wouldn't agree to let me opt out, I'd consider other service providers, compare all my options, and pick the one I liked the most.
For the masses that don't care to opt-out, they don't care! Giving out personal information is not an injury to people that don't care. I know it's impossible for /.ers to imagine that other people might have more a different set of priorities than they do, but it's a fact that different people care about different sets of things. Even people that care about the same set of things assign different weights and will come up with different tradeoffs. What's nice about a system of voluntary associations is that those sets of priorities can be efficiently mapped into different contract terms instead of everyone getting a one-sized-fits-all solution.
I really cannot understand why some people believe that they have the right to dictate the terms under which someone sells them a service. If you went into the grocery store and saw a 6-pack of apples being sold for $1, would you demand (citing some clearly inalienable right) that they sell you a 5-pack of apples for $.80? If you don't want apples on the terms that the store is selling them, buy them from a different store. If no store has terms you approve of, then you have to admit the fact that no other human being will voluntarily give you his apples under those terms. Either change your terms, or start rationalizing to yourself your right to seize those apples from him involuntarily.
You shouldn't have to dig in about:config to disable a prominent feature.
The "options" dialogs should not include a billion elements each of which will be used by 5% of the userbase. There are basic UI limits to what can be graphically presented while still being reasonable navigable.
Firefox isn't leaking memory, it's storing lots of pages in its cache so that when you go back from slashdot.org/story to slashdot.org, it can satisfy the request out of cache. If you would like to disable this, navigate to about:config and set
"browser.cache.memory.enable" to false. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.enable for information.
For my part, all of my machines have way more RAM that they can possibly use (4GB = $25, average usage ~50% even with Vista SuperFetch). RAM is cheap, network access is expensive -- it makes sense to use as much caching as possible.
Second the recommendation of flashblock. Whitelists are the way to go.
I'm pretty sure that stupid/careless employees can leak sensitive information through P2P on any OS. I'm not aware that any of the OSX/nix installs search any less widely for shared folders than the Windows versions.
Stupidity is definitely OS-independent.
I don't know anything about the 5th Amendment, but I was under the impression that it was way stronger than this quote suggests. Just because I admitted that it's my laptop, I now can't take the 5th? In movies at least, that's not how it works :-)
Not quite, he admitted that it was his computer AND voluntarily showed content to an agent that plausibly determined that they were child pornography. It was the showing of the content, not the admission of ownership, that negated his 5A right because producing the unencrypted version would not give the government any new testimony they didn't already know. This is called the "foregone conclusion doctrine".
In conversational terms, his claim is "you can't tell me to reveal the password because that is testimony that proves that I had control over the child porn" to which the government essentially replies "we already knew that, so your admission doesn't tell us anything we don't know".
The solution, of course, is never to show or tell any Federal agent anything ever for any reason. Don't try to be clever.
Just. Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
I don't think any sane person can believe that Linux supports the same range of hardware that Windows does, especially in the graphics department. You can blame that on device manufacturers that only ship with Windows drivers, leaving the FOSS community to write the Linux ones, if you want.
And yet somehow Stickney gets modded as Flamebait for a truthful assertion about his experiences, one I've had myself (and now I'm smart enough to insist on Nvidia graphics for any machine that runs Linux).
As an experiment for those that doubt me, drop into your console and run the following commands
glxinfo | grep "direct rendering"
glxinfo | grep "pbuffer"
and tell me if your driver supports both of them.
(a) Whoever produces any book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape, digital image, digitally- or computer-manipulated image of an actual human being, picture, or other matter which ...
The word "produce" has a specific legal meaning that is not the same as "possess".
The only thing a court needs to convict you of possession of child pornography is 'reasonable suspicion' that the subject of the photo is underage and the pose is considered 'sexual.'
No, the law requires you to have proof of age if you distribute the photos to anyone else. If you don't, you aren't guilty of possession of child porn, you are guilty of distributing porn without the proper labeling. This is analogous to various laws that make it illegal to distribute things without adequate source documentation -- food and ingredient lists, drugs and dosages, clothes and country of origin, appliances and their wattage ...
In order to get a conviction on private possession of CP the jury must be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that person did, in fact, possess child porn.
Please cite any authority to the contrary or stop spreading FUD.
Today.
Farmland isn't infinite. We will run out eventually. The actual timeframe will depend on what you think will happen with global warming.
No, but our output per hectare has more than doubled in the past 50 years and will likely double again with the right technology and impetus (right now, grain prices are pretty low so no one cares to really juice production). We have more food than we could possibly eat (so we turn tons of it into various processed junk) and agricultural technology, especially GMO, continue to improve. Meanwhile, global population growth is slowing and agriculture in the 3rd world is starting to adopt the successful practices we've had for decades (for instance, in Africa, Holstein cows are becoming more widespread, leading to a huge boom in the production of milk -- often much more than the local markets can handle).
Also (and entirely OT), I don't know what will happen with global warming, but last I saw there would actually be a fairly large increase in the amount of farmland due to the thawing out of Canada and Siberia.
You're absolutely right - if your definition of efficiency is dollars, and if your work base comes from underpaid black/grey market laborers, and if the cost of fuel is artificially low.
Efficiency isn't measured in dollars, value is. If diamonds are worth more dollars than rubies, for instance, that means that human beings value diamonds more than they value rubies -- we'd rather have the one than the other.
Efficiency comes in when there aren't enough diamonds and rubies to satisfy everyone's desires for them and we have to allocate them.
People pay far more for something than its value all the time. It doesn't make it any more valuable. I'm sure some goober might buy a penny for a nickel, but in the end, his penny is still worth a penny.
In my understanding, the value of an item is defined by what it can be sold for (caveats apply, complete functioning market, blah blah blah). The land on Manhattan is worth more than the Midwest land because human beings value it more. The evidence for that increased valuation is their willingness to pay more for it.
Ultimately, "value" is a subjective human concept that has no meaning outside what we think. There is no hidden true-value of that land that is distinct from what worth humans assign it in their negotiations for it.
Land on Manhattan remains some of the most valuable land on the planet. And he wants to use it for the most land-intensive production imaginable? For the price of an acre on Manhattan, you could buy 100 acres in the Midwest, plus the equipment and personnel to operate it, plus transportation of the final product to NYC. That's the market trying to give you a hint that allocating Manhattan real estate to agriculture is not the most efficient thing to do.
Even more damning, the whole damned point of having a civilization is to allow a small minority of farmers to produce enough food for everyone so that the rest of us can do things like engineering, science, art, law, politics, philosophy and all those other things that many of us find more satisfying than toiling in a field.
Disclosure: I have a garden in my backyard and I enjoy growing food in it. I don't, however, delude myself into thinking that it's anything other than a hobby -- one that is not economically sound (in the sense that I can buy the finished products much cheaper than I can grow them myself). Since I have to bring in soil, water and fertilizer, I'd be lucky if the whole thing was carbon neutral.
Finally (man, i'm just spewing comments today):
In Sweden, retroactive penal sanctions and other retroactive legal effects of criminal acts due the State are prohibited by chapter 2, section 10 of the Instrument of Government (Regeringsformen).
So much for that theory.
While we at it, can you please cite whatever US laws you think "have retroactive components"? I'm really at a loss.
Wikipedia's page indicates that ex post facto laws are, in fact, invalid in most of the first world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
Out of curiosity, can you cite any particular European (or other, well-settled democracy) country that has passed a law that criminalized conduct ex post facto? Even more to the point, has anyone actually been punished for an activity that wasn't illegal at the time it was committed?
Unfortunately that may be true. This looks like one of those cases where if they don't win they will try again, all the while trying to change the rules to make it impossible to lose. It is starting to look like media sharing is the cannabis of the new millennium (or at least the first part :)).
Just a quibble, the elected government of Sweden has every right to "change the rules", pretty much whenever they want. They can't make the new rules retroactive to old conduct (ex post facto), but we all have to follow the new rules once they are made. Democratic government surely do make mistakes (they all do), but until we devise a better system of governance, I will continue to believe in the legitimacy of our current political process.
Which brings us to poison and trapping. It's not that they don't work. They work GREAT. If they're not working, it means you're not using enough. You need to come to the budgetary equilibrium where the amount you spend on extermination makes sense based on the cost of cable replacement.
The problem with poison is that sometimes the buggers decide to up and die in inaccessible locations. Then you have to think about how the heck you are going to get them out of there. The last thing you want is a rotting carcass stuck behind drywall or in the floorboards. Your contractor, on the other hand, will thank you.
Glue traps, electrocution or cats.
Actually, when they say this about content
We respect our users' ownership of and responsibility for the content they choose to share.
(Emphasis mine) One would hope that entailed at least a notice about why your posting was deleted.
I don't see how failure to provide notice about why your content was deleted can, in any way, be construed to disparage users' ownership of that content. I can think of many different cases in which a service provider could respect that a user owns some creative content and concurrently removes it from their service consistent with their terms.
The question of who owns some content and whether it is appropriate to be posted on some service are entirely different.