Because the adult entertainment publication Whitehouse existed long before the world wide web did. Whitehouse the magazine was established, had an established trademark, etc, etc. Basic trademark law.
If you don't think that Taco, the other editors and anyone else that works on this site is in any way answerable to someone at OSDN or OSDN's stockholders then you've got a very strange interpretation of ownership.
I recall someone once writing in their journal about how they messaged the editors to ask if they could explain what an ambiguous (not common and not made any clearer by the story) three-letter acronym (TLA) in a story summary was an abbreviation from. The reply back from Taco simply read "Sucks to be you".
This is the guy who when politely asked by a reader (a subscriber too, if I remember correctly) to clarify what a certain TLA stands for fires off a sarcastic and snide reply. Yet he's surfing at home on a dial-up? I've just got one thing to say:
FYI, it's not his own website anymore, it's OSDN's. It's not been Taco's site for some time now. Of course, he's got a stake in it but so does every other OSDN stockholder. I don't see them all posting to the front-page though.
You're forgetting that Taco getting engaged or one of the members of his favourite band dying is front-page news here. I swear if the guy stubbed his toe he'd post that up front too.
Yes, they can. I'm not totally uncomfortable with yards, feet and inches. I know my height in feet, etc, but, as i said, I "think" in centimetres, hence I'm more comfortable thinking about sofa lengths in that unit of measurement.
That's the funniest shit I've read on this site for ages. If I had read that thirty seconds earlier, half my keyboard and screen would be covered in Coke right now.
Yes, but the drivers (and any updates for them) for all those bells and whistles are sourced in one easy place: your motherboard manufacturer's website. Getting drivers for one device (a motherboard) is easier and less time consuming than getting drivers for several devices (a motherboard, a USB 2.0 card, an IEEE 1394 card, a SATA RAID card, etc).
Also, you know if all your devices are on the motherboard that they'll work together smoothly and that there won't be any conflicts between them. Conflicts of this nature aren't that common nowadays (eg, IRQs aren't the nightmare that they once were) but they sometimes do crop up with add-in devices.
Don't be childish. Nobody said that SI units had to be rigidly observed in every sense. Do we measure everyday sound volumes in bels? No, we use decibels, because bels are too large a unit for that purpose.
The second is an adopted SI unit, it wasn't "invented" for that purpose. The second is the base SI unit of time because it's always been the base unit of time: the only thing that's changed over the years is how it's defined.
Just because we don't use decimal progressions to measure large increments of time it doesn't make the second any less valid as a SI unit and it doesn't mean that refering to 4,200 seconds as one hour and 10 minutes rather than 4.2 kiloseconds is unacceptable in an SI world.
Both my partner and I are in our early thirties. We both use metric measurements and "think" in metric. The other day, we were looking at a sofa from a company that doesn't include metric measurements in its brochure, so we performed the conversion from inches to centimetres before visualising the dimensions.
I think it's fair to say that it's only people of our parents generation and older (say, 50+), that think of inches before they think of centimetres.
Uh, for temperature, most of the world uses Celcius. A one degree change in Celcius is equal to a one degree change in Kelvin.
In fact, the Kelvin scale is based on the Celcius scale. 0 degrees Celcius = freezing point of water, 100 degrees Celcius = boiling point of water. How hard is that?
The only reason why the Fahrenheit scale used a non-zero value for the freezing point of water was that people of the time didn't have a strong grasp of the concept of negative numbers. So, for simplicity's sake, the freezing point of water was set at 32 degrees.
The concept of negative numbers isn't too difficult for people to grasp now, so is there any reason to stick to such an antiquated temperature scale?
Metric (or SI) units better on so many levels, especially in science. For example, you can convert from one SI unit to another easily: eg, 1 Newtons = 1 kilogram metre per second squared.
Also, Imperial measurements aren't standard: some of them vary from country to country, which is equally ridiculous.
Your "kiloseconds" example is ridiculous, as the second is the SI unit for time. For simplicity and historical reasons we use hours and minutes (because those are easy to comprehend and interpret divisions of a day), but if you were going to perform a time-critical experiment or calculation then you would measure in just seconds. Of course, at the end of your calculation you might convert those seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds so that your result can be more easily interpreted but you'd never do the mathematics in anything other than an SI-based unit.
Just because you were raised with Imperial measurements it doesn't negate the intrinsic "clunkiness" of them or the significant advantages SI units possess over them.
AMD's roadmap is simple: faster processors as soon as possible.
All you have to do is worry about how much computational power you want and how much money you want to spend on a CPU and motherboard.
Let's face it, if you hope to see an appreciable speed bump when you upgrade, buying a first-generation chip and plugging it into a first-generation motherboard with the expectation that you'll get that big speed bump when you plug in a second- or third-generation chip a couple of year's down the line is the wrong way to go about it. Yes, the new CPU will have a faster clock speed but the rest of the motherboard will be two years out of date.
Take my AMD Athlon motherboard as an example. When I bought it a couple of years back, together with an 1200MHz CPU (then the second fastest chip in the range), it had all the latest bells and whistles. But today, its support for USB 1.1, DDR2700 RAM and even PATA RAID make in far inferior to the vast number of motherboards out there that support USB 2.0, DDR3200 and 3500 RAM and SATA RAID, not to mention IEEE 1394 (FireWire), Gigabit Ethernet, better POST reporting, etc.(I won't even start to debate the performance benefits of newer nForce2 Ultra chipsets over their older counterparts.)
To match the features of the latest AMD Athlon/Athlon XP motherboards with my older motherboard I would have to add in at least two, maybe three or four, PCI cards. This would work, but it would be an inelegant (taking up valuable PCI slots), costly (PCI cards aren't free) and inefficient (PCI cards require drivers, configuration, etc) solution. Far better and cheaper to upgrade the motherboard along with the CPU in one go, allowing me to put the older motherboard and CPU combination into another machine/my spares box/the charity bin.
Seriously, when buying a motherboard and CPU, look past the upgrade path. It's a serious red herring, even for PC enthusiasts such as ourselves.
Yeah, Heaven forbid that someone might actually take a full-time job and try to live on the wage that it pays rather than live on welfare. Sheesh.
Make your minds up. Either you want people to live on welfare or you want them to work for a living. If it's the latter then you've got to pay people a proper wage.
And, getting back to the specific case of Walmart, which has a million employees, if working full-time in a supermarket (or the equivalent) is the kind of job that you don't think is worthy of a decent living wage then you really need to do the job and take home the salary for a month to appreciate just how hard the staff there have to work for their money.
1. Pop quiz, hot shot: You've got two ten year olds that have a serious medical condition, say, a congenital heart defect or leukemia. Which do you think's going to get proper treatment, one that's amongst the 40-50 million Americans that don't have health insurance or one that's covered by a parent's comprehensive health plan?
Federal law might prohibit withholding vital services from anyone unable to pay but I bet it puts strict limits as to how much far those services go.
2. I'm not asking that Walmart give away "free" benefits, only that it provides proper health benefits to its staff so that they are healthy enough to do their jobs properly (and their families are healthy enough so that they don't have to quit their jobs to look after them).
As a poster higher up this thread pointed out, Walmart offers such horrible benefits, most employees use the benefit package of their significant other for health coverage. The fact that Walmart say different on their website doesn't change that fact. Did you expect them to do anything other than sing their own praises?
And, by the way, you seem to have changed your tune on Walmart's benefits package pretty quickly. A couple of posts ago your answer to someone who asked what Walmart employees who had inadequate health cover was "If anyone wants to live the lifestyle of a higher salary range then get some marketable skills", now you're telling us that they're adequately provided for?
Oh, and since when was adequate healthcare "lifestyle of a higher salary range"? And why do you keep on referring to healthcare plans and other remuneration as "handouts"? Do you refer to your own salary and benefits in the same way?
"Free" benefits? How are they "free"? Don't the employees fill vital roles for Walmart? No? Well then you try running a supermarket without hiring anyone to stack shelves or work the checkouts.
3. So Walmart pays taxes. Big deal. So do its employees. Ask its employees which they would prefer: Walmart to make a little less profit (and pay a little less tax) and give them better healthcare benefits; or keeping things as they are. I think I know which the employees would go for.
Walmart's latest annual report (warning: 7.3MB PDF file) isn't light reading but worth looking at.
The company has over a million employees in 2,510 stores. How much it spends in salaries isn't given as a seperate line item anywhere in the report, but they do make up part of the $41.043 billion that the company spent on "Operating, selling and general and administrative expenses", together with things like the cost of running and maintaining there locations. That figure rose 13 percent from the previous 2002 figure.
Those numbers might sound big until you consider Walmart's sales of $244.524 billion and a post-tax, post-everything bottom line profit of $8.039 billion, which were up 12 percent and 21 percent from the year before.
So, to recap, Walmart's sales rose by 12 percent, its operating costs were up by 13 percent but its profits even after taxes, etc were up by a massive 21 percent.
Tell me again how Walmart's employees, who you described as being "[paid] bananas because any monkey can be taught to beep bar codes over a scanner", are "asking for a handout" when they help generate such considerable, ever-growing profits?
Well, I realise that, but I was trying to provide a simple answer that the AC who couldn't be bothered to either log in or research Beagle's mission would understand.
If I could have, I would have put it in words of two syllables or less as complex concepts such as searching for life seemed to be beyond his comprehension. He was quick to reply with a pedantic comment, not so quick to apply logic to what he was actually replying to.
How is asking for a decent living wage, one in which someone can pay their bills and not have to worry about descending into poverty at the first sign of illness "crying for a handout".
I think you also forget that the US is the only country in the western world where providing a decent level of healthcare for everyone is treated with contempt. Last time I checked, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, etc were all in the "real world".
As I've said in previous posts, a sick child that needs a vital operation is a sick child that needs a vital operation. Whether or not her parents can afford to pay for whatever it takes to make her well again should not factor into the equation.
If you're proud of wanting to live in a society that's intrinsically divided into "haves" and "have-nots" then just say so. But don't pretend that just because you haven't ended up working for an uncaring employer like Walmart (yet) that everyone else can do the same.
OK, I perhaps could have put that better, but one of the major pluses that Beagle had over the other Martian explorers that are there right now is that it was the only one designed with the ability to prove or disprove the existance of live on Mars. (Microbial life, but life nonetheless.)
If you think I'm smoking something by saying this then perhaps you should read the mission specs.
Uh, you didn't answer his question. Just what do you expect Walmart employees to do for healthcare if they or their dependants become ill? Because I bet you're not happy to have them covered by the government, are you?
Just saying "go to your local community college" doesn't solve the problem. Suppose every single Walmart employee did that. What now? You've got a whole lot of people who've just got their degrees but no degree-level jobs for them to fill. Or were they all going to land the job of their dreams as soon as they graduated?
All you've done there is create thousands of graduates who can't find jobs to match their new-found skills and who are in even bigger debt. (You did remember those Federal student loans have to be repayed, right?) And in the meantime, Walmart's got a lot of vacancies open stacking shelves...
Working in a supermarket may not be a glamourous or mentally demanding job to you but it's how a lot of people have to make a living.
Perhaps if you got your head from out of your butt and stopped dispensing your dreamworld economics lessons you'd realise that the reason why people work at Walmart for next to nothing is because they don't have a choice.
Oh, and by the way, 43.6 million Americans didn't have health insurance in 2002. God knows how bad the situation is today. But I'm sure you're right and they've all only got themselves to blame, every single last one of them.
After all, getting a good education, getting a well-paid job, keeping it and not losing it because the company found someone who'd do your job for half the salary or because the CEO bled it dry to fund his opulent lifestyle is easy and anybody who can't manage that is a fool.
We are looking at the same press release, right? Because that quote doesn't seem to justify your assertion that ESA has a serious case of American Wang Envy
There is a place for Europe and the US and [insert name of country here] in space exploration. And justification in each country being proud of its successes, and congratulating the others on their successes.
If Mrs Bulmahn's comments offended you that much, then I apologise on her behalf, and on the behalf of The whole damn socialist European Union
To hell with that, I say if you've got it then flaunt it!
Our wang's are bigger than your wangs! Nah, nah, na-nah, nah!
Seriously though, it's a pity that Beagle seems to have been lost for good. Mars Express may have proved the existance of water but Beagle would have been able to prove the existance of life.
Let's keep our finger's crossed that it eventually is found safe and sound and is still able to carry out its mission.
1. I never said all P2P traffic is made up of people who are "knowingly copyright infringing on a mass scale". But you have to admit that a significant element of P2P traffic does fall into this category. Last time I checked, RIAA wasn't focusing on people downloading Linux ISOs, just as Microsoft/Adobe/whoever don't focus their attention on people who aren't breaching their copyrights.
2. 100 percent guaranteed anonimity isn't always a good thing. I gave the paedophile because it's a relevant one. There is growing evidence that paedophiles are relying more and more upon technology to share images, movies and tactics. What percentage of P2P traffic they make up is anyone's guess. And let's not forget terrorists or organised crime: 100 percent guaranteed anonimity, whether granted by P2P or some other application would be their dream.
Why is asking the same question about anonimity in the context of paedophiles, terrorists or organised criminals "the last straw of a desperate man"? I'm comparing apples to apples, which is something with which you're clearly not comfortable. Why is that?
I'm confused. You acknowledge that we don't have the right to do what we want regardless of the law yet you seem fixated on making those people that use P2P for illegal purposes untraceable. Since when did privacy and anonimity become the same thing?
I fail to see how seeing which IP addresses downloaded the latest Britney Spears album can be equated to an internal body search.
In the former case, intellectual property has been transfered without the copyright holder's consent which, depending on your location (determinable by your IP address) may be against the law. Surely that's reasonable grounds for further investigation? A court would almost certainly think so.
In the latter case, you're talking about a search without providing a context. Am I known drug courier? Have I been under observation that has shown that I've associated with known traffickers? Have I been seen accepting dodgy packages? Is there reasonable evidence to believe that I'm trafficking right now? Those are the criteria in question when customs officers approach a court to request an internal body search on a suspect?
(That's your best analogy? Tracking down fileswappers is like giving someone an internal body search? And you attack me for bringing up how giving anonimity to P2P fileswappers who trade in music would also give anonimity to P2P fileswappers that trade in kiddie porn? At least I wasn't trying to compare apples and oranges.)
Evidence of wrong-doing > further investigation > possible action if evidence is strong enough and corroborated.
That's how it works in most countries. Isn't that what RIAA's doing now? If it can trace specific files to a given IP address right now, what's wrong with RIAA doing that - going after the people actually breaking the law rather than going after everyone - to protect their copyrights?
If RIAA shouldn't be allowed to do it then who should? The police? So we can spend public money tracking down fileswappers? Nobody? So P2P becomes one big free-for-all where you can take anything you want?
Three words for you: ain't gonna happen.
I live in the real world. I value my privacy. But I don't think for a second that my privacy gives me the right to do anything I want regardless of the consequences to others. I don't have a right to break the law without fear of prosecution.
Similarly recording artists (and others) have the right to be paid for their works. There's a system for obtaining music. If you don't like it (the music or the system) then you don't have to buy it. But if you don't like it then it doesn't give you the right to take it for free.
I'm not for RIAA. Like I said, I think that it'll hang itself by its own rope. But I'm not for taking something without ever intending to pay for it either and, like it or not, that's what a lot of P2P traffic is about.
(Note that during this entire dialogue I've refrained from calling downloaders as leeches, thieves or pirates. If I was as obsessed about screwing P2P users as you seem to think I am then I wouldn't show such restraint.)
Slashdot Mirror
Because the adult entertainment publication Whitehouse existed long before the world wide web did. Whitehouse the magazine was established, had an established trademark, etc, etc. Basic trademark law.
That's what journals are for, isn't it? If every musician who died got his own front-page news article then this would you still be so reticent?
If you don't think that Taco, the other editors and anyone else that works on this site is in any way answerable to someone at OSDN or OSDN's stockholders then you've got a very strange interpretation of ownership.
I recall someone once writing in their journal about how they messaged the editors to ask if they could explain what an ambiguous (not common and not made any clearer by the story) three-letter acronym (TLA) in a story summary was an abbreviation from. The reply back from Taco simply read "Sucks to be you".
This is the guy who when politely asked by a reader (a subscriber too, if I remember correctly) to clarify what a certain TLA stands for fires off a sarcastic and snide reply. Yet he's surfing at home on a dial-up? I've just got one thing to say:
Wow, Taco. Sucks to be you.
FYI, it's not his own website anymore, it's OSDN's. It's not been Taco's site for some time now. Of course, he's got a stake in it but so does every other OSDN stockholder. I don't see them all posting to the front-page though.
You're forgetting that Taco getting engaged or one of the members of his favourite band dying is front-page news here. I swear if the guy stubbed his toe he'd post that up front too.
Yes, they can. I'm not totally uncomfortable with yards, feet and inches. I know my height in feet, etc, but, as i said, I "think" in centimetres, hence I'm more comfortable thinking about sofa lengths in that unit of measurement.
That's the funniest shit I've read on this site for ages. If I had read that thirty seconds earlier, half my keyboard and screen would be covered in Coke right now.
I am pointing out that we don't have to be slaves to SI units. Duh.
Yes, but the drivers (and any updates for them) for all those bells and whistles are sourced in one easy place: your motherboard manufacturer's website. Getting drivers for one device (a motherboard) is easier and less time consuming than getting drivers for several devices (a motherboard, a USB 2.0 card, an IEEE 1394 card, a SATA RAID card, etc).
Also, you know if all your devices are on the motherboard that they'll work together smoothly and that there won't be any conflicts between them. Conflicts of this nature aren't that common nowadays (eg, IRQs aren't the nightmare that they once were) but they sometimes do crop up with add-in devices.
Don't be childish. Nobody said that SI units had to be rigidly observed in every sense. Do we measure everyday sound volumes in bels? No, we use decibels, because bels are too large a unit for that purpose.
The second is an adopted SI unit, it wasn't "invented" for that purpose. The second is the base SI unit of time because it's always been the base unit of time: the only thing that's changed over the years is how it's defined.
Just because we don't use decimal progressions to measure large increments of time it doesn't make the second any less valid as a SI unit and it doesn't mean that refering to 4,200 seconds as one hour and 10 minutes rather than 4.2 kiloseconds is unacceptable in an SI world.
Both my partner and I are in our early thirties. We both use metric measurements and "think" in metric. The other day, we were looking at a sofa from a company that doesn't include metric measurements in its brochure, so we performed the conversion from inches to centimetres before visualising the dimensions.
I think it's fair to say that it's only people of our parents generation and older (say, 50+), that think of inches before they think of centimetres.
Uh, for temperature, most of the world uses Celcius. A one degree change in Celcius is equal to a one degree change in Kelvin.
In fact, the Kelvin scale is based on the Celcius scale. 0 degrees Celcius = freezing point of water, 100 degrees Celcius = boiling point of water. How hard is that?
The only reason why the Fahrenheit scale used a non-zero value for the freezing point of water was that people of the time didn't have a strong grasp of the concept of negative numbers. So, for simplicity's sake, the freezing point of water was set at 32 degrees.
The concept of negative numbers isn't too difficult for people to grasp now, so is there any reason to stick to such an antiquated temperature scale?
Metric (or SI) units better on so many levels, especially in science. For example, you can convert from one SI unit to another easily: eg, 1 Newtons = 1 kilogram metre per second squared.
Also, Imperial measurements aren't standard: some of them vary from country to country, which is equally ridiculous.
Your "kiloseconds" example is ridiculous, as the second is the SI unit for time. For simplicity and historical reasons we use hours and minutes (because those are easy to comprehend and interpret divisions of a day), but if you were going to perform a time-critical experiment or calculation then you would measure in just seconds. Of course, at the end of your calculation you might convert those seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds so that your result can be more easily interpreted but you'd never do the mathematics in anything other than an SI-based unit.
Just because you were raised with Imperial measurements it doesn't negate the intrinsic "clunkiness" of them or the significant advantages SI units possess over them.
AMD's roadmap is simple: faster processors as soon as possible.
All you have to do is worry about how much computational power you want and how much money you want to spend on a CPU and motherboard.
Let's face it, if you hope to see an appreciable speed bump when you upgrade, buying a first-generation chip and plugging it into a first-generation motherboard with the expectation that you'll get that big speed bump when you plug in a second- or third-generation chip a couple of year's down the line is the wrong way to go about it. Yes, the new CPU will have a faster clock speed but the rest of the motherboard will be two years out of date.
Take my AMD Athlon motherboard as an example. When I bought it a couple of years back, together with an 1200MHz CPU (then the second fastest chip in the range), it had all the latest bells and whistles. But today, its support for USB 1.1, DDR2700 RAM and even PATA RAID make in far inferior to the vast number of motherboards out there that support USB 2.0, DDR3200 and 3500 RAM and SATA RAID, not to mention IEEE 1394 (FireWire), Gigabit Ethernet, better POST reporting, etc.(I won't even start to debate the performance benefits of newer nForce2 Ultra chipsets over their older counterparts.)
To match the features of the latest AMD Athlon/Athlon XP motherboards with my older motherboard I would have to add in at least two, maybe three or four, PCI cards. This would work, but it would be an inelegant (taking up valuable PCI slots), costly (PCI cards aren't free) and inefficient (PCI cards require drivers, configuration, etc) solution. Far better and cheaper to upgrade the motherboard along with the CPU in one go, allowing me to put the older motherboard and CPU combination into another machine/my spares box/the charity bin.
Seriously, when buying a motherboard and CPU, look past the upgrade path. It's a serious red herring, even for PC enthusiasts such as ourselves.
Please do find the time. I, and other Sky subscribers would be eternally grateful.
NOT all jobs should pay a "decent living wage."
Yeah, Heaven forbid that someone might actually take a full-time job and try to live on the wage that it pays rather than live on welfare. Sheesh.
Make your minds up. Either you want people to live on welfare or you want them to work for a living. If it's the latter then you've got to pay people a proper wage.
And, getting back to the specific case of Walmart, which has a million employees, if working full-time in a supermarket (or the equivalent) is the kind of job that you don't think is worthy of a decent living wage then you really need to do the job and take home the salary for a month to appreciate just how hard the staff there have to work for their money.
1. Pop quiz, hot shot: You've got two ten year olds that have a serious medical condition, say, a congenital heart defect or leukemia. Which do you think's going to get proper treatment, one that's amongst the 40-50 million Americans that don't have health insurance or one that's covered by a parent's comprehensive health plan?
Federal law might prohibit withholding vital services from anyone unable to pay but I bet it puts strict limits as to how much far those services go.
2. I'm not asking that Walmart give away "free" benefits, only that it provides proper health benefits to its staff so that they are healthy enough to do their jobs properly (and their families are healthy enough so that they don't have to quit their jobs to look after them).
As a poster higher up this thread pointed out, Walmart offers such horrible benefits, most employees use the benefit package of their significant other for health coverage. The fact that Walmart say different on their website doesn't change that fact. Did you expect them to do anything other than sing their own praises?
And, by the way, you seem to have changed your tune on Walmart's benefits package pretty quickly. A couple of posts ago your answer to someone who asked what Walmart employees who had inadequate health cover was "If anyone wants to live the lifestyle of a higher salary range then get some marketable skills", now you're telling us that they're adequately provided for?
Oh, and since when was adequate healthcare "lifestyle of a higher salary range"? And why do you keep on referring to healthcare plans and other remuneration as "handouts"? Do you refer to your own salary and benefits in the same way?
"Free" benefits? How are they "free"? Don't the employees fill vital roles for Walmart? No? Well then you try running a supermarket without hiring anyone to stack shelves or work the checkouts.
3. So Walmart pays taxes. Big deal. So do its employees. Ask its employees which they would prefer: Walmart to make a little less profit (and pay a little less tax) and give them better healthcare benefits; or keeping things as they are. I think I know which the employees would go for.
Walmart's latest annual report (warning: 7.3MB PDF file) isn't light reading but worth looking at.
The company has over a million employees in 2,510 stores. How much it spends in salaries isn't given as a seperate line item anywhere in the report, but they do make up part of the $41.043 billion that the company spent on "Operating, selling and general and administrative expenses", together with things like the cost of running and maintaining there locations. That figure rose 13 percent from the previous 2002 figure.
Those numbers might sound big until you consider Walmart's sales of $244.524 billion and a post-tax, post-everything bottom line profit of $8.039 billion, which were up 12 percent and 21 percent from the year before.
So, to recap, Walmart's sales rose by 12 percent, its operating costs were up by 13 percent but its profits even after taxes, etc were up by a massive 21 percent.
Tell me again how Walmart's employees, who you described as being "[paid] bananas because any monkey can be taught to beep bar codes over a scanner", are "asking for a handout" when they help generate such considerable, ever-growing profits?
One day you'll go to far.
Uh, you think that US borders are easier to penetrate that those of the eastern-most EU member states? God, that's hilarious!
Well, I realise that, but I was trying to provide a simple answer that the AC who couldn't be bothered to either log in or research Beagle's mission would understand.
If I could have, I would have put it in words of two syllables or less as complex concepts such as searching for life seemed to be beyond his comprehension. He was quick to reply with a pedantic comment, not so quick to apply logic to what he was actually replying to.
How is asking for a decent living wage, one in which someone can pay their bills and not have to worry about descending into poverty at the first sign of illness "crying for a handout".
I think you also forget that the US is the only country in the western world where providing a decent level of healthcare for everyone is treated with contempt. Last time I checked, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, etc were all in the "real world".
As I've said in previous posts, a sick child that needs a vital operation is a sick child that needs a vital operation. Whether or not her parents can afford to pay for whatever it takes to make her well again should not factor into the equation.
If you're proud of wanting to live in a society that's intrinsically divided into "haves" and "have-nots" then just say so. But don't pretend that just because you haven't ended up working for an uncaring employer like Walmart (yet) that everyone else can do the same.
OK, I perhaps could have put that better, but one of the major pluses that Beagle had over the other Martian explorers that are there right now is that it was the only one designed with the ability to prove or disprove the existance of live on Mars. (Microbial life, but life nonetheless.)
If you think I'm smoking something by saying this then perhaps you should read the mission specs.
Uh, you didn't answer his question. Just what do you expect Walmart employees to do for healthcare if they or their dependants become ill? Because I bet you're not happy to have them covered by the government, are you?
Just saying "go to your local community college" doesn't solve the problem. Suppose every single Walmart employee did that. What now? You've got a whole lot of people who've just got their degrees but no degree-level jobs for them to fill. Or were they all going to land the job of their dreams as soon as they graduated?
All you've done there is create thousands of graduates who can't find jobs to match their new-found skills and who are in even bigger debt. (You did remember those Federal student loans have to be repayed, right?) And in the meantime, Walmart's got a lot of vacancies open stacking shelves...
Working in a supermarket may not be a glamourous or mentally demanding job to you but it's how a lot of people have to make a living.
Perhaps if you got your head from out of your butt and stopped dispensing your dreamworld economics lessons you'd realise that the reason why people work at Walmart for next to nothing is because they don't have a choice.
Oh, and by the way, 43.6 million Americans didn't have health insurance in 2002. God knows how bad the situation is today. But I'm sure you're right and they've all only got themselves to blame, every single last one of them.
After all, getting a good education, getting a well-paid job, keeping it and not losing it because the company found someone who'd do your job for half the salary or because the CEO bled it dry to fund his opulent lifestyle is easy and anybody who can't manage that is a fool.
Yeah, right. Grow a brain, troll.
We are looking at the same press release, right? Because that quote doesn't seem to justify your assertion that ESA has a serious case of American Wang Envy
There is a place for Europe and the US and [insert name of country here] in space exploration. And justification in each country being proud of its successes, and congratulating the others on their successes.
If Mrs Bulmahn's comments offended you that much, then I apologise on her behalf, and on the behalf of The whole damn socialist European Union
To hell with that, I say if you've got it then flaunt it!
Our wang's are bigger than your wangs! Nah, nah, na-nah, nah!
Seriously though, it's a pity that Beagle seems to have been lost for good. Mars Express may have proved the existance of water but Beagle would have been able to prove the existance of life.
Let's keep our finger's crossed that it eventually is found safe and sound and is still able to carry out its mission.
1. I never said all P2P traffic is made up of people who are "knowingly copyright infringing on a mass scale". But you have to admit that a significant element of P2P traffic does fall into this category. Last time I checked, RIAA wasn't focusing on people downloading Linux ISOs, just as Microsoft/Adobe/whoever don't focus their attention on people who aren't breaching their copyrights.
2. 100 percent guaranteed anonimity isn't always a good thing. I gave the paedophile because it's a relevant one. There is growing evidence that paedophiles are relying more and more upon technology to share images, movies and tactics. What percentage of P2P traffic they make up is anyone's guess. And let's not forget terrorists or organised crime: 100 percent guaranteed anonimity, whether granted by P2P or some other application would be their dream.
Why is asking the same question about anonimity in the context of paedophiles, terrorists or organised criminals "the last straw of a desperate man"? I'm comparing apples to apples, which is something with which you're clearly not comfortable. Why is that?
I'm confused. You acknowledge that we don't have the right to do what we want regardless of the law yet you seem fixated on making those people that use P2P for illegal purposes untraceable. Since when did privacy and anonimity become the same thing?
I fail to see how seeing which IP addresses downloaded the latest Britney Spears album can be equated to an internal body search.
In the former case, intellectual property has been transfered without the copyright holder's consent which, depending on your location (determinable by your IP address) may be against the law. Surely that's reasonable grounds for further investigation? A court would almost certainly think so.
In the latter case, you're talking about a search without providing a context. Am I known drug courier? Have I been under observation that has shown that I've associated with known traffickers? Have I been seen accepting dodgy packages? Is there reasonable evidence to believe that I'm trafficking right now? Those are the criteria in question when customs officers approach a court to request an internal body search on a suspect?
(That's your best analogy? Tracking down fileswappers is like giving someone an internal body search? And you attack me for bringing up how giving anonimity to P2P fileswappers who trade in music would also give anonimity to P2P fileswappers that trade in kiddie porn? At least I wasn't trying to compare apples and oranges.)
Evidence of wrong-doing > further investigation > possible action if evidence is strong enough and corroborated.
That's how it works in most countries. Isn't that what RIAA's doing now? If it can trace specific files to a given IP address right now, what's wrong with RIAA doing that - going after the people actually breaking the law rather than going after everyone - to protect their copyrights?
If RIAA shouldn't be allowed to do it then who should? The police? So we can spend public money tracking down fileswappers? Nobody? So P2P becomes one big free-for-all where you can take anything you want?
Three words for you: ain't gonna happen.
I live in the real world. I value my privacy. But I don't think for a second that my privacy gives me the right to do anything I want regardless of the consequences to others. I don't have a right to break the law without fear of prosecution.
Similarly recording artists (and others) have the right to be paid for their works. There's a system for obtaining music. If you don't like it (the music or the system) then you don't have to buy it. But if you don't like it then it doesn't give you the right to take it for free.
I'm not for RIAA. Like I said, I think that it'll hang itself by its own rope. But I'm not for taking something without ever intending to pay for it either and, like it or not, that's what a lot of P2P traffic is about.
(Note that during this entire dialogue I've refrained from calling downloaders as leeches, thieves or pirates. If I was as obsessed about screwing P2P users as you seem to think I am then I wouldn't show such restraint.)