Second, I don't think that people are out to screw me personally. At least most people that is. But I do believe that humans take the path of least resistance.
Bingo. I am not part of the crowd that downloads music/books I haven't paid for (unless offered by their creator for free), yet I understand that business models in this realm must take human nature into account when setting pricing. You have displayed an understanding of applicable human nature.
Simply put, you need to find a balance where people who value your book enough to pay for it can find it at a price they find reasonable. If you price the book too high, you will lose sales/income to piracy. On the other end if you price it at the cost of publication very few people will pirate, but you'll make nothing. The aim, therefore, is to set pricing where the product of volume times gross margin is highest.
Also, don't be fooled into thinking that intellectual value or degree/amount of effort translates directly into economic value of the work (as individual copies or when multiplying price times volume). Because your book is great doesn't mean it is worth 5x the price of a novel. That your market is smaller doesn't make it worth more per copy either. Economic value is literally that - what people are willing to pay. I find it absurd that autobiographies by former presidents have higher economic value than books like yours, but that is, well, the ugly truth.
Lastly, on suing people. Even on Slashdot I think you'll find most people would be supportive of suing businesses or individuals who are making money by selling illegitimate copies. Such a commercial benefit puts them squarely in the wrong legally and morally. To sue them or not depends on to what degree you're willing to sue them out of principle (to deter this practice) and how much return you might get from such.
On the other hand, suing your "customers" is a very bad idea. Even if you can extort some $$ from them, I would avoid suing people who are interested in your work but have obtained it via other means because, to them, they found it more reasonable to do something which is likely immoral and may have taken more effort, than pay the price you set.
I agree this is a DNS setting issue. Once the tunnel is nailed up the host's DNS settings should be changed to use internal DNS servers (only, or at least first). With most of the VPN products I've seen there are config options to control this behavior (client DNS) in this type of a scenario (when host is allowed to send network traffic via local network while connected).
(I used to be the technical lead for remote access for a Fortune 100 company. Our VPNs were used by over 100k employees/contractors.)
I'd like to see Lightroom work on Linux. It's the one app keeping me on Windows. And when I say "work on Linux" I mean that Adobe should sell a Linux version (not Windows version + Wine).
I tried F-Spot, and could live with most of it's rough edges, but I found it to be much slower than Lightroom and there was one rough edge (changing of EXIF timestamps on import) that I couldn't live with and I didn't have confidence it would be resolved (open bug / feature request has existed for years without resolution) and I'm not in a position to change that personally.
I have the MV2010 myself and am happy with it. There is a yahoo user group for it, a detailed unofficial FAQ by one of the people on the product team, and I think there are some hobbiests developing various extra (unofficial/unsupported) capabilities for it.
It's a non-issue if they used a "Digital Audio Recording Device" and the CD-R was a "Digital Audio Recording Medium." I have such a device and use the slightly-more-expensive "music" CD-Rs when I make CDs for friends/family/myself (i.e. to have copy in car). I am exempt from infringement actions (I can't be prosecuted/sued for copyright infringement) for such activities. If they, like me, acted within the Home Audio Recording Act there is no story here...just FUD.
Exifer and jhead used together can be great. I received copies of digital photos from a friend's wedding, taken by a professional using two DSLRs. They were REALLY out of order because of file name mis-match, so I named them as yyyymmdd-hhmmss-[c1/c2].jpg using exifer, based on the date/time picture was taken. That put them almost in order, but the cameras were obviously off by at least 10 minutes. So, I picked the one that seemed to have had it's time set more accurately (c1) and used that as a baseline. I was able to find pictures from both cameras that would have been taken within a second or two of eachother and used that offset as an input into jhead to modify the timestamp for pics taken by the other camera (c2). I then re-renamed them using the same format and the result was a directory of pictures sorted in order.
Of course, if you're a pro photographer you can skip the jhead portion if you just remember to set the cameras' internal clocks to the same (accurate) time...but not all pros are pros.
"Their paper trail has a really nice feature in that it also prints a bar code for a quick machine recount of the ballots as well as a human readable output."
If it's as you describe and the votes are recorded for the machine in a separate bar code from the human-readable portion, well, that's just stupid as the human can only verify the human-readable portion (can't verify that the bar code is also correct). The human-readable portion should be what the machine reads, not some bar code...as stated in the Wired article, "the machine prints the votes onto a full-size paper ballot."
Problem with all this is that the machine used to fill out the ballot is overkill for a vast majority of the population. The exact same paper trail (bubbles filled in on full-size ballot) can be achieved by using a pen to fill in the bubbles. So, the perfect voting center would have a small number of these machines (enough to handle those with special needs) and a ton of those fold-up writing stations with cardboard privacy walls and a pen for the masses of people for whom that works fine...then feed all of the ballots (filled out by computer or human) through a reader that tallies the votes and is audited for accuracy. It's simple, accurate, and has a lot of bandwidth/throughput (number of people who can vote at center in a given time) per dollar so folks don't have to wait around or have their tax dollars wasted on an unnecessary number of machines.
It's not the device that's expensive (though it can be) - it's the service. $20/month (unless you pre-pay for years at a time or commit to having their service for years) is nothing to shake a stick at. It's pretty clear they make money on the service - which is why you can get free TiVo boxes from TiVo. I can't believe people pay this kind of money for electronic programming listings. Then again I'm not the type to waste my money on cable TV, satellite TV, a TiVo, etc.
The Prius is sold at a loss, the Civic is sold at a profit...the percent difference in manufactuing costs is more than what is apparent by looking at their price tags.
The base car may be under 30k, but the supercharged honda engine and the performance or race package will likely set you back 65-85K. That's quoted from the UK site, and you would have to lump homolagation charges in there too, and still might have a hard time driving it on the street.
I priced one in the US with all options and it came out to around $70k (so I think your $85k is a little high) but the supercharged version starts under $50k. They sell it as a kit car, so it won't be a problem to get it registered in most states.
Brammo motors is the licensed manufacturer of the Atom for the US. They are supposedly going to be cheaper, but they haven't found a Honda powerplant for the 300HP version that they can source reliably or sell as of yet.
They (generally) use a GM engine in the US for the 300HP version...but the Honda engine is still occasionally available. Text of an email I received from them a month ago is below...
Thank you for your continued interest in the Ariel Atom.
Brammo has begun shipping the Ariel Atom equipped with the GM Ecotec 2.0 Liter engines in 205, 230, 245 and 300hp configurations.
We have however, had continued interest from "die hard" Honda engine fans and have a limited opportunity for 9 additional Honda powered cars to be made in 2006 for US customers.
Due to the limited quantity we are offering them on a first come, first serve basis. Placing an order gets you in the queue, but the receipt of your deposit is what allocates one of these limited supply vehicles to you.
The Configurator will have the pricing, but here are the two options you will see.
Honda 245hp with Hondata ECU - 44,250
Honda 300hp with Supercharger and Hondata ECU - 48,500
We do not know whether additional Honda drivetrains will be available, nor do we know if 2007 will bring a new supply of Honda engines, so understand this may well be the end of the Honda powered Ariel Atom for North America.
Grandparent: Walmart doesn't give the very best health benefits. But it beats having unemployment and medicaid.
Parent: False duality. The choices are not 1. Wal-Mart exists, lots of people have low pay and bad health benefits, and 2. Wal-mart does not exist, those same people are all unemployed. There is also 3. Wal-Mart gives better health benefits.
Me: Wal-Mart actually does #3. It gives much better health benefits than are the norm for the retail industry.
"So, why is it that when Wal*Mart does this, it's 'heinous,' but when an NFL franchise does it, the country looks the other way?"
It's horrible when anyone does it - NFL or Wal-Mart. Looking at the post I imagine "Rocketship Underpant (804162)" is near my political leanings (at least on this issue, but likely on other things as well). The groups I'm familiar with that fight for property-rights do so whether it's Wal-Mart, the NFL, or Habitat for Humanity that is unjustly taking property from others for private use/ownership via eminent domain.
It's 100% wrong and unethical, even if they're able to accomplish it via legal means...and we should try to stop EVERY instance of it (just just Wal-Mart).
I also agree with the grandparent that a lot of the other crap hurled at Wal-Mart is just that...crap.
"To be sure, there are a lot of poor, arbitrary, or economically inaccurate accusations hurled at Wal-Mart, the 'evil corporation that steals jobs from Americans' (for example). Some people have probably reasoned out their arguments; most haven't."
Wal-Mart is one of the very best in their industry (retail) in terms of pay and benefits...yet they're attacked by people who want good pay and benefits for others. These folks shoul should recognize and support Wal-Mart's leadership in this area, even if (or especially if) they desire more. Also, focusing on issues where Wal-Mart is comparitavely good generates a lot of noise which drounds out and draws attention away from activities of theirs that ARE REALLY BAD (like misuse of eminent domain).
"Besides the difficulty of quantifying the problem, there's also the issue that job loss affects a few people very severely, while price cuts benefit a whole lot of people much more modestly. How do you balance those concerns?"
The same arguement can be made against productivity gains and specialization of labor. How can we justify replacing a room full of people manually calculating figures, typing documents, etc with a computer and a printer? How can we justify having a tractor plant/harvest food crops instead of paying a bunch of workers to do this manual labor in the field? How, in the first place, did we get to having "farm hands" instead of having everyone hunt/gether/farm for themselves?
1. If you can reach the same result using less resources (money and/or people), you can use those now-surplus resources to effect another result.
2. If 15 households spend $2000/year less on goods (because Wal-Mart reduced the number of people necessary to service those folks by one and is passing the savings along), that's $30,000 those families have in aggregate to spend on something else. Aggregate this across an entire nation of folks and that's a lot of money that will be spent on other activities (home improvement, other goods, entertainment, etc) that will in turn employ other people.
3. There is also some correlation to game theory... If company A doesn't keep it's costs in line, another company will and will have a competitive advantage.
Long ago the output of 100 people was probably enough food for 200 people. Now, those same 100 people produce a lot more (maybe 10 produce food, 10 produce computers, 10 produce cars, 10 produce fancy houses, 10 produce fancy clothing and furniture, etc). The standard of living for all of these people go up because of specialization of labor and productivity gains. They all still get fed, but now they get more than just food. Each sector competes against itself to keep it's costs low. In this process resources are released to move where there is demand for them.
It seems like a problem (and it can be frightening to lose a job), but history has shown this to not be a very big problem because there is always demand for labor. Efficiencly like this may keep wages down, but this also keeps inflation down. If wages for everyone were to rise, so would the cost of goods...and there would be no real rise (just inflationary rise). The economy is more stable and the standards of living for the entire population are better specifically because these concerns are balanced.
Grandparent: "It has passed health care costs onto the taxpayers."
Parent: "There is no reason they need to be a charity, if the government wants to pay for health care, there is no reason they need to refuse to accept it. And just so you know almost all employers of low skilled workers are doing the same thing. It's not walmart, it's the economic situation."
While I don't necessarily disagree with the parent (Wal-Mart and government both have the choose to or to not offer healthcare), the parent ignores the error of the grandparent. Statistics show that a lot of Wal-Mart's employees are uninsured and on welfare, the same statistics also show that Wal-Mart actually reduces the number of people uninsured and on welfare. I think the grandparent and a lot of other anti-Wal-Mart persons look at the first part of the picture and ignore the latter.
It's a matter of choosing which stats/facts to focus on and if they are looked at in context. Here is a stat that a lot of people like to give...but, for some reason, without the context.
Stat: Wal-Mart employes the highest number of uninsured workers in a given state.
Context: Wal-Mart is the largest employer in this state. Wal-Mart is in the retail sector. The retail sector has some of the worst wages of any class of jobs in the US.
So, all this stat really says is that Wal-Mart is the largest retail employer in a given state. Big surprise. What people should want to know is if Wal-Mart's net effect is to take people on welfare roles or in uninsured status and improve their situation (take them off welfare, get them out of uninsured status).
The statistics show that Wal-Mart improves the situation of it's employees (job vs no job, higher wages than other retailers, better health care coverage than other retailers). I see this as positive. They're making goods cheaper for everyone (including their employees) and their employees are making more than they would elsewhere with the same skillset. It's a win/win.
"many domain owners are hiding their true identity [and could be] fronts for spammers, phishing gangs and other net criminals."
I hide my mailing address and use a rarely-checked email address to reduce the SPAM and physical junk mail I have to deal with. The scammers/SPAMmers don't want me to know who they are...I want to limit the information they have about me. Go figure.
I would run to the store to buy a disc that has ALL of the Simpsons episodes in HD (assuming the series ends at some point and thus "all" is not a moving targt)...or maybe seasons 1-10 then 11-20 (later...and so on) on single disks. Same would be true for others and the Sopranos or some other hit show or content they really like.
Sorry, you can hold all of those things(chemistry, particle physics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity) and still be honestly skeptical of macroevolution. There are MANY scientists who would agree, as they fit into this category.
While his replacement will also be right-of-center, Bush strongly rewards neo-con views. The replacement is likely to support further strengthening federal power and diluting that of individual States.
As a libertarian who voted for Bush both times, this was one of my biggest fears (along with his inability to veto spending). However, this particular fear has somewhat subsided with the nomination of Roberts, who I get the impression would associate most-strongly with the Federalist Society, if doing so weren't political suicide. In other words, I get the impression that Roberts would limit federal power (limit use of commerce clause as a catch-all excuse for federal involvement), not expand it.
Roberts seems to be a "classical/paleo conservative" (otherwise known as a "classical liberal" in the US or a "liberal" in Europe), not a neo-con. If the next person appointed by Bush is even half as good as Roberts he'll be better than 6/7ths of the existing court.
I'm sure there are also lots of procedural advantages that are mostly invisible to outsiders, like maybe he gets to decide who talks first in deliberations or something.
I believe this is true, but Rehnquist didn't use this power to his "advantage." He used it to setup a system for discussing/debating cases within the SCOTUS: The senior justice gets to speak first, then the next-senior, etc. Nobody is allowed to interrupt, and nobody can speak a second time until everyone has spoken. He really used this authority to bring structure and civility to the court (even in these private discussions). Let's hope the next Chief Justice is wise enough to do similar.
"People aren't telling you that you have to accept or believe evolution, just that if you are going to claim its wrong, you put your money where you mouth is and show us your proof."
These people are making the same logical fallacy. Just because the error is being repeated by many people doesn't mean the error ceases to be an error.
You ask for proof evolution is wrong, but I'm not trying to prove that, nor was the person being interviewed. Even though I consider your post a troll, I'll bite a little. Here is some evidence (can't prove evolution is wrong any more than you can prove it's correct) against macroevolution:
The "Theory of evolution" assumes macroevolution occurred billions of times.
1. Macroevolution has never been observed.
2. Two instances of essentially identical macroevoltion would have had to occur simultaniously (within a period shorter than the lifespan of a given species) for even one non-asexual species to have survived (create offspring). One would think macroevolution would be more common than it is for these simultanious events to happen the billions of times necessary for the diversity of life.
3. There are not billions upon billions of intermediate fossles as evidence of this (there are a hand-full, which are themselves disputable).
Regardless, the burden of proof for evolution is on those claiming it, not those questioning it...and putting it anywhere else is a fallacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Second, I don't think that people are out to screw me personally. At least most people that is. But I do believe that humans take the path of least resistance.
Bingo. I am not part of the crowd that downloads music/books I haven't paid for (unless offered by their creator for free), yet I understand that business models in this realm must take human nature into account when setting pricing. You have displayed an understanding of applicable human nature.
Simply put, you need to find a balance where people who value your book enough to pay for it can find it at a price they find reasonable. If you price the book too high, you will lose sales/income to piracy. On the other end if you price it at the cost of publication very few people will pirate, but you'll make nothing. The aim, therefore, is to set pricing where the product of volume times gross margin is highest.
Also, don't be fooled into thinking that intellectual value or degree/amount of effort translates directly into economic value of the work (as individual copies or when multiplying price times volume). Because your book is great doesn't mean it is worth 5x the price of a novel. That your market is smaller doesn't make it worth more per copy either. Economic value is literally that - what people are willing to pay. I find it absurd that autobiographies by former presidents have higher economic value than books like yours, but that is, well, the ugly truth.
Lastly, on suing people. Even on Slashdot I think you'll find most people would be supportive of suing businesses or individuals who are making money by selling illegitimate copies. Such a commercial benefit puts them squarely in the wrong legally and morally. To sue them or not depends on to what degree you're willing to sue them out of principle (to deter this practice) and how much return you might get from such.
On the other hand, suing your "customers" is a very bad idea. Even if you can extort some $$ from them, I would avoid suing people who are interested in your work but have obtained it via other means because, to them, they found it more reasonable to do something which is likely immoral and may have taken more effort, than pay the price you set.
I agree this is a DNS setting issue. Once the tunnel is nailed up the host's DNS settings should be changed to use internal DNS servers (only, or at least first). With most of the VPN products I've seen there are config options to control this behavior (client DNS) in this type of a scenario (when host is allowed to send network traffic via local network while connected).
(I used to be the technical lead for remote access for a Fortune 100 company. Our VPNs were used by over 100k employees/contractors.)
I'd like to see Lightroom work on Linux. It's the one app keeping me on Windows. And when I say "work on Linux" I mean that Adobe should sell a Linux version (not Windows version + Wine).
I tried F-Spot, and could live with most of it's rough edges, but I found it to be much slower than Lightroom and there was one rough edge (changing of EXIF timestamps on import) that I couldn't live with and I didn't have confidence it would be resolved (open bug / feature request has existed for years without resolution) and I'm not in a position to change that personally.
You might consider one of these:
MV2010: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE592AV%2523ABA
MV2020: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE591AV%2523ABA
EX470: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG795AA%2523ABA
EX475: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG796AA%2523ABA
I have the MV2010 myself and am happy with it. There is a yahoo user group for it, a detailed unofficial FAQ by one of the people on the product team, and I think there are some hobbiests developing various extra (unofficial/unsupported) capabilities for it.
It's a non-issue if they used a "Digital Audio Recording Device" and the CD-R was a "Digital Audio Recording Medium." I have such a device and use the slightly-more-expensive "music" CD-Rs when I make CDs for friends/family/myself (i.e. to have copy in car). I am exempt from infringement actions (I can't be prosecuted/sued for copyright infringement) for such activities. If they, like me, acted within the Home Audio Recording Act there is no story here...just FUD.
Why?
...
Paying the fine so they can get their connection back isn't stupid. It's a necessity.
The stupidity is in getting disconnected in the first place.
Ted Nugent has a little more common sense than Jack Thomson when it comes to finding things that contributed to this event...
t /index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/19/commentary.nugen
"You would have to be an idiot to buy anything security-related from a company like that."
The article mentions it's "approved by the French intelligence service" - lol.
Exifer and jhead used together can be great. I received copies of digital photos from a friend's wedding, taken by a professional using two DSLRs. They were REALLY out of order because of file name mis-match, so I named them as yyyymmdd-hhmmss-[c1/c2].jpg using exifer, based on the date/time picture was taken. That put them almost in order, but the cameras were obviously off by at least 10 minutes. So, I picked the one that seemed to have had it's time set more accurately (c1) and used that as a baseline. I was able to find pictures from both cameras that would have been taken within a second or two of eachother and used that offset as an input into jhead to modify the timestamp for pics taken by the other camera (c2). I then re-renamed them using the same format and the result was a directory of pictures sorted in order.
Of course, if you're a pro photographer you can skip the jhead portion if you just remember to set the cameras' internal clocks to the same (accurate) time...but not all pros are pros.
"Their paper trail has a really nice feature in that it also prints a bar code for a quick machine recount of the ballots as well as a human readable output."
If it's as you describe and the votes are recorded for the machine in a separate bar code from the human-readable portion, well, that's just stupid as the human can only verify the human-readable portion (can't verify that the bar code is also correct). The human-readable portion should be what the machine reads, not some bar code...as stated in the Wired article, "the machine prints the votes onto a full-size paper ballot."
Problem with all this is that the machine used to fill out the ballot is overkill for a vast majority of the population. The exact same paper trail (bubbles filled in on full-size ballot) can be achieved by using a pen to fill in the bubbles. So, the perfect voting center would have a small number of these machines (enough to handle those with special needs) and a ton of those fold-up writing stations with cardboard privacy walls and a pen for the masses of people for whom that works fine...then feed all of the ballots (filled out by computer or human) through a reader that tallies the votes and is audited for accuracy. It's simple, accurate, and has a lot of bandwidth/throughput (number of people who can vote at center in a given time) per dollar so folks don't have to wait around or have their tax dollars wasted on an unnecessary number of machines.
It's not the device that's expensive (though it can be) - it's the service. $20/month (unless you pre-pay for years at a time or commit to having their service for years) is nothing to shake a stick at. It's pretty clear they make money on the service - which is why you can get free TiVo boxes from TiVo. I can't believe people pay this kind of money for electronic programming listings. Then again I'm not the type to waste my money on cable TV, satellite TV, a TiVo, etc.
The Prius is sold at a loss, the Civic is sold at a profit...the percent difference in manufactuing costs is more than what is apparent by looking at their price tags.
I priced one in the US with all options and it came out to around $70k (so I think your $85k is a little high) but the supercharged version starts under $50k. They sell it as a kit car, so it won't be a problem to get it registered in most states.
Brammo motors is the licensed manufacturer of the Atom for the US. They are supposedly going to be cheaper, but they haven't found a Honda powerplant for the 300HP version that they can source reliably or sell as of yet.
They (generally) use a GM engine in the US for the 300HP version...but the Honda engine is still occasionally available. Text of an email I received from them a month ago is below...
Grandparent: Walmart doesn't give the very best health benefits. But it beats having unemployment and medicaid.
Parent: False duality. The choices are not 1. Wal-Mart exists, lots of people have low pay and bad health benefits, and 2. Wal-mart does not exist, those same people are all unemployed. There is also 3. Wal-Mart gives better health benefits.
Me: Wal-Mart actually does #3. It gives much better health benefits than are the norm for the retail industry.
"So, why is it that when Wal*Mart does this, it's 'heinous,' but when an NFL franchise does it, the country looks the other way?"
It's horrible when anyone does it - NFL or Wal-Mart. Looking at the post I imagine "Rocketship Underpant (804162)" is near my political leanings (at least on this issue, but likely on other things as well). The groups I'm familiar with that fight for property-rights do so whether it's Wal-Mart, the NFL, or Habitat for Humanity that is unjustly taking property from others for private use/ownership via eminent domain.
It's 100% wrong and unethical, even if they're able to accomplish it via legal means...and we should try to stop EVERY instance of it (just just Wal-Mart).
I also agree with the grandparent that a lot of the other crap hurled at Wal-Mart is just that...crap.
"To be sure, there are a lot of poor, arbitrary, or economically inaccurate accusations hurled at Wal-Mart, the 'evil corporation that steals jobs from Americans' (for example). Some people have probably reasoned out their arguments; most haven't."
Wal-Mart is one of the very best in their industry (retail) in terms of pay and benefits...yet they're attacked by people who want good pay and benefits for others. These folks shoul should recognize and support Wal-Mart's leadership in this area, even if (or especially if) they desire more. Also, focusing on issues where Wal-Mart is comparitavely good generates a lot of noise which drounds out and draws attention away from activities of theirs that ARE REALLY BAD (like misuse of eminent domain).
"Besides the difficulty of quantifying the problem, there's also the issue that job loss affects a few people very severely, while price cuts benefit a whole lot of people much more modestly. How do you balance those concerns?"
The same arguement can be made against productivity gains and specialization of labor. How can we justify replacing a room full of people manually calculating figures, typing documents, etc with a computer and a printer? How can we justify having a tractor plant/harvest food crops instead of paying a bunch of workers to do this manual labor in the field? How, in the first place, did we get to having "farm hands" instead of having everyone hunt/gether/farm for themselves?
1. If you can reach the same result using less resources (money and/or people), you can use those now-surplus resources to effect another result.
2. If 15 households spend $2000/year less on goods (because Wal-Mart reduced the number of people necessary to service those folks by one and is passing the savings along), that's $30,000 those families have in aggregate to spend on something else. Aggregate this across an entire nation of folks and that's a lot of money that will be spent on other activities (home improvement, other goods, entertainment, etc) that will in turn employ other people.
3. There is also some correlation to game theory... If company A doesn't keep it's costs in line, another company will and will have a competitive advantage.
Long ago the output of 100 people was probably enough food for 200 people. Now, those same 100 people produce a lot more (maybe 10 produce food, 10 produce computers, 10 produce cars, 10 produce fancy houses, 10 produce fancy clothing and furniture, etc). The standard of living for all of these people go up because of specialization of labor and productivity gains. They all still get fed, but now they get more than just food. Each sector competes against itself to keep it's costs low. In this process resources are released to move where there is demand for them.
It seems like a problem (and it can be frightening to lose a job), but history has shown this to not be a very big problem because there is always demand for labor. Efficiencly like this may keep wages down, but this also keeps inflation down. If wages for everyone were to rise, so would the cost of goods...and there would be no real rise (just inflationary rise). The economy is more stable and the standards of living for the entire population are better specifically because these concerns are balanced.
Grandparent: "It has passed health care costs onto the taxpayers."
Parent: "There is no reason they need to be a charity, if the government wants to pay for health care, there is no reason they need to refuse to accept it. And just so you know almost all employers of low skilled workers are doing the same thing. It's not walmart, it's the economic situation."
While I don't necessarily disagree with the parent (Wal-Mart and government both have the choose to or to not offer healthcare), the parent ignores the error of the grandparent. Statistics show that a lot of Wal-Mart's employees are uninsured and on welfare, the same statistics also show that Wal-Mart actually reduces the number of people uninsured and on welfare. I think the grandparent and a lot of other anti-Wal-Mart persons look at the first part of the picture and ignore the latter.
It's a matter of choosing which stats/facts to focus on and if they are looked at in context. Here is a stat that a lot of people like to give...but, for some reason, without the context.
Stat: Wal-Mart employes the highest number of uninsured workers in a given state.
Context: Wal-Mart is the largest employer in this state. Wal-Mart is in the retail sector. The retail sector has some of the worst wages of any class of jobs in the US.
So, all this stat really says is that Wal-Mart is the largest retail employer in a given state. Big surprise. What people should want to know is if Wal-Mart's net effect is to take people on welfare roles or in uninsured status and improve their situation (take them off welfare, get them out of uninsured status).
The statistics show that Wal-Mart improves the situation of it's employees (job vs no job, higher wages than other retailers, better health care coverage than other retailers). I see this as positive. They're making goods cheaper for everyone (including their employees) and their employees are making more than they would elsewhere with the same skillset. It's a win/win.
"many domain owners are hiding their true identity [and could be] fronts for spammers, phishing gangs and other net criminals."
I hide my mailing address and use a rarely-checked email address to reduce the SPAM and physical junk mail I have to deal with. The scammers/SPAMmers don't want me to know who they are...I want to limit the information they have about me. Go figure.
I would run to the store to buy a disc that has ALL of the Simpsons episodes in HD (assuming the series ends at some point and thus "all" is not a moving targt)...or maybe seasons 1-10 then 11-20 (later...and so on) on single disks. Same would be true for others and the Sopranos or some other hit show or content they really like.
This announcement simply reveals the local (to Europe) details of the larger (global) layoffs announced earlier, not a new set/round of layoffs.
Sorry, you can hold all of those things(chemistry, particle physics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity) and still be honestly skeptical of macroevolution. There are MANY scientists who would agree, as they fit into this category.
While his replacement will also be right-of-center, Bush strongly rewards neo-con views. The replacement is likely to support further strengthening federal power and diluting that of individual States.
As a libertarian who voted for Bush both times, this was one of my biggest fears (along with his inability to veto spending). However, this particular fear has somewhat subsided with the nomination of Roberts, who I get the impression would associate most-strongly with the Federalist Society, if doing so weren't political suicide. In other words, I get the impression that Roberts would limit federal power (limit use of commerce clause as a catch-all excuse for federal involvement), not expand it.
Roberts seems to be a "classical/paleo conservative" (otherwise known as a "classical liberal" in the US or a "liberal" in Europe), not a neo-con. If the next person appointed by Bush is even half as good as Roberts he'll be better than 6/7ths of the existing court.
I'm sure there are also lots of procedural advantages that are mostly invisible to outsiders, like maybe he gets to decide who talks first in deliberations or something.
I believe this is true, but Rehnquist didn't use this power to his "advantage." He used it to setup a system for discussing/debating cases within the SCOTUS: The senior justice gets to speak first, then the next-senior, etc. Nobody is allowed to interrupt, and nobody can speak a second time until everyone has spoken. He really used this authority to bring structure and civility to the court (even in these private discussions). Let's hope the next Chief Justice is wise enough to do similar.
"And your arguing is what, an Ad Hominem?"
Pointing out a logical fallacy in one's supposed rebuttal is hardly ad hominem (an attack on the person). It is an attack on the statement/argument.
"Let me partake also."
Sorry, I didn't see where you attacked me as a person. An ad hominem (so you have a good example to reference) would be something like this:
Where did you learn about logic and critical thinking? Let me guess: Nowhere (i.e. you never learned about these).
"People aren't telling you that you have to accept or believe evolution, just that if you are going to claim its wrong, you put your money where you mouth is and show us your proof."
These people are making the same logical fallacy. Just because the error is being repeated by many people doesn't mean the error ceases to be an error.
You ask for proof evolution is wrong, but I'm not trying to prove that, nor was the person being interviewed. Even though I consider your post a troll, I'll bite a little. Here is some evidence (can't prove evolution is wrong any more than you can prove it's correct) against macroevolution:
The "Theory of evolution" assumes macroevolution occurred billions of times.
1. Macroevolution has never been observed.
2. Two instances of essentially identical macroevoltion would have had to occur simultaniously (within a period shorter than the lifespan of a given species) for even one non-asexual species to have survived (create offspring). One would think macroevolution would be more common than it is for these simultanious events to happen the billions of times necessary for the diversity of life.
3. There are not billions upon billions of intermediate fossles as evidence of this (there are a hand-full, which are themselves disputable).
Regardless, the burden of proof for evolution is on those claiming it, not those questioning it...and putting it anywhere else is a fallacy.