I could mention the utter pointlessness of putting phone numbers and addresses on facebook to begin with, no matter how private you have it, because everyone who's already your super duper bestest friends probably already have that information. But apparently you can't make sense out of human nature. People can instruct their children time and again to not take candy from strangers, but as soon as the icecream truck rolls by, hoardes of kids come chasing it down. Well, of course we don't mean THAT stranger.. we mean all the OTHER strangers. Of course, on facebook, who's really a stranger? If you have 1000 facebook "friends", how many of those are really FRIENDS. In fact, how many of them do you really know at all? Yet you freely fork over your personal details to those people... because they're "friends".
So what does it really matter if facebook is going to introduce one more potentially privacy threatening interface? The people who would be affected by it don't really care much about their privacy anyway. Everyone else is smart enough to not HAVE any private contact information on there in the first place. So.. yeah.. carry on. Nothing to see here.
Of course, history is full of perfectly good examples where we teamed up with one bad guy to help defeat a worse (or sometimes not) bad guy. Stalin was more of a sadistic mass murderer than Hitler was, by some accounts, and political fallout from that arrangement led to 40 years of itchy fingers on big red buttons and bouncing all over the world getting our troops (involuntarily) involved in one war after another, which led to us giving aid and support to the same people and groups that we're fighting an all-out war with today. The hindsight is obvious of course. We can see everywhere we went wrong. But then again, what if we ventured another way. What if we just re-armed after Pearl Harbor and kept an eye out for future Japanese attacks? What if we just wished England the best of luck and closed our borders. We might have avoided all of the cold war and all of the fallout from it. Maybe Hitler and Stalin would have just wiped each other out and left the rest of the world in Peace. Maybe... but I doubt it.
But just think.. the whole Israel vs the rest of the middle east thing could have been avoided. All the jews would be dead. Europe would still have a single currency and government run healthcare, that nobody would ever complain about. No Vietnam, no hippies, no cheap TV sets and cars, ALL of our oil would be drilled domestically, because the rest of the world would hate us, for entirely different reasons than they claim to hate us today. The world would never know nuclear war... at least not until someone else discovered it and decided to use our country as a testing ground. Probably no space program, no gps, no satellite TV, no google maps... probably no Internet at all, since most of these things came about as a fringe benefit of the various military engagements we were involved in.
In the end, history is just that. History. You can't change it, and even if you could, you might not want to. You're better off just learning from it, and attempting to avoid the same mistakes in the future.
The difference there is the fact that if you could land ANYWHERE, there was a decent (albeit difficult) chance that you could live off the land. Many of the first pilgrims left with that exact goal in mind, never intending to return.
Mars is a different story though. There is NOTHING there. About the only remotely useful local resource is CO2. Anything else we'd have to bring with us. That doesn't mean we couldn't bring enough to be self-sustaining. The various biosphere type projects were an effort to prove that possibility. However, it would require a LOT of infrastructure to make even one person self sustaining, let alone a colony. While I think there might actually be support to send a permanent colony there (they can't come back, but they'll be able to live out their natural lives and still communicate with us, with the eventual hope that future technology would make returning them easier), I don't think anyone would support a mission which would last only a few months or years followed by death as an absolute certainty.
As far as the psychological angle goes, I'm sure there are plenty of perfectly well adjusted people that would still find a life-long adventure to be a worthy pursuit. I personally would question the sanity of people that jump out of perfectly good airplanes, but I realize that most of them are perfectly sane. Well, this would just be a higher-order of daredevil activity. Of course there will be takers. Some people will do ANYTHING.
There is no such rule. Politicians will generally sell their interest in companies or industries that might present a conflict of interest with their job, but if all they own are widely diversified mutual funds, about the only possible interest they would have is to ensure that the economy continues to improve, and you're unlikely to find ANY American who's against that stance.
The problem most people see with a single queue is that the line is LONG. Our minds have issues thinking of the fact that 4 lines with 4 people waiting each is the same as one line with 16 people waiting. We also give up the illusion of choice with the longer line. With multiple lines, we can look at the quantity of products in the baskets, the perceived speed of the cashier, if there's a second employee at that register helping to bag groceries, etc. Of course, none of that matters if one of the people you're stuck behind is trying to pay with food stamps and has selected the wrong size of product, and needs to run back quickly to exchange it with the correct size.... or if someone's check won't read, or whatnot.
The other issue with a longer line is that you need space for it. Fry's is set up to handle the long queues, but look how much space that whole arrangement takes up, not to mention the fact that people at fry's don't tend to purchase 100 small items, which fascilitate the need for a conveyor belt and bagging system. The grocery store probably couldn't get away with much less space for the registers than they're already using, so providing space for a long queue would require them to take in more of the store for that purpose. Best they can do easily is provide the express lanes (which would work even faster if they only accepted cash).
It doesn't appear that they're cutting the foundation itself, or even any money that the foundation is able to grant. They're instead focusing more on who's getting the grants and why and if any of them are deemed wasteful (of which I have no doubt), those grants would then be available to other more worthy causes. It's highly unlikely that the budget will ever be less than it was the year before, no matter WHO is in charge of Congress. And in all fairness, it doesn't really matter. If they simply refuse to let the budget grow, we'll be in surplus territory in a few years as tax revenue will continue to increase each year to catch up with it. Getting more efficient with the spending will help as well, even if the actual money spent isn't any less. So much of that money is spent on resources and positions that simply aren't necessary, or wouldn't be necessary with a bit of overhaul. The government could easily operate for the next decade at least, if not longer, on the current budget, just by doing some routine overhaul to the system itself.
Do effects companies ever turn down work? Good actors will turn down work, because they don't want their name associated with some piece of crap.
It's not QUITE the same thing. A "good actor" who clears 20+ million a year can afford to turn down a crappy movie, because they don't HAVE to do it, and there are 10+ good movies about to be produced, the directors of which are eagerly trying to sign the actor for less than half the projected budget of the movie. However, for every good actor that turns down a crappy movie role, there are 100 up and coming stars who are knocking each other over in sheer desperation hoping to get it.
A effect company, however, probably doesn't really care if the movie itself sucks, as long as the effects turn out well. Nobody's first bad impression of the new Star Wars movies is that the effects suck. The effects are great. It's just the story, actors, direction, dialog, marketing, etc... that suck. ILM isn't losing any sleep over Lucas's failure to produce movies that are as epic as he hyped them to be. The criteria for an effects company would most likely be "how much are you going to pay us?" and "will your check clear?"
I played (and greatly enjoyed) GTA:SA. Among many of the amusing anticdotes in the game, were the many MANY references to popular culture. You had all of your rap music references, many movie references, rednecks, Area 51, junkies, the mafia, the CIA, the military, and countless others. And the main character has to embark on a great adventure that winds through a complex story that ties all of these elements together in the most rediculously unrealistic way possible, and mow down a few hookers while he's at it. I don't even know of any FICTIONAL character's life for which the entire story could apply to, let alone someone who's real. But hey, Rockstar has a lot of money, and those lawyers need to get fed.
Does this mean that EA is going to stop producing the Sims games? They don't have much of a multiplayer feature to speak of, and they certainly have more than 25 hours of playability. That kinda flys in the face of the "single-player is dead" philosophy, but is it just an exception to the rule as far as they're concerned?
I've got an idea. Those who want to fix what they perceive as a problem this week (namely global warming caused by CO2 gas emissions), should provide a solution that will fix their problem without negatively impacting anyone who's uninterested in playing along. This means, design, develop, and produce a vehicle that doesn't emit CO2, that will travel 300+ miles on a single charge, that will recharge in 10 minutes or less, and will cost the same or less (both at the time of purchase and over the life of the vehicle) than any currently available gas powered vehicle in the same class. If you do that, your problem will be solved as nobody will have any reason to continue using the gas powered vehicles as the alternatives are a better deal.
The same applies to any other technology for which you wish to replace a dirty method with a green one. Make the green one more economically appealing, and you won't even have to tell anyone about it. It'll just happen. All the money, time, effort, and research spent over the course of decades that is hoping to lobby governments to force their citizens to convert at a great financial burden, could instead be spent to lower the economic impact threshold of the alternative technologies such that people would knocking each other over to get a chance to be part of the green movement. It doesn't matter what the consequences are, people in mass will not be willing to sacrifice based only on the good natured intentions of a bunch of (perceived) hippies and government mandate. Politicians get voted out of office for less.
So, there's your solution. You need a better mousetrap. Good hunting!
Actually, you CAN buy them, but you'd need to go through a background check, extensive paperwork, get approval from local law enforcement, pay a special registration tax on each one... and of course, you'd need a good reason for needing one in the first place, which it's highly unlikely any civilian will have. But if you can clear those roadblocks, have at!
You get permission. In writing. IN ADVANCE. Unless your idea is so unusual or unique that it can't reasonably be considered to be a direct derivative of some other copyrighted creative work, your best bet is to feel out those who might complain about it before its an issue. If they say no, you simply move on to the next idea, without losing any time, money or resources. While the world has spent the last couple of decades jumping on the multi-ghz 3D-everything bandwagon with regards to games, a lot of the simpler classic games have fallen off the radar, and yet the copyright and trademark owners have maintained and enforced them, because there's a good chance those old concepts will gain some new life in the handheld/portable/phone market, where they would never again see light on the desktop.
Besides, Pac-Man has had a long and colorful history of infringement lawsuits related to it. It's a field of landmines best left avoided.
Actually, this would be the proper time for the defense to prove that he did not in fact break the law. The jury has one purpose. They are to be educated on the law that the prosecution says the defendant broke, and then decide if he actually broke that law. They're not supposed to decide if the law is "fair" or not. That's what legislatures and supreme courts do. Not juries. And while we all love to think that by some divine coincidence a jury will be selected that all agree the laws were broken, but decide to acquit anyway, remember that the same bogus legal concept also works, and has worked, in less desirable situations, or do you want a return to the pre-civil rights days where a black man couldn't get a fair trial with a white jury, no matter how well defended he was. If someday you are the victim of a crime, would you want the jury to acquit the suspect because for some reason they think you deserved it?
All jury nullification is really good for is as a concept you express during the panel selection process to hope that you get struck from the pool.
The purchaser is legally required to pay a use tax if he purchases something without paying sales tax. People don't generally do this, and they will usually get away with it unless the comptroller has some other reason to some sniffing around. If you're running a business, however, those use taxes are likely going to add up on you, especially if you deduct the purchases as expenses on your income tax, you'd best be sure to pay the use tax on it.
The fact of the matter is, until very recently, this hasn't been an issue to even bother with. Sure, we had mail-order before the Internet, but lets face it, most people would buy stuff that was sold within a few miles of where they live (as in, the same state), so they paid sales taxes, and if you randomly roll the dice and do a sales tax audit on some random Joe, 4 times out of 5, the most you're going to be able to come up with is the $1.12 cents they owe in use taxes on some fungal spray they ordered through a catalog when the local store didn't have the brand they wanted. Now with all the e-commerce and ebay and such, it's much more likely that the average resident has ordered a significant amount of stuff from out of state, and that adds up to quite a chunk of change, especially if you consider that it's all in the form of lost sales in the local economy. So occasionally you get a state that tries to do something to make up some of that difference... like requiring an e-retailer to submit a customer order list so they know who needs harassing. Naturally, the retailer, in the interests of good PR if nothing else, will resist any such attempt.
Ultimately, it will likely boil down to some requirement that all online retailers in a state charge the sales tax for that state, and keep it there, and as long as every state does it, it will work out. Of course, that requires all states to cooperate, and you know there will be one or two that figure they can benefit more if they don't have the sales tax requirement and watch all the web stores move into their state, bringing all the jobs and other benefits with them. Then again, maybe each of the states sees that already and would prefer things just stay as they are. Just as long as we all get to grumble about it from time to time.
I guess I can understand someone who works by traveling all the time, who has to schedule weeks or months in advance, a jury summons can provide a major financial hardship, not only for the one called to serve, but the business that he works for. However, most people, especially the ones with typical 9 to 5 jobs, should have no trouble attending jury duty. Heck, I wish they'd call me more often. I get to sit in a courtroom for a couple hours, until they either assign me to a panel or decide they don't need me. If they don't need me, I get to spend the rest of the day at home, and I still get a full day's pay from my job (in addition to the pittance that I get paid for jury duty itself). If I were to get selected for a jury, I'd get paid my full wages for each day the trial lasts (up to 2 weeks), PLUS an extra $50 a day. I personally think it'd be an interesting experience to actually get on a jury. I wouldn't want to be on one for months at a time, but doing that for a week instead of going to my day job would be a welcome change of pace. Oh well.
While a strong third party system would be a nice idea, it's simply politically unrealistic. Like it or not, until a third party can reliably capture 33% of the vote, any vote for such a candidate is practically equivalent to voting for the party you oppose. As monumental a task as it would be, it would be far easier to completely reform one of the two major parties (either one of them), than to bring a third party to power with sufficient numbers to actually make a difference.
However, with a 40 year plan in mind, you MIGHT make some headway if you can find a large number of people who want NEITHER major party in power any longer. That poses some difficulties though, because most people will at least politically align themselves with one party or the other to some extent. They might hate one party, but they hate the other one more. That sort of thing. So to politically align yourself with a third party will likely mean that you will share at least SOME ideals with one party or the other. It'd be difficult to form a party that has nothing in common with either republicans or democrats and still get a majority of people to vote that way. A political party dedicated solely to the murder of kittens would be such an example, but you're not going to get many takers.... unless, of course, you can find a lot of people that REALLY hate cats. What would psychotic felinicide have to with politics? Nothing at all. But cat haters just might be willing to vote on that issue alone and disregard everything else. Of course, that's not an issue most people would be willing to get behind. So find another. Something that is so precious to enough people that they would be willing to disregard EVERY OTHER ISSUE just to be sure that the supporting party gets elected. Junkies would probably support drug legalization as such an issue, but there aren't enough of them, and besides, you'd have to get them to show up to vote. Perhaps WOW addicts could be united against any anti-video game push.
Or you could try to find some issue that would appeal to the 50% of people that don't vote at all. They seem to be pretty apathetic about the political state of affairs as it is, so there's no party loyalty to get in the way. However, if they're too apathetic to vote NOW, what issue could possibly change all of that? The secret to the success of a third party system relies in solving these puzzles. Good luck!
I don't expect the number of kids playing the forbidden games to go down, just a change in their method of obtaining them. Of course, if the kids are playing them NOW, they probably don't have parents that care a great deal, and those parents are unlikely to object greatly to acting as a filter for the purchase.
And for those situations for which piracy is an option (every non-online PC game), expect it to be exploited more often than it might have been in the past. More and more games are also sold online, for direct digital distribution. How does the law apply in that case? Even if some method of adult verification is required, the possession of a credit card to purchase it is usually sufficient. Extremely resourceful children with uncooperative parents will be able to cash purchase a pre-paid debit card, populate it with whatever owner data they wish, and purchase the games with that..
Ultimately, this all boils down to the parents monitoring the activities of their children and rearing their children in the way they best see fit. If restricting violent video games is part of their parental ajenda, their involvement will have much more effect than any law will.
1. The SSD technology reduces in cost faster than the conventional drives do. At some point, it will become economically advantageous to switch, and it will happen en-masse. However, an order of magnitude in cost difference will keep most people from switching except for specific applications.
2. We reach a storage plateau. The point at which one has more HD space than they can possibly use or conceive of using. At that point, advances in the conventional HD storage will wane since increasing the size will no longer provide any significant advantage, and the base cost of construction isn't going to change. HOWEVER... I don't see this as particularly likely. If I could buy a 50 TB drive today, I'm sure I could find a way to fill it up in a short amount of time.
An incandescent bulb will, indeed. The heat from a typical bulb is enough to match the temperature of a stove on a lower setting, so certainly enough to cook on. However, the typical bulb is 60 to 100 watts. The USB port puts out a max of 2.5 watts. That's an order of magnitude less than even a CFL bulb, and those barely even get warm.
The point was that government is not very good at understanding technology, the benefits that it provides, and the fallout of any action to suppress it. We already tried this 14 years ago, banning "indecent" material on the internet. The problem is, they get something that looks good on paper and think the majority of citizens will get on board with, and pass it without even realizing how it will apply, who will be enforcing it, and if it's even workable. It's ok if you're specific. Ban child pornography. Fine. No problem there. It's already illegal to create, possess, sell, and transport, so tweaking those laws just to be sure that online dissemination will be illegal as well, to prevent lengthy courtroom battles debating the meaning of "possess" or "transport" when referring to online activities, is perfectly acceptable.
However, DISCUSSION of child pornography need not be banned, although it would be far too easy to draft legislation that would be vague enough to include that as well, and possibly even with that shortsighted intent. They might be thinking they want people to not be able to discuss the practice or techniques, but also will hit those who are attempting to prevent it, track it down and report it, parents worried about it, and don't even get me started about the 14 year old kids who fail to understand the meaning of "forever" on the internet. We already have enough problems in the guise of protecting the children. Misguided efforts in this regard end up just creating a solution in search of a problem. And there are plenty of "problems" to find.
What do I care if an executive makes more money? My ONLY concerns when grocery shopping is that I can find and afford what I want, and get out of there as quickly as possible. If I have 2 items and there's an open self-checkout station, why WOULDN'T I want to use that instead of waiting 5+ minutes in even the express line?
Of course, it only makes sense to do it if you have a small number of items. The checkers who don't have to wait for the voice prompt to scan the next item can blow through 100+ items a lot faster than I could. But I like having the choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I could mention the utter pointlessness of putting phone numbers and addresses on facebook to begin with, no matter how private you have it, because everyone who's already your super duper bestest friends probably already have that information. But apparently you can't make sense out of human nature. People can instruct their children time and again to not take candy from strangers, but as soon as the icecream truck rolls by, hoardes of kids come chasing it down. Well, of course we don't mean THAT stranger.. we mean all the OTHER strangers. Of course, on facebook, who's really a stranger? If you have 1000 facebook "friends", how many of those are really FRIENDS. In fact, how many of them do you really know at all? Yet you freely fork over your personal details to those people... because they're "friends".
So what does it really matter if facebook is going to introduce one more potentially privacy threatening interface? The people who would be affected by it don't really care much about their privacy anyway. Everyone else is smart enough to not HAVE any private contact information on there in the first place. So.. yeah.. carry on. Nothing to see here.
-Restil
Sure you don't get a say, but I find it a little surprising that the judge's recommendation was ignored.
It wasn't ignored. However, it's just a recommendation, not a mandate. If the judge didn't want him in prison, he should have probated the sentence.
-Restil
Of course, history is full of perfectly good examples where we teamed up with one bad guy to help defeat a worse (or sometimes not) bad guy. Stalin was more of a sadistic mass murderer than Hitler was, by some accounts, and political fallout from that arrangement led to 40 years of itchy fingers on big red buttons and bouncing all over the world getting our troops (involuntarily) involved in one war after another, which led to us giving aid and support to the same people and groups that we're fighting an all-out war with today. The hindsight is obvious of course. We can see everywhere we went wrong. But then again, what if we ventured another way. What if we just re-armed after Pearl Harbor and kept an eye out for future Japanese attacks? What if we just wished England the best of luck and closed our borders. We might have avoided all of the cold war and all of the fallout from it. Maybe Hitler and Stalin would have just wiped each other out and left the rest of the world in Peace. Maybe... but I doubt it.
But just think.. the whole Israel vs the rest of the middle east thing could have been avoided. All the jews would be dead. Europe would still have a single currency and government run healthcare, that nobody would ever complain about. No Vietnam, no hippies, no cheap TV sets and cars, ALL of our oil would be drilled domestically, because the rest of the world would hate us, for entirely different reasons than they claim to hate us today. The world would never know nuclear war... at least not until someone else discovered it and decided to use our country as a testing ground. Probably no space program, no gps, no satellite TV, no google maps... probably no Internet at all, since most of these things came about as a fringe benefit of the various military engagements we were involved in.
In the end, history is just that. History. You can't change it, and even if you could, you might not want to. You're better off just learning from it, and attempting to avoid the same mistakes in the future.
-Restil
The difference there is the fact that if you could land ANYWHERE, there was a decent (albeit difficult) chance that you could live off the land. Many of the first pilgrims left with that exact goal in mind, never intending to return.
Mars is a different story though. There is NOTHING there. About the only remotely useful local resource is CO2. Anything else we'd have to bring with us. That doesn't mean we couldn't bring enough to be self-sustaining. The various biosphere type projects were an effort to prove that possibility. However, it would require a LOT of infrastructure to make even one person self sustaining, let alone a colony. While I think there might actually be support to send a permanent colony there (they can't come back, but they'll be able to live out their natural lives and still communicate with us, with the eventual hope that future technology would make returning them easier), I don't think anyone would support a mission which would last only a few months or years followed by death as an absolute certainty.
As far as the psychological angle goes, I'm sure there are plenty of perfectly well adjusted people that would still find a life-long adventure to be a worthy pursuit. I personally would question the sanity of people that jump out of perfectly good airplanes, but I realize that most of them are perfectly sane. Well, this would just be a higher-order of daredevil activity. Of course there will be takers. Some people will do ANYTHING.
-Restil
There is no such rule. Politicians will generally sell their interest in companies or industries that might present a conflict of interest with their job, but if all they own are widely diversified mutual funds, about the only possible interest they would have is to ensure that the economy continues to improve, and you're unlikely to find ANY American who's against that stance.
-Restil
The problem most people see with a single queue is that the line is LONG. Our minds have issues thinking of the fact that 4 lines with 4 people waiting each is the same as one line with 16 people waiting. We also give up the illusion of choice with the longer line. With multiple lines, we
can look at the quantity of products in the baskets, the perceived speed of the cashier, if there's a second employee at that register helping to bag groceries, etc. Of course, none of that matters if one of the people you're stuck behind is trying to pay with food stamps and has selected the wrong size of product, and needs to run back quickly to exchange it with the correct size.... or if someone's check won't read, or whatnot.
The other issue with a longer line is that you need space for it. Fry's is set up to handle the long queues, but look how much space that whole arrangement takes up, not to mention the fact that people at fry's don't tend to purchase 100 small items, which fascilitate the need for a conveyor belt and bagging system. The grocery store probably couldn't get away with much less space for the registers than they're already using, so providing space for a long queue would require them to take in more of the store for that purpose. Best they can do easily is provide the express lanes (which would work even faster if they only accepted cash).
-Restil
It doesn't appear that they're cutting the foundation itself, or even any money that the foundation is able to grant. They're instead focusing more on who's getting the grants and why and if any of them are deemed wasteful (of which I have no doubt), those grants would then be available to other more worthy causes. It's highly unlikely that the budget will ever be less than it was the year before, no matter WHO is in charge of Congress. And in all fairness, it doesn't really matter. If they simply refuse to let the budget grow, we'll be in surplus territory in a few years as tax revenue will continue to increase each year to catch up with it. Getting more efficient with the spending will help as well, even if the actual money spent isn't any less. So much of that money is spent on resources and positions that simply aren't necessary, or wouldn't be necessary with a bit of overhaul. The government could easily operate for the next decade at least, if not longer, on the current budget, just by doing some routine overhaul to the system itself.
-Restil
Do effects companies ever turn down work? Good actors will turn down work, because they don't want their name associated with some piece of crap.
It's not QUITE the same thing. A "good actor" who clears 20+ million a year can afford to turn down a crappy movie, because they don't HAVE to do it, and there are 10+ good movies about to be produced, the directors of which are eagerly trying to sign the actor for less than half the projected budget of the movie. However, for every good actor that turns down a crappy movie role, there are 100 up and coming stars who are knocking each other over in sheer desperation hoping to get it.
A effect company, however, probably doesn't really care if the movie itself sucks, as long as the effects turn out well. Nobody's first bad impression of the new Star Wars movies is that the effects suck. The effects are great. It's just the story, actors, direction, dialog, marketing, etc... that suck. ILM isn't losing any sleep over Lucas's failure to produce movies that are as epic as he hyped them to be. The criteria for an effects company would most likely be "how much are you going to pay us?" and "will your check clear?"
I played (and greatly enjoyed) GTA:SA. Among many of the amusing anticdotes in the game, were the many MANY references to popular culture. You had all of your rap music references, many movie references, rednecks, Area 51, junkies, the mafia, the CIA, the military, and countless others. And the main character has to embark on a great adventure that winds through a complex story that ties all of these elements together in the most rediculously unrealistic way possible, and mow down a few hookers while he's at it. I don't even know of any FICTIONAL character's life for which the entire story could apply to, let alone someone who's real. But hey, Rockstar has a lot of money, and those lawyers need to get fed.
-Restil
Does this mean that EA is going to stop producing the Sims games? They don't have much of a multiplayer feature to speak of, and they certainly have more than 25 hours of playability. That kinda flys in the face of the "single-player is dead" philosophy, but is it just an exception to the rule as far as they're concerned?
-Restil
I've got an idea. Those who want to fix what they perceive as a problem this week (namely global warming caused by CO2 gas emissions), should provide a solution that will fix their problem without negatively impacting anyone who's uninterested in playing along. This means, design, develop, and produce a vehicle that doesn't emit CO2, that will travel 300+ miles on a single charge, that will recharge in 10 minutes or less, and will cost the same or less (both at the time of purchase and over the life of the vehicle) than any currently available gas powered vehicle in the same class. If you do that, your problem will be solved as nobody will have any reason to continue using the gas powered vehicles as the alternatives are a better deal.
The same applies to any other technology for which you wish to replace a dirty method with a green one. Make the green one more economically appealing, and you won't even have to tell anyone about it. It'll just happen. All the money, time, effort, and research spent over the course of decades that is hoping to lobby governments to force their citizens to convert at a great financial burden, could instead be spent to lower the economic impact threshold of the alternative technologies such that people would knocking each other over to get a chance to be part of the green movement. It doesn't matter what the consequences are, people in mass will not be willing to sacrifice based only on the good natured intentions of a bunch of (perceived) hippies and government mandate. Politicians get voted out of office for less.
So, there's your solution. You need a better mousetrap. Good hunting!
-Restil
Actually, insurance will likely cover it. The article only says that the government isn't going to be doing any compensating.
-Restil
Actually, you CAN buy them, but you'd need to go through a background check, extensive paperwork, get approval from local law enforcement, pay a special registration tax on each one... and of course, you'd need a good reason for needing one in the first place, which it's highly unlikely any civilian will have. But if you can clear those roadblocks, have at!
-Restil
You get permission. In writing. IN ADVANCE. Unless your idea is so unusual or unique that it can't reasonably be considered to be a direct derivative of some other copyrighted creative work, your best bet is to feel out those who might complain about it before its an issue. If they say no, you simply move on to the next idea, without losing any time, money or resources. While the world has spent the last couple of decades jumping on the multi-ghz 3D-everything bandwagon with regards to games, a lot of the simpler classic games have fallen off the radar, and yet the copyright and trademark owners have maintained and enforced them, because there's a good chance those old concepts will gain some new life in the handheld/portable/phone market, where they would never again see light on the desktop.
Besides, Pac-Man has had a long and colorful history of infringement lawsuits related to it. It's a field of landmines best left avoided.
-Restil
Actually, this would be the proper time for the defense to prove that he did not in fact break the law. The jury has one purpose. They are to be educated on the law that the prosecution says the defendant broke, and then decide if he actually broke that law. They're not supposed to decide if the law is "fair" or not. That's what legislatures and supreme courts do. Not juries. And while we all love to think that by some divine coincidence a jury will be selected that all agree the laws were broken, but decide to acquit anyway, remember that the same bogus legal concept also works, and has worked, in less desirable situations, or do you want a return to the pre-civil rights days where a black man couldn't get a fair trial with a white jury, no matter how well defended he was. If someday you are the victim of a crime, would you want the jury to acquit the suspect because for some reason they think you deserved it?
All jury nullification is really good for is as a concept you express during the panel selection process to hope that you get struck from the pool.
-Restil
The purchaser is legally required to pay a use tax if he purchases something without paying sales tax. People don't generally do this, and they will usually get away with it unless the comptroller has some other reason to some sniffing around. If you're running a business, however, those use taxes are likely going to add up on you, especially if you deduct the purchases as expenses on your income tax, you'd best be sure to pay the use tax on it.
The fact of the matter is, until very recently, this hasn't been an issue to even bother with. Sure, we had mail-order before the Internet, but lets face it, most people would buy stuff that was sold within a few miles of where they live (as in, the same state), so they paid sales taxes, and if you randomly roll the dice and do a sales tax audit on some random Joe, 4 times out of 5, the most you're going to be able to come up with is the $1.12 cents they owe in use taxes on some fungal spray they ordered through a catalog when the local store didn't have the brand they wanted. Now with all the e-commerce and ebay and such, it's much more likely that the average resident has ordered a significant amount of stuff from out of state, and that adds up to quite a chunk of change, especially if you consider that it's all in the form of lost sales in the local economy. So occasionally you get a state that tries to do something to make up some of that difference... like requiring an e-retailer to submit a customer order list so they know who needs harassing. Naturally, the retailer, in the interests of good PR if nothing else, will resist any such attempt.
Ultimately, it will likely boil down to some requirement that all online retailers in a state charge the sales tax for that state, and keep it there, and as long as every state does it, it will work out.
Of course, that requires all states to cooperate, and you know there will be one or two that figure they can benefit more if they don't have the sales tax requirement and watch all the web stores move into their state, bringing all the jobs and other benefits with them. Then again, maybe each of the states sees that already and would prefer things just stay as they are. Just as long as we all get to grumble about it from time to time.
-Restil
I guess I can understand someone who works by traveling all the time, who has to schedule weeks or months in advance, a jury summons can provide a major financial hardship, not only for the one called to serve, but the business that he works for. However, most people, especially the ones with typical 9 to 5 jobs, should have no trouble attending jury duty. Heck, I wish they'd call me more often. I get to sit in a courtroom for a couple hours, until they either assign me to a panel or decide they don't need me. If they don't need me, I get to spend the rest of the day at home, and I still get a full day's pay from my job (in addition to the pittance that I get paid for jury duty itself). If I were to get selected for a jury, I'd get paid my full wages for each day the trial lasts (up to 2 weeks), PLUS an extra $50 a day. I personally think it'd be an interesting experience to actually get on a jury. I wouldn't want to be on one for months at a time, but doing that for a week instead of going to my day job would be a welcome change of pace. Oh well.
-Restil
While a strong third party system would be a nice idea, it's simply politically unrealistic. Like it or not, until a third party can reliably capture 33% of the vote, any vote for such a candidate is practically equivalent to voting for the party you oppose. As monumental a task as it would be, it would be far easier to completely reform one of the two major parties (either one of them), than to bring a third party to power with sufficient numbers to actually make a difference.
However, with a 40 year plan in mind, you MIGHT make some headway if you can find a large number of people who want NEITHER major party in power any longer. That poses some difficulties though, because most people will at least politically align themselves with one party or the other to some extent. They might hate one party, but they hate the other one more. That sort of thing. So to politically align yourself with a third party will likely mean that you will share at least SOME ideals with one party or the other. It'd be difficult to form a party that has nothing in common with either republicans or democrats and still get a majority of people to vote that way. A political party dedicated solely to the murder of kittens would be such an example, but you're not going to get many takers.... unless, of course, you can find a lot of people that REALLY hate cats. What would psychotic felinicide have to with politics? Nothing at all. But cat haters just might be willing to vote on that issue alone and disregard everything else. Of course, that's not an issue most people would be willing to get behind. So find another. Something that is so precious to enough people that they would be willing to disregard EVERY OTHER ISSUE just to be sure that the supporting party gets elected. Junkies would probably support drug legalization as such an issue, but there aren't enough of them, and besides, you'd have to get them to show up to vote. Perhaps WOW addicts could be united against any anti-video game push.
Or you could try to find some issue that would appeal to the 50% of people that don't vote at all. They seem to be pretty apathetic about the political state of affairs as it is, so there's no party loyalty to get in the way. However, if they're too apathetic to vote NOW, what issue could possibly change all of that? The secret to the success of a third party system relies in solving these puzzles. Good luck!
-Restil
By that standard, they're probably making more than me.
-Restil
I don't expect the number of kids playing the forbidden games to go down, just a change in their method of obtaining them. Of course, if the kids are playing them NOW, they probably don't have parents that care a great deal, and those parents are unlikely to object greatly to acting as a filter for the purchase.
And for those situations for which piracy is an option (every non-online PC game), expect it to be exploited more often than it might have been in the past. More and more games are also sold online, for direct digital distribution. How does the law
apply in that case? Even if some method of adult verification is required, the possession of a credit card to purchase it is usually sufficient. Extremely resourceful children with uncooperative parents will be able to cash purchase a pre-paid debit card, populate it with whatever owner data they wish, and purchase the games with that..
Ultimately, this all boils down to the parents monitoring the activities of their children and rearing their children in the way they best see fit. If restricting violent video games is part of their parental ajenda, their involvement will have much more effect than any law will.
-Restil
When one of two things happen:
1. The SSD technology reduces in cost faster than the conventional drives do. At some point, it will become economically advantageous to switch, and it will happen en-masse. However, an order of magnitude in cost difference will keep most people from switching except for specific applications.
2. We reach a storage plateau. The point at which one has more HD space than they can possibly use or conceive of using. At that point, advances in the conventional HD storage will wane since increasing the size will no longer provide any significant advantage, and the base cost of construction isn't going to change. HOWEVER... I don't see this as particularly likely. If I could buy a 50 TB drive today, I'm sure I could find a way to fill it up in a short amount of time.
-Restil
An incandescent bulb will, indeed. The heat from a typical bulb is enough to match the temperature of a stove on a lower setting, so certainly enough to cook on. However, the typical bulb is 60 to 100 watts. The USB port puts out a max of 2.5 watts. That's an order of magnitude less than even a CFL bulb, and those barely even get warm.
Yeah, that pretty well describes EVERYTHING on TV. What's your point?
The point was that government is not very good at understanding technology, the benefits that it provides, and the fallout of any action to suppress it. We already tried this 14 years ago, banning "indecent" material on the internet. The problem is, they get something that looks good on paper and think the majority of citizens will get on board with, and pass it without even realizing how it will apply, who will be enforcing it, and if it's even workable. It's ok if you're specific. Ban child pornography. Fine. No problem there. It's already illegal to create, possess, sell, and transport, so tweaking those laws just to be sure that online dissemination will be illegal as well, to prevent lengthy courtroom battles debating the meaning of "possess" or "transport" when referring to online activities, is perfectly acceptable.
However, DISCUSSION of child pornography need not be banned, although it would be far too easy to draft legislation that would be vague enough to include that as well, and possibly even with that shortsighted intent. They might be thinking they want people to not be able to discuss the practice or techniques, but also will hit those who are attempting to prevent it, track it down and report it, parents worried about it, and don't even get me started about the 14 year old kids who fail to understand the meaning of "forever" on the internet. We already have enough problems in the guise of protecting the children. Misguided efforts in this regard end up just creating a solution in search of a problem. And there are plenty of "problems" to find.
-Restil
What do I care if an executive makes more money? My ONLY concerns when grocery shopping is that I can find and afford what I want, and get out of there as quickly as possible. If I have 2 items and there's an open self-checkout station, why WOULDN'T I want to use that instead of waiting 5+ minutes in even the express line?
Of course, it only makes sense to do it if you have a small number of items. The checkers who don't have to wait for the voice prompt to scan the next item can blow through 100+ items a lot faster than I could. But I like having the choice.
-Restil