The point is you *can't count on taking out of a business's hide after the fact*. It is in the business's rational interest to externalize the cost. Even in the case of the *legal* tire dump, perverse incentives exist to take money needed to deal with the problem out as profit.
You've got to build the cost of recycling the tires *into* the cost of the tire. That forces economic rationality much more effectively than regulation. If there were a ten dollar deposit on each tire, then a twenty million tires is two hundred millions of dollars.
With respect to recycling tires as filler -- of course. That makes sense, given that you are forced to do something responsible with the. The notion that this application is economically rational on its own is self-evidently false. If old tires were worth enough money to do this, then there wouldn't be illegal tire dumps.
You raise a good point, but you also have to account for how the cost and benefits are accounted for and distributed.
In theory an economically optimal approach will be arrived at by the market, but only if all the costs are accounted for in the transaction.
They aren't.
I think we are far from reaching anything like an optimal exploitation of efficiency technologies. It's like people who throw their fast food bags out on the side of the road. We all benefit from a trash free environment, but they make the decision that the marginal benefit of chucking their trash out the window outweighs the marginal cost of one piece of trash behind them on the road.
People who are habitual freeloaders on the public good don't even see it. An auto repair shop that throws old tires out along the side of the road knows very well the cost of processing the tire properly. They have to pay the cost, so it's *real*. The environmental and public health costs of the mosquitoes they breed and other nuisances is *theoretical*.
Recently there was a news story about an illegal tire dump just like this in Connecticut that contained *twenty million tires*. That's over *250 million pounds* (114 million kg). Alabama state taxpayers just cleaned up an eighty million pound tire dump (this one was legal, but the business went belly up), at a cost of seven million dollars.
This illustrates an important point about environmental issues: sooner or later the cost is real to *someone*.
With respect to energy efficiency -- of *course* there are levels of energy efficiency which are physically possible to achieve, but which are financially irrational for society as a whole. That point almost certainly comes well past the point where increments of energy efficiency aren't worth it for an individual who pays the energy bill, be that for his SUV or replacing a valve throttled pump in his manufacturing facility.
I agree. Reading the except of the judge's ruling, it sounds like he's only applying common sense. He's not throwing out fair use in general, only as applies to the facts of this case as admitted to by the defendant. What might raise an eyebrow is the timing of the ruling, but all in all it's fairer to the defendant than sustaining the plaintiff's objection that the fair use claim is batshit crazy.
What's scary about this is the insane damages the plaintiffs are bound to ask for. If such inflated damages are apt to be granted, then it's only fair that inflated claims of "fair use" be allowed. If the judge decides to apply the same common sense standard to the damage claims, I'll be more than satisfied.
My experience with Linux on Thinkpads has also been positive. I'm just saying don't extrapolate from that experience to other laptops, even from manufacturers that otherwise support Linux (e.g. Asus).
As long as you are not on a laptop and need ACPI, sound and video to work stably. Or deal with kernel updates from your distro that break things after you've got them working again.
I realize these things are not Linux's "fault". I live with them because of Linux's other advantages. But they are a PITA.
Linux is ideal on a netbook. If it is supported by the manufacturer, you won't have these kinds of problems, and enjoy the benefits of freedom and open standards. I've used it since Debian 0.9, which I downloaded over a modem. I've had very positive experiences with Linux on desktops, where you can simply replace hardware you are having compatibility problems with and use the BIOS to disable motherboard features. I've had good experiences with Linux on ThinkPads. But I've had terrible experiences with Linux on a variety of other notebooks in the $1000 to $2000 range, most recently an Asus F8VA. Bad enough that I'm considering reinstalling Vista, which is quite tolerable with 3+GB of RAM and a multicore CPU running at 2.53GHz.
As an old time Unix guy, I like Linux a great deal, and am glad that low system margins on devices like netbooks force manufacturers to support Linux better. But we shouldn't exaggerate how wonderful things are, especially on middle priced notebooks. I have no hesitation to recommend Linux for netbooks or for Thinkpads.
If you are the kind of person who has lots of good ideas, there's plenty more where they came from. I'd only worry about this if you'd sunk investment into making the idea real, e.g. if you have a company that's about to release a product.
I've given away ideas, really *good* ideas, and never lost a wink of sleep over it.
Once I was chatting with a software entrepreneur I knew about a software product he wanted to develop for the military. He'd had some success demonstrating the product deployed on a small scale, but the system concept wasn't practically scalable to large deployments. After hashing over the various approaches he'd tried, I drove home and as I did I had an epiphany. I realized how to make the product dramatically simpler to use on a large scale. I sent him an e-mail, and he went out and hired a math PhD and a couple of developers to make my idea work.
I never received a cent; I never asked for one. He did all the hard stuff. He made the business contacts, he wrote the proposals, hired the staff, everything. He put up his own money too. I just had a nice half hour chat and spent about ten minutes writing an email.
If I thought I only had a limited number of ideas like that in me, I'd worry about getting paid for a valuable idea like that. But I don't. The more ideas you discuss, the more you create. If you hole yourself up in your garage, you'll end up spending your time on useless ideas. This is heresy, but ideas really aren't worth much on their own. I've been in the tech business, and I've seen this is true. People who have lots of "clever ideas" have more than they can use. They get in the way. When they get a pot of money for idea A, you have to be careful they don't spend it on B. What you really need is money, time, discipline, contacts, technical skill -- a host of other things that are nearly impossibly hard to put together. Once you're able to do that, *ideas* looking for implementors aren't hard to find.
When you consider this, you'll see the idea that sensible people might want to steal ideas is naive. If the idea is easy to steal, it's not worth much in itself. If it's worth much in itself, it probably takes a lot of other stuff before you'll see any money out of it.
This gets to the nature of creativity. Ideas are like darts thrown into the wall. You can say, "Gee that's an interesting place for a dart to land," but that's not the same as being able to throw a dart into a bullseye not of your choosing. Really good ideas come from superior insights into the problem domain. When you pitch an idea to somebody, it should be clear that this idea comes from an unique understanding of the problem. That naturally makes you the best person imaginable to lead the conversion of the idea into reality.
Of course, if you think somebody is talking to you under false pretenses, you should cut off right there, but it is a rare, rare idea about which somebody could reasonably say, "Gee, I could make a lot of money at this by doing it myself, and I'd be better off doing that than working with the guy who had it." If you do have one of those one in a million lifetime ideas, then you ought to be talking to a patent attorney. But I can almost guarantee that none of your ideas are as valuable without you as they are with you. Very few ideas can be turned into money without solving many related problems which you have unique insight into. In that unlikely event, you should just *do it*, you should just create this amazing, money making, easy to implement thing. And of course get an attorney.
Mainly, I think you should concentrate on making your ideas a reality. If you do that, you'll probably make a living. Make enough money for other people, and you'll be in a position to make more money for yourself. If you want to get rich off your ideas, then be prepared to do a lot of the boring work it takes to make that happen. If you don't want to do that work, then prepared for other people to make money "off your ideas".
Oh, come now. "Threaten"? Greenpeace just said unkind and poorly supported things about these manufacturers' products. If that's a threat, then marketing ought to be banned.
One thing that would be nice is if this lead the manufacturers made their products easier to recycle. This would certainly address Greenpeace's concern about the breakdown of plastics in landfills, and then some. The best documented health concerns over PVC are the use of plasticizers, but that probably doesn't apply to consoles. Concerns over the health effects of flame retardants is just silly.
But it would be nice if things were designed to be be recycled.
The patent exempts computers and distinctly applies itself to portable media/entertainment devices.
I *hate* that kind of patent. It pretty much says that this is something that's already being done in closely related devices, and they're staking their claim at the land office before it inevitably is applied to this class of device. There were about a gazillion GPS and mobile computer patents like this in the late 90s eary 00s.
I've always envisioned the battery swap to be done by some kind of robotic system. Since the consumers don't handle the batteries, they don't left out in the backyard in the elements or kicked around.
I also imagined the batteries to have onboard instrumentation. This would tell a number of things: the amount of energy the battery is capable of delivering in its current condition; whether the battery had been in a collision; whether it is time to recycle. If a consumer gets a battery that underperforms then a computer network would issue a credit on behalf of the station that swapped it in for any energy he paid for but did not receive.
The F-22 is a no-compromises air superiority fighter. Engineers will immediately understand this means plenty of compromises in other roles you want fighter aircraft to perform. It's built to do one thing: destroy aircraft. It's useless against ground targets, and adapting it to his role would be silly given that we'll be building the cheaper, more versatile and hopefully more reliable F-35.
If the F-22 is ever called on to do what it was built for, it will be worth every penny of its $300+ million dollar price tag -- up to a point. I've heard it called a "first day of the war fighter". It's job is to clear the skies of all hostile aircraft, after which the F-35 follows up and performs a wide variety of war fighting tasks. If this scenario works the way it is supposed to, then at some point adding more F-22s is pointless. Imagine enemy fighters are plaque and the F-22 is a toothbrush. Brushing your teeth for ten minutes is very good for you; brushing for twenty minutes isn't any better for and costs twice as much.
The F-22 is a one trick pony, but it's a pretty damn good trick if you ever need it done. But we simply don't need that many of them if it works. If it doesn't work, then it's a big waste of money to build more.
The "hate" component is not directed at the victim of the assault. It has nothing to do with offending anyone, and everything to do with threatening them.
Sidling up to somebody and saying "We know where you live," does not offend that person and it IS a crime under the correct circumstances.
You see, I can punch you in the nose and yell "All you idiots should go back to where you came from!" because everybody assumes I'm not talking about *them*. If I punch you in the face and yell "All you [fill in the ethnicity] go back where you came from!" [fill in the ethnicity] people *know* I'm trying to make them leave town.
"Hate crimes" is about the stupidest name ever dreamed up for a crime. Lots and lots of crimes involve hate, but are not hate crimes. Likewise, it is possible for a "hate crime" to involve very little hate at all, possibly even *none*.
A hate crime is a crime aimed, not at individuals, but at the community. They are designed to make it impossible for people to live together, to force *your* opinion of who should live where on other people when it's none of your damn business.
I am mystified that conservatives find it so hard to understand that "hate crime" is orthogonal to the physical act being done. They understand how this works perfectly in the case of "treason". It's not the effect on people physically connected to the treasonous act that makes treason so bad. It's the effect on the country as a whole. Hate crimes work exactly the same way.
Ah yes, the Russians. A people renowned for their capacity to endure any hardship, their ability to get things done no matter how badly the system is broken... Let me tell you, there's lots of things you ought to admire about the Russians, sonny boy, but plumbing ain't one of 'em.
Just this afternoon I was driving my family to see the Harry Potter movie, and talk turned toward which Harry Potter characters we'd choose to be friends with. Everybody in my family agreed they'd like to be friends with Luna Lovegood. Then I dropped my bombshell: When I was a teenager, I was friends with somebody who was just like Luna.
"He believed anything he heard, as long as it was weird," I said.
"Like what?" they wanted to know.
"Oh, pyramid power, alien abductions, elves, ghosts and fairies, anything like that. No, seriously. He was really into cryptobiology. You know, Yeti, sea monsters, tribes of strange little people who live in the woods."
"You mean, like in South America?"
"No, near Boston, down toward Plymouth I think. Oh, yes, he believed in clouds."
"Clouds?"
"Oh, I mean sentient clouds. Intelligent ones. They supposedly have a civilization but they're so different from us we don't understand it. He had plans to build some electronic gizmo so he could listen to them. Or that might have been the ghosts. Probably both. Funny, I hadn't thought of him in years."
"What happened to him?"
"I lost touch with him, then I ran into him some years later. He told me he'd joined a satanist cult, but they'd messed his head up really bad."
Which was true. You could tell: he still believed anything weird he heard, but now that made him miserable.
Well, you'd have to compare these games to the most primitive sort of graphical games to be perfectly fair.
It may well be that the end of commercial text game development meant that better formulas and design principles appropriate to the medium were never developed. There's no way the limits of language as a game medium have ever been approached by software. What are tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons but language based adventure games with a few visual aids?
I think the problem with text games was that you'd run into a dead end where the designer wanted you to do some particular thing, and if you didn't do it, there was nothing else you could do. Adventure games need to give the player alternatives when he is frustrated. My kids play the Legend of Zelda games, and to my eye they have a lot in common with those early text games. The big difference is that when you get tired of figuring out the puzzle you are working on, you can set it aside and do something else.
If people continued to pour development money into text games, they'd probably be a lot more open ended and flexible than they were twenty five years ago.
I don't think it is "incredible" in the sense of "impossible to believe". It's all to easy to believe.
You see the people of the US (as a whole) lost interest in the whole thing once we'd done the Moon once or twice. NASA didn't even have the money to buy mag tapes for the satellite data they were collecting, which anybody with half a brain would see is worthwhile once you'd went through the trouble of putting a satellite up there. Now how many people would understand that cataloging conserving digital media was something that took money? Back in the 80's? The 70s?
It takes a great deal of effort to turn a book into a palimpsest. So reasoning from what people knew about information storage, the attitude would be that it'd take some effort to lose this data. But overwriting a mag tape is as easy as writing it in the first place.
This is just the sort of thing that in the late 60s might have overlooked. And then, and then, one of the most powerful of human cognitive bugs does the rest. It is the dog that does not bark in the night. Since anybody could see this sort of thing ought to have been preserved, it is but a short leap to the assumption that somebody must have done it. There are two ways such an oversight can be caught. The first would be that somebody decides they wanted this information and go looking for it. The second is somebody thinks to check that what seems plainly obvious to do had in fact been done. Being something of a fan of the last approach, I can tell you that advocating for it, especially if it costs money, is not something that makes you popular with your boss.
I'd say that $1.25/gallon is pretty impressive, given the scale they're talking about, which is tiny. 100,000 gallons of ethanol/year? Production plants being built today have anything from one hundred to, in one case one thousand times that capacity.
Why do people build big plants? To achieve economies of scale. If you built a back yard reactor that produced a thousand gallons of ethanol per year at a cost of $1.25, that would be darn impressive. Clearly, this thing is a model.
Especially if it ends up you can eat the organic residue. The omega 3 fatty acids that make fish so healthy for you aren't made by the fish; they're made by algae and bioaccumulated up the food chain.
So have another of those yummy Soylent Green crackers... They've got everything needed to build strong bodies.
I think you are making a bit of a rhetorical exaggeration.
I believe you are referring to is called "jury nullification", where the jury basically says, "to hell with the law, we're going to rule to ensure the outcome we want to see." That's a far cry from being above the law or being able to make the law or seek out alternative laws. You can't, for example, ask your brother-in-law for his legal opinions if you don't like the judge's. If you go on Wikipedia to clarify any questions of law, you'll be booted off the jury. If you sold your jury vote to one party, as you would be able to do if you were "above the law", you'd be prosecuted, I'm reasonably certain.
The ultimate source of the power of jury nullification is that nobody can compel a jury to come to a particular conclusion, nor can they read the jurors' minds. In criminal trials, the double jeopardy rule makes jury nullification a one way trap door. If they decide to let a murderer off because he was white and his victim was black, there's nothing anyone can do about it. If they decide the other way, the defendant can appeal.
IANAL, but I'm guessing things get more complicated in civil law. If a jury could be shown after the fact to have deliberately misruled on some finding of fact, with the intent to favor one party over the other, I'm pretty sure they'd try those facts again. Equity is a different kettle of fish, so I'd guess some kinds of bias (a soft spot for the little guy in a David vs. Goliath conflict) might be allowable and others (one of the plaintiffs is my cousin) not.
So, it's kind of like the optimist/pessimist thing, right?
As an optimist, I'd say that least they didn't fail in the worst possible way.
The pessimist in me thinks I should get a bit more than "not failing in the worst possible way" when I pay somebody a barrel of cash to hash a couple numbers for me.
Well "exact" could mean "accurate" or it could mean "precise".
I take it to mean it to mean that Brits in their inebriated state have a gift for putting their fingers and other assorted appendages in precisely the wrong place.
Unless his cats have him so totally hypnotized he doesn't realize he's their slave. Seen teenagers do the Jedi mind trick plenty of times.
In any case, as an older guy, I remember that phase of my life when my friends would extrapolate from their pet owning experience to their incipient parental prowess. I won't spoil the fun, other than to say this: you'll find out for yourself. It's a hell of a ride, in every sense of the word.
Slashdot Mirror
Confused I may be, but not on this point.
The point is you *can't count on taking out of a business's hide after the fact*. It is in the business's rational interest to externalize the cost. Even in the case of the *legal* tire dump, perverse incentives exist to take money needed to deal with the problem out as profit.
You've got to build the cost of recycling the tires *into* the cost of the tire. That forces economic rationality much more effectively than regulation. If there were a ten dollar deposit on each tire, then a twenty million tires is two hundred millions of dollars.
With respect to recycling tires as filler -- of course. That makes sense, given that you are forced to do something responsible with the. The notion that this application is economically rational on its own is self-evidently false. If old tires were worth enough money to do this, then there wouldn't be illegal tire dumps.
You raise a good point, but you also have to account for how the cost and benefits are accounted for and distributed.
In theory an economically optimal approach will be arrived at by the market, but only if all the costs are accounted for in the transaction.
They aren't.
I think we are far from reaching anything like an optimal exploitation of efficiency technologies. It's like people who throw their fast food bags out on the side of the road. We all benefit from a trash free environment, but they make the decision that the marginal benefit of chucking their trash out the window outweighs the marginal cost of one piece of trash behind them on the road.
People who are habitual freeloaders on the public good don't even see it. An auto repair shop that throws old tires out along the side of the road knows very well the cost of processing the tire properly. They have to pay the cost, so it's *real*. The environmental and public health costs of the mosquitoes they breed and other nuisances is *theoretical*.
Recently there was a news story about an illegal tire dump just like this in Connecticut that contained *twenty million tires*. That's over *250 million pounds* (114 million kg). Alabama state taxpayers just cleaned up an eighty million pound tire dump (this one was legal, but the business went belly up), at a cost of seven million dollars.
This illustrates an important point about environmental issues: sooner or later the cost is real to *someone*.
With respect to energy efficiency -- of *course* there are levels of energy efficiency which are physically possible to achieve, but which are financially irrational for society as a whole. That point almost certainly comes well past the point where increments of energy efficiency aren't worth it for an individual who pays the energy bill, be that for his SUV or replacing a valve throttled pump in his manufacturing facility.
I agree. Reading the except of the judge's ruling, it sounds like he's only applying common sense. He's not throwing out fair use in general, only as applies to the facts of this case as admitted to by the defendant. What might raise an eyebrow is the timing of the ruling, but all in all it's fairer to the defendant than sustaining the plaintiff's objection that the fair use claim is batshit crazy.
What's scary about this is the insane damages the plaintiffs are bound to ask for. If such inflated damages are apt to be granted, then it's only fair that inflated claims of "fair use" be allowed. If the judge decides to apply the same common sense standard to the damage claims, I'll be more than satisfied.
My experience with Linux on Thinkpads has also been positive. I'm just saying don't extrapolate from that experience to other laptops, even from manufacturers that otherwise support Linux (e.g. Asus).
As long as you are not on a laptop and need ACPI, sound and video to work stably. Or deal with kernel updates from your distro that break things after you've got them working again.
I realize these things are not Linux's "fault". I live with them because of Linux's other advantages. But they are a PITA.
Linux is ideal on a netbook. If it is supported by the manufacturer, you won't have these kinds of problems, and enjoy the benefits of freedom and open standards. I've used it since Debian 0.9, which I downloaded over a modem. I've had very positive experiences with Linux on desktops, where you can simply replace hardware you are having compatibility problems with and use the BIOS to disable motherboard features. I've had good experiences with Linux on ThinkPads. But I've had terrible experiences with Linux on a variety of other notebooks in the $1000 to $2000 range, most recently an Asus F8VA. Bad enough that I'm considering reinstalling Vista, which is quite tolerable with 3+GB of RAM and a multicore CPU running at 2.53GHz.
As an old time Unix guy, I like Linux a great deal, and am glad that low system margins on devices like netbooks force manufacturers to support Linux better. But we shouldn't exaggerate how wonderful things are, especially on middle priced notebooks. I have no hesitation to recommend Linux for netbooks or for Thinkpads.
then they bankrupt you.
A cheap shot? Yes. But it had to be done.
If you are the kind of person who has lots of good ideas, there's plenty more where they came from. I'd only worry about this if you'd sunk investment into making the idea real, e.g. if you have a company that's about to release a product.
I've given away ideas, really *good* ideas, and never lost a wink of sleep over it.
Once I was chatting with a software entrepreneur I knew about a software product he wanted to develop for the military. He'd had some success demonstrating the product deployed on a small scale, but the system concept wasn't practically scalable to large deployments. After hashing over the various approaches he'd tried, I drove home and as I did I had an epiphany. I realized how to make the product dramatically simpler to use on a large scale. I sent him an e-mail, and he went out and hired a math PhD and a couple of developers to make my idea work.
I never received a cent; I never asked for one. He did all the hard stuff. He made the business contacts, he wrote the proposals, hired the staff, everything. He put up his own money too. I just had a nice half hour chat and spent about ten minutes writing an email.
If I thought I only had a limited number of ideas like that in me, I'd worry about getting paid for a valuable idea like that. But I don't. The more ideas you discuss, the more you create. If you hole yourself up in your garage, you'll end up spending your time on useless ideas. This is heresy, but ideas really aren't worth much on their own. I've been in the tech business, and I've seen this is true. People who have lots of "clever ideas" have more than they can use. They get in the way. When they get a pot of money for idea A, you have to be careful they don't spend it on B. What you really need is money, time, discipline, contacts, technical skill -- a host of other things that are nearly impossibly hard to put together. Once you're able to do that, *ideas* looking for implementors aren't hard to find.
When you consider this, you'll see the idea that sensible people might want to steal ideas is naive. If the idea is easy to steal, it's not worth much in itself. If it's worth much in itself, it probably takes a lot of other stuff before you'll see any money out of it.
This gets to the nature of creativity. Ideas are like darts thrown into the wall. You can say, "Gee that's an interesting place for a dart to land," but that's not the same as being able to throw a dart into a bullseye not of your choosing. Really good ideas come from superior insights into the problem domain. When you pitch an idea to somebody, it should be clear that this idea comes from an unique understanding of the problem. That naturally makes you the best person imaginable to lead the conversion of the idea into reality.
Of course, if you think somebody is talking to you under false pretenses, you should cut off right there, but it is a rare, rare idea about which somebody could reasonably say, "Gee, I could make a lot of money at this by doing it myself, and I'd be better off doing that than working with the guy who had it." If you do have one of those one in a million lifetime ideas, then you ought to be talking to a patent attorney. But I can almost guarantee that none of your ideas are as valuable without you as they are with you. Very few ideas can be turned into money without solving many related problems which you have unique insight into. In that unlikely event, you should just *do it*, you should just create this amazing, money making, easy to implement thing. And of course get an attorney.
Mainly, I think you should concentrate on making your ideas a reality. If you do that, you'll probably make a living. Make enough money for other people, and you'll be in a position to make more money for yourself. If you want to get rich off your ideas, then be prepared to do a lot of the boring work it takes to make that happen. If you don't want to do that work, then prepared for other people to make money "off your ideas".
Oh, come now. "Threaten"? Greenpeace just said unkind and poorly supported things about these manufacturers' products. If that's a threat, then marketing ought to be banned.
One thing that would be nice is if this lead the manufacturers made their products easier to recycle. This would certainly address Greenpeace's concern about the breakdown of plastics in landfills, and then some. The best documented health concerns over PVC are the use of plasticizers, but that probably doesn't apply to consoles. Concerns over the health effects of flame retardants is just silly.
But it would be nice if things were designed to be be recycled.
And have more fun doing it.
At least, I can get the process started. And I'll need the assistance of a woman for nine months and a few minutes.
The patent exempts computers and distinctly applies itself to portable media/entertainment devices.
I *hate* that kind of patent. It pretty much says that this is something that's already being done in closely related devices, and they're staking their claim at the land office before it inevitably is applied to this class of device. There were about a gazillion GPS and mobile computer patents like this in the late 90s eary 00s.
I've always envisioned the battery swap to be done by some kind of robotic system. Since the consumers don't handle the batteries, they don't left out in the backyard in the elements or kicked around.
I also imagined the batteries to have onboard instrumentation. This would tell a number of things: the amount of energy the battery is capable of delivering in its current condition; whether the battery had been in a collision; whether it is time to recycle. If a consumer gets a battery that underperforms then a computer network would issue a credit on behalf of the station that swapped it in for any energy he paid for but did not receive.
Actually, it's an apples and oranges comparison.
The F-22 is a no-compromises air superiority fighter. Engineers will immediately understand this means plenty of compromises in other roles you want fighter aircraft to perform. It's built to do one thing: destroy aircraft. It's useless against ground targets, and adapting it to his role would be silly given that we'll be building the cheaper, more versatile and hopefully more reliable F-35.
If the F-22 is ever called on to do what it was built for, it will be worth every penny of its $300+ million dollar price tag -- up to a point. I've heard it called a "first day of the war fighter". It's job is to clear the skies of all hostile aircraft, after which the F-35 follows up and performs a wide variety of war fighting tasks. If this scenario works the way it is supposed to, then at some point adding more F-22s is pointless. Imagine enemy fighters are plaque and the F-22 is a toothbrush. Brushing your teeth for ten minutes is very good for you; brushing for twenty minutes isn't any better for and costs twice as much.
The F-22 is a one trick pony, but it's a pretty damn good trick if you ever need it done. But we simply don't need that many of them if it works. If it doesn't work, then it's a big waste of money to build more.
You still miss the point.
The "hate" component is not directed at the victim of the assault. It has nothing to do with offending anyone, and everything to do with threatening them.
Sidling up to somebody and saying "We know where you live," does not offend that person and it IS a crime under the correct circumstances.
Well, yes.
You see, I can punch you in the nose and yell "All you idiots should go back to where you came from!" because everybody assumes I'm not talking about *them*. If I punch you in the face and yell "All you [fill in the ethnicity] go back where you came from!" [fill in the ethnicity] people *know* I'm trying to make them leave town.
"Hate crimes" is about the stupidest name ever dreamed up for a crime. Lots and lots of crimes involve hate, but are not hate crimes. Likewise, it is possible for a "hate crime" to involve very little hate at all, possibly even *none*.
A hate crime is a crime aimed, not at individuals, but at the community. They are designed to make it impossible for people to live together, to force *your* opinion of who should live where on other people when it's none of your damn business.
I am mystified that conservatives find it so hard to understand that "hate crime" is orthogonal to the physical act being done. They understand how this works perfectly in the case of "treason". It's not the effect on people physically connected to the treasonous act that makes treason so bad. It's the effect on the country as a whole. Hate crimes work exactly the same way.
Ah yes, the Russians. A people renowned for their capacity to endure any hardship, their ability to get things done no matter how badly the system is broken... Let me tell you, there's lots of things you ought to admire about the Russians, sonny boy, but plumbing ain't one of 'em.
It's easy to say the words, but it's actions that really tell the truth.
No, words can sometimes tell the truth and actions, insofar as they are intended to convey meaning, can sometimes be lies.
Yes, talk can be cheap. But so can actions be, when others pay the price.
Just this afternoon I was driving my family to see the Harry Potter movie, and talk turned toward which Harry Potter characters we'd choose to be friends with. Everybody in my family agreed they'd like to be friends with Luna Lovegood. Then I dropped my bombshell: When I was a teenager, I was friends with somebody who was just like Luna.
"He believed anything he heard, as long as it was weird," I said.
"Like what?" they wanted to know.
"Oh, pyramid power, alien abductions, elves, ghosts and fairies, anything like that. No, seriously. He was really into cryptobiology. You know, Yeti, sea monsters, tribes of strange little people who live in the woods."
"You mean, like in South America?"
"No, near Boston, down toward Plymouth I think. Oh, yes, he believed in clouds."
"Clouds?"
"Oh, I mean sentient clouds. Intelligent ones. They supposedly have a civilization but they're so different from us we don't understand it. He had plans to build some electronic gizmo so he could listen to them. Or that might have been the ghosts. Probably both. Funny, I hadn't thought of him in years."
"What happened to him?"
"I lost touch with him, then I ran into him some years later. He told me he'd joined a satanist cult, but they'd messed his head up really bad."
Which was true. You could tell: he still believed anything weird he heard, but now that made him miserable.
Well, you'd have to compare these games to the most primitive sort of graphical games to be perfectly fair.
It may well be that the end of commercial text game development meant that better formulas and design principles appropriate to the medium were never developed. There's no way the limits of language as a game medium have ever been approached by software. What are tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons but language based adventure games with a few visual aids?
I think the problem with text games was that you'd run into a dead end where the designer wanted you to do some particular thing, and if you didn't do it, there was nothing else you could do. Adventure games need to give the player alternatives when he is frustrated. My kids play the Legend of Zelda games, and to my eye they have a lot in common with those early text games. The big difference is that when you get tired of figuring out the puzzle you are working on, you can set it aside and do something else.
If people continued to pour development money into text games, they'd probably be a lot more open ended and flexible than they were twenty five years ago.
I don't think it is "incredible" in the sense of "impossible to believe". It's all to easy to believe.
You see the people of the US (as a whole) lost interest in the whole thing once we'd done the Moon once or twice. NASA didn't even have the money to buy mag tapes for the satellite data they were collecting, which anybody with half a brain would see is worthwhile once you'd went through the trouble of putting a satellite up there. Now how many people would understand that cataloging conserving digital media was something that took money? Back in the 80's? The 70s?
It takes a great deal of effort to turn a book into a palimpsest. So reasoning from what people knew about information storage, the attitude would be that it'd take some effort to lose this data. But overwriting a mag tape is as easy as writing it in the first place.
This is just the sort of thing that in the late 60s might have overlooked. And then, and then, one of the most powerful of human cognitive bugs does the rest. It is the dog that does not bark in the night. Since anybody could see this sort of thing ought to have been preserved, it is but a short leap to the assumption that somebody must have done it. There are two ways such an oversight can be caught. The first would be that somebody decides they wanted this information and go looking for it. The second is somebody thinks to check that what seems plainly obvious to do had in fact been done. Being something of a fan of the last approach, I can tell you that advocating for it, especially if it costs money, is not something that makes you popular with your boss.
I'd say that $1.25/gallon is pretty impressive, given the scale they're talking about, which is tiny. 100,000 gallons of ethanol/year? Production plants being built today have anything from one hundred to, in one case one thousand times that capacity.
Why do people build big plants? To achieve economies of scale. If you built a back yard reactor that produced a thousand gallons of ethanol per year at a cost of $1.25, that would be darn impressive. Clearly, this thing is a model.
Especially if it ends up you can eat the organic residue. The omega 3 fatty acids that make fish so healthy for you aren't made by the fish; they're made by algae and bioaccumulated up the food chain.
So have another of those yummy Soylent Green crackers... They've got everything needed to build strong bodies.
I think you are making a bit of a rhetorical exaggeration.
I believe you are referring to is called "jury nullification", where the jury basically says, "to hell with the law, we're going to rule to ensure the outcome we want to see." That's a far cry from being above the law or being able to make the law or seek out alternative laws. You can't, for example, ask your brother-in-law for his legal opinions if you don't like the judge's. If you go on Wikipedia to clarify any questions of law, you'll be booted off the jury. If you sold your jury vote to one party, as you would be able to do if you were "above the law", you'd be prosecuted, I'm reasonably certain.
The ultimate source of the power of jury nullification is that nobody can compel a jury to come to a particular conclusion, nor can they read the jurors' minds. In criminal trials, the double jeopardy rule makes jury nullification a one way trap door. If they decide to let a murderer off because he was white and his victim was black, there's nothing anyone can do about it. If they decide the other way, the defendant can appeal.
IANAL, but I'm guessing things get more complicated in civil law. If a jury could be shown after the fact to have deliberately misruled on some finding of fact, with the intent to favor one party over the other, I'm pretty sure they'd try those facts again. Equity is a different kettle of fish, so I'd guess some kinds of bias (a soft spot for the little guy in a David vs. Goliath conflict) might be allowable and others (one of the plaintiffs is my cousin) not.
So, it's kind of like the optimist/pessimist thing, right?
As an optimist, I'd say that least they didn't fail in the worst possible way.
The pessimist in me thinks I should get a bit more than "not failing in the worst possible way" when I pay somebody a barrel of cash to hash a couple numbers for me.
Well "exact" could mean "accurate" or it could mean "precise".
I take it to mean it to mean that Brits in their inebriated state have a gift for putting their fingers and other assorted appendages in precisely the wrong place.
Unless his cats have him so totally hypnotized he doesn't realize he's their slave. Seen teenagers do the Jedi mind trick plenty of times.
In any case, as an older guy, I remember that phase of my life when my friends would extrapolate from their pet owning experience to their incipient parental prowess. I won't spoil the fun, other than to say this: you'll find out for yourself. It's a hell of a ride, in every sense of the word.