Fischer-Tropsch? A few reasons. It's inefficient, in that a considerable portion of the energy from the coal is used up in the process. It still pulls up carbon from the depths of the earth and throws it into the atmosphere. We unfortunately will start using it as gas prices continue to increase, but it's far from an ideal solution, which is why the DoE and others have been looking into other ways of getting fuel.
If it's either rootkit-infested crap or nothing, I'd rather have nothing in the library as far as copyrighted music goes. It's not the library's fault; it's te music publisher's fault. If they wanted to make it available only under a license that requires you to post your firstborn as collateral, or to reserve the right to root your box "just to make sure" you're not duping their precious, precious media, then it's their damn fault you can't find their precious, precious media in the library, not the library's fault.
Anybody know what library policies tend to be on lending out plain audio CDs, or DVDs? The libraries I've been to have signs and such making it clear that copyright infringement is illegal, but they don't actually seek to enforce the law themselves. (This was previously a problem when copying machines came around; every library I've been to has a sign on the copier requesting that the patron respect copyright, but it did not have some brownshirt looking over every patron's shoulder to make sure that they did. This was on purpose; they wouldn't have done it even if they did have the staff.)
That's a pretty jaundiced view of things. Sure, the state may act like it has an interest in revenge, but that's a failure on the part of the system---are you saying that the only possible reason for a criminal justice system is for the state to exact revenge on citizens who piss it off? What about a criminal justice system based on the other ideas I mentioned, like reducing recidivism, or sequestering dangerous individuals away from society at large, or rehabilitation? I'm well aware that that's not what we have, but to chuck the whole idea of the state's interest in keeping order by any after-the-fact means, punitive or otherwise... are you serious about that?
How is a world in which people actually have free will distinguishable from a world in which people think they have free will? If no such difference can be established short of cutting up brains, how can we say that "free will" is a meaningful concept? I know it's important to Christian mythology, but why should the rest of us care?
I've heard it mentioned in relation to criminal justice, for assigning "fault" or "blame"... but we don't punish people because of some fuzzy moral precept (at least, we shouldn't; the state has no interest in revenge)--we punish people because it achieves a certain goal, whether it's rehabilitation, discouraging recidivism or simply isolating them from society for a given period.
The analogy with Basil Fawlty beating up his uncooperative car falls apart because while a car doesn't respond to being hit with a tree branch (except by growing a few dents), people manifestly do respond to being punished, whether they possess the poorly-defined philosophical/theological notion of free will or not.
And yet providing an exclusive right to a subset of that information (creative works) for a limited time seems to benefit the whole more than it costs them.
Copyright is a good idea. It's ridiculously long and overly broad, but there are better ways to fix it than to abolish it altogether.
In fact, I have a bag of "corn chips" with exactly that... corn, water, oil, and salt. Funny thing, they're great! They don't need the wildly artificial crap to taste good.
Oh, agreed that the stuff they put on them is foul. I can't believe I used to actually eat it. My father would make all sorts of complaining sounds if I would crack open a Doritos bag in the car, because he couldn't even stand the smell of them.
I'll bet that was an interesting tour. Food processing is fascinating (that's what I've seen the most of), but I imagine most industrial processing could be interesting in some way or another - even something "simple" like a machine that takes a piece of cardboard and folds and glues it into a box around its contents...
It was fascinating. For instance, the baking part of the process involved passing the chips on the conveyor belt through about six feet of oven; they were particularly warm and crispy-good when they came out the other side. Stuffing them into bags was done with a roll of bags and a clear plastic chute, and involved flushing the bags with nitrogen gas to keep them from going stale. They also made potato chips there, but I didn't get a chance to see that part of the process. Cheetos were a different facility entirely.
I'm just flabbergasted that someone responded with good grace when I corrected them. Happens to all of us---I vividly remember boldly asserting that copyright violation was not a criminal offense in the US and being soundly corrected; geoffspear still has me on his foes list because of that one.
Private toll company manufactures a bridge without guardrails, rumble strips or anything of the sort. Just road, then empty air. Driver falls off the bridge, gets injured. Driver sues, complaining that private toll company should have done something like put guardrails on the bridge. Corporate bootlicking jerkwads come out of the woodwork on the internet, and gift us with such gems as: Under normal use, there's nothing wrong with the road--did the instructions say to drive off the edge of the bridge? I bet Driver fell off that bridge on purpose for all the money that jury's going to dole out. We should have let nature take its course and weed out the stupid people! Me and my friends have gone over that bridge a thousand times, and we never fell off.
She wasn't driving at the time, and the car was stopped. Please familiarize yourself with the facts of the case in more than the standard "talking points" fashion before pretending that you know what you're talking about.
I don't think people are stupid, so much as ignorant. The problem is that ignorance becomes fashionable, because knowing stuff is for four-eyed intellectuals who never get laid. Combine that with people not wanting to look stupid, and you have a perfect recipe for people never asking questions---which is, after all, how all of us learned this stuff in the first place.
If the coffee was that hot, why sit in the flaming puddle of coffee for 90 seconds?
Feel free to conduct an experiment on some random 79-year-old women to see how sprightly they are when you start charring their flesh. I'm not really used to seeing septuagenarians leaping out of cars, but perhaps your experience has been different. I guess she didn't want to get out of the car, right? Because if I'm watching the skin peel from my thighs, I know my first thought is, "another forty-five seconds and it's lawsuit time!"
I think it was either two days' profits or two days' sales of coffee (the original multimillion dollar award, not the reduced settlement); there's also been a proposal in California for the State to take a portion of tort awards, but that brings with it its own raft of problems. Perhaps punitive damages could be doled out with the proviso that the recipient had to designate charities (to which they had no connection) to receive the money anonymously.
No, but putting a styrofoam cup of even warm coffee between your legs is the quintessential act of stupidity, and she was paid for it. What would have happened had it not been so hot it scalded her? A lawsuit for her dry cleaning expenses?
If your messy sweatpants require you to undergo two years of medical treatment costing eleven grand, I think I'd be okay with you suing about that. Because you'd have magic pants.
All those people were dismissed as unserious Saddam-loving anti-American hippies who thought it was 1968 again, and just had to hop on the bus and realize that the ghosts of Vietnam had finally been laid to rest. Y'know, again. I suppose by heaping more ghosts on top of them. The kind of bullshit that famed "libertarian" Glenn Reynolds was saying back in 2003. And yet, for some reason, nobody's suddenly said "gee, maybe the people banging the wardrums were the fundamentally unserious ones". For some reason, they're still marginalized and ignored, despite having right.
Seriously, though, I was thinking of vacationing there for a week or two; what's fun? What should I know? Is it really as scenic as it looks in all the pictures? Where's the best place to go to take pictures of unusual wildlife?
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Fischer-Tropsch? A few reasons. It's inefficient, in that a considerable portion of the energy from the coal is used up in the process. It still pulls up carbon from the depths of the earth and throws it into the atmosphere. We unfortunately will start using it as gas prices continue to increase, but it's far from an ideal solution, which is why the DoE and others have been looking into other ways of getting fuel.
Oh, so you'd like to live your life free from the baleful mailed fist of government? Move to Somalia.
If it's either rootkit-infested crap or nothing, I'd rather have nothing in the library as far as copyrighted music goes. It's not the library's fault; it's te music publisher's fault. If they wanted to make it available only under a license that requires you to post your firstborn as collateral, or to reserve the right to root your box "just to make sure" you're not duping their precious, precious media, then it's their damn fault you can't find their precious, precious media in the library, not the library's fault.
Anybody know what library policies tend to be on lending out plain audio CDs, or DVDs? The libraries I've been to have signs and such making it clear that copyright infringement is illegal, but they don't actually seek to enforce the law themselves. (This was previously a problem when copying machines came around; every library I've been to has a sign on the copier requesting that the patron respect copyright, but it did not have some brownshirt looking over every patron's shoulder to make sure that they did. This was on purpose; they wouldn't have done it even if they did have the staff.)
In what sense do you mean "portable"? As far as I know, it runs on i386 and its 64-bit variants; that's hardly portable.
That's a pretty jaundiced view of things. Sure, the state may act like it has an interest in revenge, but that's a failure on the part of the system---are you saying that the only possible reason for a criminal justice system is for the state to exact revenge on citizens who piss it off? What about a criminal justice system based on the other ideas I mentioned, like reducing recidivism, or sequestering dangerous individuals away from society at large, or rehabilitation? I'm well aware that that's not what we have, but to chuck the whole idea of the state's interest in keeping order by any after-the-fact means, punitive or otherwise... are you serious about that?
How is a world in which people actually have free will distinguishable from a world in which people think they have free will? If no such difference can be established short of cutting up brains, how can we say that "free will" is a meaningful concept? I know it's important to Christian mythology, but why should the rest of us care?
I've heard it mentioned in relation to criminal justice, for assigning "fault" or "blame"... but we don't punish people because of some fuzzy moral precept (at least, we shouldn't; the state has no interest in revenge)--we punish people because it achieves a certain goal, whether it's rehabilitation, discouraging recidivism or simply isolating them from society for a given period.
The analogy with Basil Fawlty beating up his uncooperative car falls apart because while a car doesn't respond to being hit with a tree branch (except by growing a few dents), people manifestly do respond to being punished, whether they possess the poorly-defined philosophical/theological notion of free will or not.
And yet providing an exclusive right to a subset of that information (creative works) for a limited time seems to benefit the whole more than it costs them.
Copyright is a good idea. It's ridiculously long and overly broad, but there are better ways to fix it than to abolish it altogether.
And Mac users are lithe, sexy art types, too. I know, because the ads tell me so.
That's awesome. I've only seen that done with the "French Erotic Film" song, and with "Yatta". Do you have the rest?
It was fascinating. For instance, the baking part of the process involved passing the chips on the conveyor belt through about six feet of oven; they were particularly warm and crispy-good when they came out the other side. Stuffing them into bags was done with a roll of bags and a clear plastic chute, and involved flushing the bags with nitrogen gas to keep them from going stale. They also made potato chips there, but I didn't get a chance to see that part of the process. Cheetos were a different facility entirely.
I'm just flabbergasted that someone responded with good grace when I corrected them. Happens to all of us---I vividly remember boldly asserting that copyright violation was not a criminal offense in the US and being soundly corrected; geoffspear still has me on his foes list because of that one.
For the "tort reform" crowd in general...
Private toll company manufactures a bridge without guardrails, rumble strips or anything of the sort. Just road, then empty air. Driver falls off the bridge, gets injured. Driver sues, complaining that private toll company should have done something like put guardrails on the bridge. Corporate bootlicking jerkwads come out of the woodwork on the internet, and gift us with such gems as: Under normal use, there's nothing wrong with the road--did the instructions say to drive off the edge of the bridge? I bet Driver fell off that bridge on purpose for all the money that jury's going to dole out. We should have let nature take its course and weed out the stupid people! Me and my friends have gone over that bridge a thousand times, and we never fell off.
The possibilities are endless...
She wasn't driving at the time, and the car was stopped. Please familiarize yourself with the facts of the case in more than the standard "talking points" fashion before pretending that you know what you're talking about.
I don't think people are stupid, so much as ignorant. The problem is that ignorance becomes fashionable, because knowing stuff is for four-eyed intellectuals who never get laid. Combine that with people not wanting to look stupid, and you have a perfect recipe for people never asking questions---which is, after all, how all of us learned this stuff in the first place.
I think it was either two days' profits or two days' sales of coffee (the original multimillion dollar award, not the reduced settlement); there's also been a proposal in California for the State to take a portion of tort awards, but that brings with it its own raft of problems. Perhaps punitive damages could be doled out with the proviso that the recipient had to designate charities (to which they had no connection) to receive the money anonymously.
McDonald's sold coffee at a temperature significantly higher than other restaurants, and had received seven hundred complaints of coffee burns over the preceding ten years. Despite the case's standing in popular culture, it really didn't go down like that. Though the woman was found partly responsible, the coffee was indeed defective as argued.
Turunen. I'm a sucker for metal with classic-style female vocalists.
All those people were dismissed as unserious Saddam-loving anti-American hippies who thought it was 1968 again, and just had to hop on the bus and realize that the ghosts of Vietnam had finally been laid to rest. Y'know, again. I suppose by heaping more ghosts on top of them. The kind of bullshit that famed "libertarian" Glenn Reynolds was saying back in 2003. And yet, for some reason, nobody's suddenly said "gee, maybe the people banging the wardrums were the fundamentally unserious ones". For some reason, they're still marginalized and ignored, despite having right.
It's enough to make you spit, you know.
Can you tell the difference between facile common-sense "reasoning" and actual data? I suppose not.
Seriously, though, I was thinking of vacationing there for a week or two; what's fun? What should I know? Is it really as scenic as it looks in all the pictures? Where's the best place to go to take pictures of unusual wildlife?
It's cold there! And you have cell phones! And... okay, I got nothin'.
Say, how do you pronounce "Tarja"?
No, no. Bush bashers. Alliteration makes it truer.