Perhaps people (women? I have no idea what the target demographic for literary porn is -- I'm a consumer of the visual media myself) aren't expecting heavy bitch-on-whelp action when they buy the book. How clearly is the content explained beforehand? That might be part of the problem.
30% of our natural Gas production in the US comes from fracking. Producing energy is not completely safe no matter what method you use.
Nice straw man, but nobody's saying it should be "completely safe." There's a wide array of values between completely safe and deliberately ignoring what may be catastrophic environmental damage to satisfy a year or two of energy demand. Call me when your tap water is flammable and taking a shower presents a risk of explosion.
Are there more dishonest people per capita at certain income levels? Is it just that the magnitude of their crimes is so much higher because of their station in life? Or is it the size of the immorality of stealing all the net worth of millions of people, and not just their lunch money or their car, and not one personalized theft at a time?
I would say that dishonest people are simply more likely to get ahead... After all, everyone would be honest if dishonesty didn't convey some sort of advantage. So almost by definition, people who are good at lying, cheating, and stealing without getting caught are likely to be successful. It's even less surprising, then, that we find so many psychopaths in positions of power, since they're exceptionally convincing liars.
No, it's completely about access to birth control. To say it's about religious freedom is, at best, hypocrisy, and at worst an outright lie. Let me first start by saying it *should* all be moot, and certainly would be under a single-payer system, since Jesus says "Give to Ceasar what is Caesar's..." in other words, don't stop paying taxes because you morally object to their use.
The only people who refrain from using drugs due to their legal status are precisely the sort of people who are responsible enough to keep their use under control.
That's assuming that people can control addiction, which is sort of nonsensical. Yes, they can control their behavior before they're addicted, but by definition, they can't afterwards. There's a difference between "I'd like to try some meth, but I'm not going to risk my job to do it," and "I'm going to try some meth because there are no social consequences, oh shit this is good, fuck the consequences."
That's really a lesson for the future, where the future means our lifetimes, or our kids. At some point -- and we can nitpick over when, but it's not far away on the scale of human history, and likely not even human lifetimes -- physical labor of any sort, no matter how complicated, will be obsolete, as will the supervision and management thereof. Maintenance might be around for a little longer than that, but not much -- self repairing systems will see to that. It will necessarily be cheaper to use machines to perform manual labor, because the cost of machinery can be reduced to values much lower than even the cheapest of slave workers. Even if economies of scale for the production of these machines themselves don't lower the bar enough, the fact that machines don't get tired, or lazy, or belligerent, or stop paying attention will.
The jobs that will be left in manufacturing will be those of engineering and the management of engineers. But manufacturing is just the tip of the iceberg; the tip of the spear of automation. Other fields will soon feel the pressures as well. Even medicine -- perhaps especially medicine -- will not be immune from the transition. Diagnosticians and surgeons will be obsolete eventually, (and we're seeing the former already), though supervision of machines performing surgery might be desirable for some time to come.
So when I hear politicians talk about "getting manufacturing jobs back to the US," I think of the MPAA and RIAA chasing down their obsolete business models. Conservatives want to force people off of unemployment without any sort of path to employment, as if the only thing holding them back was the desire to find work and they just need a not-so-gentle prodding. We need to figure out how to adapt to a society where there simply isn't enough work for everyone to have a job. It's the future we always said we wanted, but we never prepared for, and indeed, we don't recognize it happening around us. Like the proverbial frog in hot water, it's not happening fast enough for people to necessarily recognize it, but it *is* happening. That automation would replace human workers, when it started in the 80s, was a foregone conclusion, but the fact that it didn't happen overnight, in full, has made us complacent. We make the mistake of believing that if it hasn't happened yet, it never will.
Meanwhile, people who can't find jobs are justifiably angry that they can't support themselves and their families, and the situation will only get worse over the long term unless and until we transition to a society where self-sufficiency is an option rather than a requirement. Unemployment numbers as a percent are mainly improving because people who have stopped looking for a job aren't counted, and while job growth *is* happening, January's pace for growth would take us until 2029 to reach pre-recession levels. We need to stop ignoring reality and work on dealing with it instead. Manufacturing mostly isn't going to come back, especially in the form of jobs, and definitely not at the rates we need to employ people. Likewise, even if everyone who worked in manufacturing was capable of retraining, there just aren't enough jobs in other fields. So what do we do?
Change the grip, you change the moment axis, and thus the rotation plane and thus the amount of connective tissue, or lack thereof, between your hand and your thumb.
You can't just move a mine. If it's two cents more expensive, it will just cut two cents into profit. It's not like these companies are mining to break even.
I agree... the fact that they sent the letters, as ordered, is not egregious. The fact that they obtained the order in the first place, however, is. The same order also held the defendants (who commissioned the study) in contempt, so I wish there was more background available in the case, but I haven't been able to turn up much via Google.
Doctors had to remove the arms and legs that had been transplanted last Friday onto evket Ãavdar, 27, because of tissue incompatibility.
I look forward to the day where limbs and organs can be lab-grown from a patient's own cells and we won't have to worry about tissue rejection. While sad, I hope these sort of stories can at least help to inform the public of the promise that tissue engineering holds. The overwhelming majority of deaths in the US are a result of organ failure, whether due to cancer, heart disease, or other chronic illness. The ability to replace organs and tissue with their lab-grown counterparts would be a huge boost to both life expectancy and quality of life for a significant portion of the population.
What if your safe contains a piece of paper with what appear to be random markings. Does the government have the right to assert that you "decode" the paper? What if it really *is* random markings?
A safe either contains something, or it does not, and that can be rather easily verified by looking at the contents. The same cannot be said for either the paper described above, or for a hard drive filled with noise and/or encrypted data.
They can't, but that's the second line of defense. The first line of defense is denying prosecutors the ability to ask you to decrypt it in the first place. After all, saying "I can't remember the password" might be good enough for the court because they can't prove otherwise, but it's going to raise red flags with any jury.
Yeah, but for most people that's irrelevant. The DEA is going after dealers and distributors, not someone carrying a joint, which is what would have landed you in jail before state decriminalization, and now results in an administrative fine (like a parking ticket) or nothing (if you have a prescription). And there are still limits -- typically anything over an ounce is still a crime.
I don't want it to go to waste and at the moment with the meat I have the best thing I can do is create the best tasting food I can with it.
See, that raises quite a few logical inconsistencies in my mind.
1) Why is it "wasting" an animal to not retrieve it? Presumably there are other animals that will be happy to eat the carcass, as they would eventually anyway. Changing the timeframe for this event on a small scale doesn't seem particularly immoral to me. I would still want to retrieve my kill, but that's not because I think it would be a waste not to. A waste for me, perhaps, but not in the big picture.
2) Why is the enjoyment of eating an animal more proper than the enjoyment of killing it? They're both enjoyment, and they're both demonstrably unnecessary, but one is considered morally wrong. To me, this seems to be the same wrongheadedness of people who want to ban abortion or other "morally questionable" activities that don't harm other people. We (the majority of us) acknowledge that zygotes and that fetuses early in their development are not people, and that we can terminate lives of non-people for no other reason than because we want to, or because we don't want them to exist. Whether we enjoy *the act*, or can find some practical justification shouldn't be relevant. Would these hunts be okay if the feathers were used to make pillows for homeless people? If that's going to be our standard (which I maintain is ridiculous and arbitrary), then maybe that's something they should look in to.
don't like the use of raised birds in a pigeon shoot
Who cares? They're *pigeons*. They have the mental capacity of... *pigeons*, and they are neither endangered nor being driven in that direction, particularly since they were bred for this very purpose. This isn't some sort of slippery slope argument where today they're shooting pigeons and tomorrow they're throwing baby seals in the air; rather it's both practice for, and testing of, skills necessary to hunt live birds.
But even if it's just for fun and there were no other redeeming factors, if people want to breed and shoot pigeons, what business is it of mine? Cruel and inhumane treatment is just that: treatment, not the rationale behind the treatment. It's not inherently cruel and inhumane to kill animals quickly, and that's true whether it's for sport, or for hunger, or for convenience (such as occurs in animal "shelters"). The only arguments against this really come down to "we don't like it," which shouldn't automatically trump "we do like it," when no other factors are involved. My opinion on this is the same as for abortion and other social issues by the way: If you don't like it, don't do it. The world is no worse off because other people do, and frankly, if people are happier and are not harming other people, then the world is probably better off.
Here on Earth, people will steal whatever they can get their hands on
People, somewhat, businesses, generally no. The question of whether to spend $10k on a license or to defend a possible lawsuit in the future with lawyer fees, damages, and the license they should have bought in the first place isn't even a question for most businesses. All it takes is one (ex-)employee with a grudge. Sure, there are exceptions -- companies run by idiots who are penny wise and pound foolish -- but they tend not to last very long anyway.
And $10k isn't an outrageous price for commercially used software at all. Our software is very uncomplicated and starts at about $3k, and we sell tens to hundreds of programs to individual companies. Why? Because it costs a lot more than that for someone to hire a competent developer with the technical knowledge necessary to write the software themselves. Even if they hire a developer on contract, they need someone to support it, and support can get expensive when you're not pooling your resources with other clients and getting "free" updates and bug fixes (built in to the cost of the software, really).
What the original poster *should* do is accept that the people who aren't paying for the software are almost certainly people who never would or could, but that these people are still providing a service, because they'll eventually take their knowledge and (if it's worth pirating over, say, Sony Vegas or Adobe Whatever) love of your software to their job where they will extol its virtues, and where sales will potentially be made. The question would actually be much more difficult to answer if he were writing consumer oriented software, but he's not, so the answer is simple: ignore the piracy unless and until it's brought to his attention that a business is using it without a license, and then decide how to handle that separately. Running video editing software in a browser is particularly stupid given the bandwidth requirements, unless you're suggesting that the processing be done locally, which is also stupid because then you're creating unnecessary overhead versus a native app AND it can still be copied. There's nothing magical about running code locally just because it's running inside of a browser.
I don't care who with what authority says it can or cannot happen, no person is at fault for deaths as a result of earthquakes, hurricanes, avalanches, tornadoes, etc.
I agree as far as predictions go, at least with the state of science as it stands today, but negligence can be a contributing factor and convey liability to the negligent party. For example, if I built tornado shelters, and my shoddy construction techniques or materials led to the collapse of the structure during a tornado, I could be liable. Same could apply to avalanches: people are responsible for preventing them in many areas by preemptively triggering smaller, nondestructive avalanches, and failure to perform that duty could be a contributing factor if someone died as a result.
As for this particular case, they seem to be saying that if the scientists didn't know for sure, then they shouldn't have said anything, which is stupid. I'm not sure what's up with the Italian courts (not that the US system is any better), but they seem to be focused more on making someone pay than delivering justice. At least for events that garner international attention...
Yeah, I don't think opposition from former Eastern Bloc countries like Bulgaria and Poland surprises anyone really, nor do I expect their dissent to convince any of the proponents to back down, particularly the US. On the contrary, I expect they'll use that to fuel their argument about the necessity of ACTA.
Good to see Germany and the Netherlands opposing it though. The economic powerhouse of Germany cannot be ignored, and their opposition makes it politically easier for other countries to voice their dissent as well.
Keep in mind, I'm not a Tea Party sympathizer; I'm just pointing out that the correlation you discovered could be construed the way you intended, or the way you didn't intend (and of course as mere coincidence, but you ruled that out for the sake of argument).
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps people (women? I have no idea what the target demographic for literary porn is -- I'm a consumer of the visual media myself) aren't expecting heavy bitch-on-whelp action when they buy the book. How clearly is the content explained beforehand? That might be part of the problem.
30% of our natural Gas production in the US comes from fracking. Producing energy is not completely safe no matter what method you use.
Nice straw man, but nobody's saying it should be "completely safe." There's a wide array of values between completely safe and deliberately ignoring what may be catastrophic environmental damage to satisfy a year or two of energy demand. Call me when your tap water is flammable and taking a shower presents a risk of explosion.
On second thought, don't bother.
Are there more dishonest people per capita at certain income levels? Is it just that the magnitude of their crimes is so much higher because of their station in life? Or is it the size of the immorality of stealing all the net worth of millions of people, and not just their lunch money or their car, and not one personalized theft at a time?
I would say that dishonest people are simply more likely to get ahead... After all, everyone would be honest if dishonesty didn't convey some sort of advantage. So almost by definition, people who are good at lying, cheating, and stealing without getting caught are likely to be successful. It's even less surprising, then, that we find so many psychopaths in positions of power, since they're exceptionally convincing liars.
No, it's completely about access to birth control. To say it's about religious freedom is, at best, hypocrisy, and at worst an outright lie. Let me first start by saying it *should* all be moot, and certainly would be under a single-payer system, since Jesus says "Give to Ceasar what is Caesar's..." in other words, don't stop paying taxes because you morally object to their use.
But putting that aside, here's a very good article on why the bishops are full of it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/bishops-contraception-objections-fail-their-churchs-own-moral-reasoning/2012/02/14/gIQA3en3DR_story.html
Correction, self-driving cars will *really* take off when they have wings and jet or fan-based propulsion.
The only people who refrain from using drugs due to their legal status are precisely the sort of people who are responsible enough to keep their use under control.
That's assuming that people can control addiction, which is sort of nonsensical. Yes, they can control their behavior before they're addicted, but by definition, they can't afterwards. There's a difference between "I'd like to try some meth, but I'm not going to risk my job to do it," and "I'm going to try some meth because there are no social consequences, oh shit this is good, fuck the consequences."
That's really a lesson for the future, where the future means our lifetimes, or our kids. At some point -- and we can nitpick over when, but it's not far away on the scale of human history, and likely not even human lifetimes -- physical labor of any sort, no matter how complicated, will be obsolete, as will the supervision and management thereof. Maintenance might be around for a little longer than that, but not much -- self repairing systems will see to that. It will necessarily be cheaper to use machines to perform manual labor, because the cost of machinery can be reduced to values much lower than even the cheapest of slave workers. Even if economies of scale for the production of these machines themselves don't lower the bar enough, the fact that machines don't get tired, or lazy, or belligerent, or stop paying attention will.
The jobs that will be left in manufacturing will be those of engineering and the management of engineers. But manufacturing is just the tip of the iceberg; the tip of the spear of automation. Other fields will soon feel the pressures as well. Even medicine -- perhaps especially medicine -- will not be immune from the transition. Diagnosticians and surgeons will be obsolete eventually, (and we're seeing the former already), though supervision of machines performing surgery might be desirable for some time to come.
So when I hear politicians talk about "getting manufacturing jobs back to the US," I think of the MPAA and RIAA chasing down their obsolete business models. Conservatives want to force people off of unemployment without any sort of path to employment, as if the only thing holding them back was the desire to find work and they just need a not-so-gentle prodding. We need to figure out how to adapt to a society where there simply isn't enough work for everyone to have a job. It's the future we always said we wanted, but we never prepared for, and indeed, we don't recognize it happening around us. Like the proverbial frog in hot water, it's not happening fast enough for people to necessarily recognize it, but it *is* happening. That automation would replace human workers, when it started in the 80s, was a foregone conclusion, but the fact that it didn't happen overnight, in full, has made us complacent. We make the mistake of believing that if it hasn't happened yet, it never will.
Meanwhile, people who can't find jobs are justifiably angry that they can't support themselves and their families, and the situation will only get worse over the long term unless and until we transition to a society where self-sufficiency is an option rather than a requirement. Unemployment numbers as a percent are mainly improving because people who have stopped looking for a job aren't counted, and while job growth *is* happening, January's pace for growth would take us until 2029 to reach pre-recession levels. We need to stop ignoring reality and work on dealing with it instead. Manufacturing mostly isn't going to come back, especially in the form of jobs, and definitely not at the rates we need to employ people. Likewise, even if everyone who worked in manufacturing was capable of retraining, there just aren't enough jobs in other fields. So what do we do?
Change the grip, you change the moment axis, and thus the rotation plane and thus the amount of connective tissue, or lack thereof, between your hand and your thumb.
Potentially true, but not applicable in this case. Cavdar lost all four of his limbs in 1998 after he was accidentally electrocuted. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/02/27/triumph-then-failure-in-first-four-limb-transplant/
You can't just move a mine. If it's two cents more expensive, it will just cut two cents into profit. It's not like these companies are mining to break even.
I agree... the fact that they sent the letters, as ordered, is not egregious. The fact that they obtained the order in the first place, however, is. The same order also held the defendants (who commissioned the study) in contempt, so I wish there was more background available in the case, but I haven't been able to turn up much via Google.
Doctors had to remove the arms and legs that had been transplanted last Friday onto evket Ãavdar, 27, because of tissue incompatibility.
I look forward to the day where limbs and organs can be lab-grown from a patient's own cells and we won't have to worry about tissue rejection. While sad, I hope these sort of stories can at least help to inform the public of the promise that tissue engineering holds. The overwhelming majority of deaths in the US are a result of organ failure, whether due to cancer, heart disease, or other chronic illness. The ability to replace organs and tissue with their lab-grown counterparts would be a huge boost to both life expectancy and quality of life for a significant portion of the population.
What if your safe contains a piece of paper with what appear to be random markings. Does the government have the right to assert that you "decode" the paper? What if it really *is* random markings?
A safe either contains something, or it does not, and that can be rather easily verified by looking at the contents. The same cannot be said for either the paper described above, or for a hard drive filled with noise and/or encrypted data.
They can't, but that's the second line of defense. The first line of defense is denying prosecutors the ability to ask you to decrypt it in the first place. After all, saying "I can't remember the password" might be good enough for the court because they can't prove otherwise, but it's going to raise red flags with any jury.
Yeah, but for most people that's irrelevant. The DEA is going after dealers and distributors, not someone carrying a joint, which is what would have landed you in jail before state decriminalization, and now results in an administrative fine (like a parking ticket) or nothing (if you have a prescription). And there are still limits -- typically anything over an ounce is still a crime.
Depends, really. His grandchildren might have a much longer life expectancy than we do.
I don't want it to go to waste and at the moment with the meat I have the best thing I can do is create the best tasting food I can with it.
See, that raises quite a few logical inconsistencies in my mind.
1) Why is it "wasting" an animal to not retrieve it? Presumably there are other animals that will be happy to eat the carcass, as they would eventually anyway. Changing the timeframe for this event on a small scale doesn't seem particularly immoral to me. I would still want to retrieve my kill, but that's not because I think it would be a waste not to. A waste for me, perhaps, but not in the big picture.
2) Why is the enjoyment of eating an animal more proper than the enjoyment of killing it? They're both enjoyment, and they're both demonstrably unnecessary, but one is considered morally wrong. To me, this seems to be the same wrongheadedness of people who want to ban abortion or other "morally questionable" activities that don't harm other people. We (the majority of us) acknowledge that zygotes and that fetuses early in their development are not people, and that we can terminate lives of non-people for no other reason than because we want to, or because we don't want them to exist. Whether we enjoy *the act*, or can find some practical justification shouldn't be relevant. Would these hunts be okay if the feathers were used to make pillows for homeless people? If that's going to be our standard (which I maintain is ridiculous and arbitrary), then maybe that's something they should look in to.
don't like the use of raised birds in a pigeon shoot
Who cares? They're *pigeons*. They have the mental capacity of... *pigeons*, and they are neither endangered nor being driven in that direction, particularly since they were bred for this very purpose. This isn't some sort of slippery slope argument where today they're shooting pigeons and tomorrow they're throwing baby seals in the air; rather it's both practice for, and testing of, skills necessary to hunt live birds.
But even if it's just for fun and there were no other redeeming factors, if people want to breed and shoot pigeons, what business is it of mine? Cruel and inhumane treatment is just that: treatment, not the rationale behind the treatment. It's not inherently cruel and inhumane to kill animals quickly, and that's true whether it's for sport, or for hunger, or for convenience (such as occurs in animal "shelters"). The only arguments against this really come down to "we don't like it," which shouldn't automatically trump "we do like it," when no other factors are involved. My opinion on this is the same as for abortion and other social issues by the way: If you don't like it, don't do it. The world is no worse off because other people do, and frankly, if people are happier and are not harming other people, then the world is probably better off.
Here on Earth, people will steal whatever they can get their hands on
People, somewhat, businesses, generally no. The question of whether to spend $10k on a license or to defend a possible lawsuit in the future with lawyer fees, damages, and the license they should have bought in the first place isn't even a question for most businesses. All it takes is one (ex-)employee with a grudge. Sure, there are exceptions -- companies run by idiots who are penny wise and pound foolish -- but they tend not to last very long anyway.
And $10k isn't an outrageous price for commercially used software at all. Our software is very uncomplicated and starts at about $3k, and we sell tens to hundreds of programs to individual companies. Why? Because it costs a lot more than that for someone to hire a competent developer with the technical knowledge necessary to write the software themselves. Even if they hire a developer on contract, they need someone to support it, and support can get expensive when you're not pooling your resources with other clients and getting "free" updates and bug fixes (built in to the cost of the software, really).
What the original poster *should* do is accept that the people who aren't paying for the software are almost certainly people who never would or could, but that these people are still providing a service, because they'll eventually take their knowledge and (if it's worth pirating over, say, Sony Vegas or Adobe Whatever) love of your software to their job where they will extol its virtues, and where sales will potentially be made. The question would actually be much more difficult to answer if he were writing consumer oriented software, but he's not, so the answer is simple: ignore the piracy unless and until it's brought to his attention that a business is using it without a license, and then decide how to handle that separately. Running video editing software in a browser is particularly stupid given the bandwidth requirements, unless you're suggesting that the processing be done locally, which is also stupid because then you're creating unnecessary overhead versus a native app AND it can still be copied. There's nothing magical about running code locally just because it's running inside of a browser.
I'll see your wolf and raise you a 3-wolves t-shirt.
I don't care who with what authority says it can or cannot happen, no person is at fault for deaths as a result of earthquakes, hurricanes, avalanches, tornadoes, etc.
I agree as far as predictions go, at least with the state of science as it stands today, but negligence can be a contributing factor and convey liability to the negligent party. For example, if I built tornado shelters, and my shoddy construction techniques or materials led to the collapse of the structure during a tornado, I could be liable. Same could apply to avalanches: people are responsible for preventing them in many areas by preemptively triggering smaller, nondestructive avalanches, and failure to perform that duty could be a contributing factor if someone died as a result.
As for this particular case, they seem to be saying that if the scientists didn't know for sure, then they shouldn't have said anything, which is stupid. I'm not sure what's up with the Italian courts (not that the US system is any better), but they seem to be focused more on making someone pay than delivering justice. At least for events that garner international attention...
Yeah, I don't think opposition from former Eastern Bloc countries like Bulgaria and Poland surprises anyone really, nor do I expect their dissent to convince any of the proponents to back down, particularly the US. On the contrary, I expect they'll use that to fuel their argument about the necessity of ACTA.
Good to see Germany and the Netherlands opposing it though. The economic powerhouse of Germany cannot be ignored, and their opposition makes it politically easier for other countries to voice their dissent as well.
How does that conflict what I said?
Keep in mind, I'm not a Tea Party sympathizer; I'm just pointing out that the correlation you discovered could be construed the way you intended, or the way you didn't intend (and of course as mere coincidence, but you ruled that out for the sake of argument).
So, what, you're saying that people started paying attention and the Tea Party was formed?
That's hot.