Who cares about the glove? Seriously, lying to a customs official is a felony. Punishable by years and years in a Federal penitentiary where only getting the "glove" would have been a blessing.
Clearly you and I have different views of HUGE. The B-52 is HUGE, a 747 is HUGE. The SR-71 is about the width of a 1-1/2 F-16's and the length of about two F-16's tail to nose. It's a remarkably small plane, not even close to the size of your average 737, I'd wager the dimensions are about the same as a 12 seater regional jet. So either you've never seen an SR-71 in person and are full of shit or you have a very very different understanding of "huge" than the rest of the population. I'd recommend you stop by one of the many air force museums around the country that contain SR-71's and inspect their real size because they aren't a HUGE plane.
Meh. We pay taxes for precisely this sort of thing.
Rescue efforts in my state are paid for at the local level. My local taxes go to support fire/police and other city services, along with the occasional disaster related rescue. Your taxes have nothing to do with paying for rescue efforts in my area, if you come to my area and climb a mountain with no planning and assume your cell phone will save you if something happens you will get a bill. My tax money isn't to rescue you from your own stupidity.
That's not a search and rescue, that's an ambulance ride. Unless your taxes are supporting the ambulance (very unlikely) then of course you were billed.
Any routine back country rescue/search effort exceeds $500,000 in costs. The people involved are 99% of the time on overtime as they have regular jobs that have to be done. The equipment, fuel, supplies and time are expensive, even with hundereds of volunteers the rescue group can easily spend half a million just providing food, fuel, experts, aircraft and managers to the rescue effort.
My state was one of the first to propose charging for rescues because we had lots of people visiting from out of state that would decide to go hiking at 5pm in shorts and a tank top with a snow storm blowing in at 7pm. They hike upwards until 6:30pm and then it starts getting dark and cold and they start down but only get 10% of the way down. They then call emergency services on their cell phone, the one piece of equipment they have with them, and they don't know where they are, have no way to signal anyone, and will freeze to death in a few short hours. So a massive rescue effort is mobilized using paid local government workers on overtime, sometimes involving 50-100 people, helicopters and experienced rescue personal (a situation where volunteers can't be used because of the risks). After they find the people who at this point are fully in hypothermia and can't offer any assistence in their rescue even if people are close. Now the city and county (rescue is a local expense) are out 1/4 to 1/2 a million bucks because of shear stupidity.
IMO the people should be charged if they are stupid. If someone has an accident and gets a compound fracture while in the back country with all the proper equipment such that it's a rescue not necessarily a search effort then they shouldn't be charged. In general if the rescue/search are the result of something outside the control of the person involved and they were in general prepared for reasonable accidents/weather they shouldn't be charged but if they weren't prepared it's their fault and their $$$.
Responsible people: 1. Tell people where they are going including a detailed map that they don't vary from. 2. Tell people when they will be back and how long overdue they should wait till they call for help and they then stick to that schedule. 3. Carry proper equipment to survive/sustain changes in weather or common accidents. This includes first aid, extra clothes, food and water, flashlights, a sharp knife, fire starters and signaling gear (flares, beacons, mirrors) 4. That everyone in the party is aware of basic survival skills and first aid and can at a minimum secure a broken leg with splits and know when and when not to apply a tourniquet.
If you go hiking in the middle of September in the late afternoon in flip flops, shorts and a tank top and there is a winter storm scheduled for that evening and the only gear you take with you is a cell phone you deserve to pay for the rescue.
Because the cops think Sturgeon is a liar. When you confess to being a premeditated serial killer you usually know details of the case and how the police can A: find bodies or evidence of bodies, B: people are currently "missing", C: explain how you did it in great detail, D: Know the names of the people you killed (he claimed to target child molesters).
Lot of people confess to crimes they didn't commit and there is no evidence even happened. Sturgeon guy dressed in drag (he was the first lady at Han's wedding) and apparently convinced the cops he was a nut job to the point that his "confession" was a red herring at Han's trial. For all we know he conspired with Han's to make up this mass murder thing to provide "reasonable doubt", the judge was very correct in excluding that fact from the Jury. If he had confessed to killing Nina that would have been one thing, but confessing to killing 8 child molesters wouldn't even put Nina in the running even if he had actually killed 8 people.
I personally don't think that Han's would have been convicted if he had kept his mouth shut (the prosecution had motive and some erratic behavior but very little good forensic evidence), but if there is one thing you learn from watching Forensic Files and lot of CourtTV, smart people think they can sham a jury into believing anything because they are "smart". His explanations for his strange behavior were unbelievable. The Jury was shaking their head at his statements, that should have been his clue to shut up.
Notes is hardly the only competitor to the Exchange monopoly.
Novell Groupwise is another contender and is actually far cheaper. The Open Workgroup suite from Novell is $110 a seat with a yearly maintenance of $75 (http://www.novell.com/products/openworkgroupsuite/howtobuy.html), includes groupwise, openserver, Netware (edirectory included), and groupwise mobile for windows and palm mobile handhelds (also works with blackberry). I fail to see how notes is even slightly competitive in this area.
Not only does Novell give you a complete single sign-on solution that is equal to microsoft in ease of setup and user use, but they give you an exchange server replacement, Server licenses with no limit to accommodate the users you have AND support. Most small businesses show easily be able to afford $75 a seat when the equivalent MS solution is close to $300.
So when our ancestors got wounds and rubbed dirt into them they had it right all along? Or is it they had it wrong, you only rub special dirt in, and only if the wound is severe?
Yeah, the US system is hideously expensive and byzantine, but in terms of actually having a positive medical outcome it can't be beat. Maybe if one of the other countries spent as much they might (or might not) have similar medical outcome statistics.
You forgot the most important part. This might be true, but only in the circumstance where the person being discussed has high quality private insurance, typically of the PPO type. Extract the same results to people with HMO's or no insurance the results are drastically different than the rest of the world. The US has the highest industrialized death rates for treatable conditions in the world due to the large number of uninsured people that die of simple treatable conditions.
Beyond that the system costs 2x what other countries are managing with national insurance programs. The fact is that basic healthcare, ie yearly routine visits to the doctor along with preventative care do far more to save costs in the long run than any other measure yet in this country that is exactly the care that the people that can't afford insurance are excluded from while being allowed by law to use the most expensive care in the system (emergency room). A simple basic national insurance program that removed the profit motive from the basis of medical costs while providing access to routine non-emergency care would do far more to lower the per capita medical expenses in this country than just about any other measure you can imagine.
In my state the public employee health insurance plan, managed by the state, administered by state employees and paid for by employee benefits at the various public agencies is by the far the best managed AND least expensive (in comparison to similar coverage levels in private insurance) insurance available in the state. Allow private businesses to join the plan which removes the insurance industry profit and the entire health care system would see an immediate cost savings of anywhere from 6-20%, but probably much higher because of the simplicity the system would provide.
The American Healthcare system is broken, if we don't fix it now it's going to get even more broken. It's not only expensive it makes US workers uncompetitive on the world scale and moves production and jobs outside the US. Not only is it a serious cost issue it's also an issue of national security and global competition. A US manufacturer cannot spend $10,000 a year on benefits for an employee while their foreign competitor has no such expense because it's handled at a national level. As essentially the only country in the world without universal healthcare it's done more damage to our industrial sector than almost any other factor. Although the early damage to the steel industry was a factor of dumping the largest single factor continuing to harm the industry is a legacy healthcare and pension obligation that causes the price of steel produced in the US to cost 20% more.
Every MMORPG suffers the same problem. How do you keep a game interesting and maintain incentive for people to keep playing the more they play? Every Single MMORPG, that I'm aware of, going all the way back to the very first network MUD's solved the problem with grindage. Grindage is play where all you do is hack and slash for experience/equipment. That the new generation of graphical MMORPG players is becoming aware of this and using the same techniques the text based predecessors used (scripting or bots) is absolutely not unexpected.
If every level is as easy to reach as the last then no one would play because there is no challenge in it. The grindage is a simple function of the game to make the higher levels and stuff more valuable as the time commitment goes up dramatically the higher you go. There are only a couple other tools you can use to keep things interesting and neither are perfect. Quests require massive continuing development of unique entertaining single player experiences (on MUD's this was handled by the volunteer development community of former players), the second solution is forcing everyone above a certain level to automatically accept Player killer status such that moving about in the world is much more dangerous. The only other option is to bring in elements of non killing group interactivity (true role playing), which graphical MMORPG's seem to be unusable for.
Don't blame Blizzard for the game being about grindage, it's a fact of the genre that you would know if you had been around long enough to have played MUD's back in their heyday. As a for profit company Blizzard has a goal of preventing people from cheating at the grindage because it can get people to stop playing because the achievement of working through the grindage means a lot less.
Snooping is one thing, using that snooping in a court is another thing. Remember, even though Bush is breaking the law and the telecommunications companies were complicit in it, the simple fact is that none of the information obtained can be used to put a single US citizen in jail. Part of the ongoing fight at Gitmo is to make sure that none of the information gained can be used in any court anywhere including those where they try to take away constitutional rights from non-citizens.
It's one thing to allow your government to listen and a completely different matter to allow your government to listen then use that against the citizens. This is the big difference between the west and China. Sure our governments listens, but without a court order and some reasonable suspicion to get the warrant none of listening can amount of much of anything, in China they execute you for portraying the state badly to the world and your own words can be used against you without any checks on the abuse of government.
I use bob@aol.com for situations similar to this or where it's just a spam harvesting operation. I sometimes feel bad for Bob, then I remember Bob uses aol and I don't feel so bad for Bob.
If you want to end this tactic you make some prominent politicians, preferably a significant number of very high ranking legislators and directors of executive law enforcement show up on that list. Not them directly as the FBI would avoid the warrants, but their favorite grandchild or their married daughter. Someone where the name doesn't give away the connection. As long as only ordinary people are harmed by the actions nothing will stop it but someone with connections get's harmed and there will be hearings.
As vivisection requires that the entity being dissected be alive at the time of dissection, hence the very definition of the word vivisection. You can't kill the grue then dissect it, you must capture it alive then find a way to secure it so you can vivisect it. My guess would be that the grue wouldn't like being vivisected and as a result the search for the non-trivial zero will involve the division of blood and flesh of the searcher, possibly by an amount of blood and flesh such that you end up with an imaginary number. And we all know what happens when imaginary numbers and grue's collide and it ain't pretty.
You can't ban an organization in the US. The government can take all their assests and arrest the leaders and even the members but the government can't stop the free association of people.
Wikipedia shouldn't have to edit anything. As they don't create anything (everything being publicly generated) they are only responsible in an order to remove, not for any sort liability for statements made.
It's not good to say they would be liable, the MOST he could do is get a court order to force removal of certain phrases, not a rewrite to a positive light and then he has to prove it's defamatory and NOT opinion (when the every wikipedia page includes a note that this it everything is generated by the public.
Keep in mind the only bridge selling construed as buying a sham would be the purchase of PUBLIC bridges as quite a number of private entities do sell bridges, all you have to provide is the ground to put the bridge on.
The PC Game industry makes more $$$ per year than Hollywood using the 10% he claims. His complaint is that he can't get beyond that 10%, but the problem is that most people aren't hardcore gamers. They want a cheap reliable graphics that does 2D in windows and maybe some 3D aero glass and don't care a whit about gaming performance at the time of purchase. Then when their child who is an aspiring hard core gamers tries to play Crysis they get upset that it can't run it.
The problem isn't necessarily Intel, it's box labeling. Instead of trying to sell copies to people that can't play it maybe they should make their boxes a little more clear and sacrifice the sales of the games to those who can't play the game.
I'm surprised they aren't collecting DNA as well. After all there is a penchant for the British police to get a cheek swab from every single person for absolutely any reason.
Just look at that guy that bought the laptop with the secret classified CDROM hidden under the keyboard, he had to give a cheek swab and all he did was buy a used a computer and turn in the classified CDROM as a punishment for being honest and doing the right thing.
According to the full account he's the instigator of a massive academic crime and deserves the academic death penalty (expulsion). Being a party to the academic crime all the other 147 other students should receive an academic public flogging (failing the course, or less depending on their level of involvement and whether or not they come completely clean on their involvement to the professor and school).
Working together is one thing, telling everyone in the group that to join they have to post their answers to the homework completely, as according to the facebook group page that was the only way he would let you in the group, is cheating. He led up a massive, by invitation only homework copying service. Just because of the inflammatory nature of the news posting doesn't mean you can't do a little research on your OWN before jumping to conclusions.
nVidia is telling you what you need to hear to conclude that they aren't threatened with extinction.
The fact is that in probably in a little more than two years there is going to be NO need for discrete graphics anymore. In roughly two years time Intel is going to be pushing 16 cores on a die, probably following the announced AMD strategy of mixing in some cores that are highly optimized and streamlined for operations that just happen to be very similar to what graphics technology needs (AMD calls them XPU cores). And if they can deliver ray-tracing in real time then it's more than likely going to be ray-tracing because it's an order of magnitude more precise than other techniques. The simple fact is once we move to 16+ cores there isn't going to be a need for discrete graphics anymore. Move the basic 2D stuff into the motherboard and run the graphics on the discrete cores. Hell that's the whole principle behind the PS3, 8 (7 usable) identical, programmable, highly optimized SIMD floating point cores and a power processor to run the OS. Just take the model and stick 8 of the cell like cores on the die with 8 x86 cores and you have highly programmable graphics without the need for discrete graphics.
nVidia is going to be in big trouble in about 2 years. If you're an investor watch the AMD and Intel roadmaps and when the multi-core processors come out with the cell like processors and x86 processors on the same die it's game over for nVidia and time to sell the stock if they don't have another plan to stay viable. Not to mention Linux will be MUCH better off as we'll have direct access to those cores and will be able to do some amazing things.
You make it sound so simple. Making an IC microchip is not like making a loaf of bread.
Microchips are created by creating a programming design. This design is then turned into a mask (a very complicated process) which is then used in the lithography to create the IC. Then after you get the engineering samples you spend months figuring out where your mask is recreating the programming wrong, then make the second revision with a new mask that you then more than likely use. Taking the mask (which the manufacturer has) and turning it back into the programing code so you can figure out what transistors and circuits to modify and then creating a new mask that you debug then create another mask so you can create new chips without the circuits is NOT trivial. Not only won't they be exact copies, it would be extremely laborious and very expensive to do as it would require many many hours by highly qualified and very intelligent EE's who have worked in the IC design for many years. The larger the circuit the more complicated and time consuming reverse engineering the mask would be. On complicated designs it would probably take longer than the revision cycle of the chip to properly reverse engineer. Unless there is some coordinated government need and outside funding the fabs engaged in this will be unable to make extra chips because they don't have the resources to do the reverse engineering required and stay in business. Again you won't stop a highly coordinated state effort to remove the lock but the outsource Fab's likely wouldn't be able to do it.
This is important to preserving high paid jobs, the more chips produced by the fabs and sold on the blackmarket the more the companies producing the chips are hurt. The ideal solution in my mind is to build the fabs in the US, the problem is the unfair trade conditions that make it more expensive to produce in the US. Until the currency and trade imbalance is corrected China will continue to dominate manufacturing, but anything we can do to stop them from black marketing over production the better. I imagine companies like nVidia and others that use foreign fabs will start using this technology immediately.
What I can't understand is how this is even a debate for public schools. I went to a Catholic school through junior high and there wasn't even a discussion about this. We were taught about evolution in science class, *and* in religion class we were taught that the creation stories were not meant to be taken literally.
Well all real Christians (read southern baptists) know that Catholics are a bunch of Hell bound heretics.
You have to understand the mentality of the group that exposes these beliefs. They truly believe that the stories in the bible are not parable, but fact. They BELIEVE that the earth is 6436 years old (or whatever the number really is). You can present real solid evidence to the contrary and they WON'T believe you. They will discount real verifiable proof as it conflicts with their BELIEF. It doesn't matter that evolution is THE fundamental basis for ALL medical research. It doesn't matter that nearly every single medical advance for the last 20 years has relied on evolution as a basis not only for the discovery but the proof as well. It doesn't matter that the growing field of molecular biology (which holds the promise of a cure for cancer) wouldn't exist without evolutionary biology. It doesn't matter that the genetic conditions for disease, and the vestigial organs and body parts in not only humans but other animals wouldn't exist if evolution wasn't a fact.
It doesn't matter that Darwin's theory of evolution is not very well liked in the academic community, or that the real value of his work was the hundreds of pages and years of research documenting irrefutable evolution on the Galapagos. It doesn't matter that over 1000 collegiate level biological scientists signed a statement that they consider evolution a fact and the only thing in debate is the method by which it operates (the theory), there is no debate that evolution is an Observed, documented fact of this planet. It doesn't matter that evolution on both the micro and macro level has been observed, documented and verified. It doesn't matter that humans have seen the evolution of species, including over a dozen during our well documented research time (less than 200 years). It doesn't matter that domestication and selective breeding wouldn't be possible without evolution. The reality is the evidence is meaningless to those who believe they already have the answer.
This is the real danger of young earth religions and something I thought the dark ages did away with. A belief that you already have the answers for everything is a dangerous path to walk down. You end up like the Amish, refusing to participate in the advancement of society. Either that or you pretend that you can partake in the advancement while denying how the advancement occurs, that and handicap the children of this nation by teaching them nonsense and that their eyes and reason can't teach them about the world we live in. Because that's what science is, it's a method designed to be as objective as humanely possible for verifying what our eyes, ears and reason tells us about the world and universe we live in. It doesn't depend on religion, nor does it even concern itself with ideas that can't be verified. Anything that isn't falsifiable is philosophy, not science.
The point of ID is to try to co-opt the credibility of science and apply it to the belief in god. They make arguments that science isn't fair if it doesn't consider the option of sky wizards, and play to emotion rather than fact and reason. They make the claim of items so complex that they can't exist naturally, challenging that the item could not exist without the presence of a sky wizard. Yet the item exists so there must be a sky wizard, con men call this turning the argument around. Rather than saying X exists, and asking the question of how did it come to exist and studying such a thing, they turn the argument around, providing the answer and making the argument every other possibility is just too remote or improbable to occur. This conveniently ignor
Judge White made a terrible decision. A jaw dropping horrible decision. A decision so horrible it drew in briefs from the who's who of top civil rights defense organizations. Close to 20 separate nonprofit civil rights groups including the EFF, Librarians association, Public Citizen and ACLU.
He failed to even ask basic questions about why he was hearing a case by a foreign bank against an Australian living in Kenya. He failed to even ask basic questions about why he was in an exparte motion on document exposure with a foreign bank. He failed to verify that Wikileaks had been properly served. They HADN'T, unless you think a vague threat of court action possibly taking place in three separate countries by email counts as proper service. He failed to ask even rudimentary questions about why he was being asked to take down the domain name for an organization with over 20,000 documents exposing fraud and public misdeeds over the release of a single set of documents that purport to show company sanctioned money laundering by one of Switzerlands top banks. He failed to even consider that the public value of the document as press overrides the copyright considerations. He failed to even read the injunction he signed, as all he did was cross out the proposed on the top of what Baer's lawyers had given him. He absolutely failed to consider the freedom of press as it relates to these documents. He absolutely failed in almost every respect.
Judge White's actions, not only in allowing the case to go forward when it's CLEAR he has no jurisdiction in the case and his previous actions lead me to believe he is nothing short of incompetent in the job. Judge White is a danger to the American justice system and should be removed from the bench. His actions were clearly negligent and a breach of everything this country stands for and a slap in the face of justice.
And just to throw a little analogy your way what he did was the equivalent of removing a foreign citizens name from an international phone book at the request of a foreign company over the dispute of a published editorial on the conduct of said company. The decision was one of the worst made in the last 10 years by an American court. Jaw dropping horrible, not a single basis in law or even common sense for how he ruled.
Taking the time to defend his judgment to the press (and not the parties to the suit) shows just how bad the decision was and was simply an attempt to cover his ass. In fact I'm even more offended by the Judges actions by his attempt to defend his terrible ruling including blatantly lieing that WIkileaks was properly served. Had the Judge an ounce of honesty he would have admitted his negligence and transfered the case to another Judge to rule on the jurisdictional issue. Instead he rules that Wikileaks sending council to get their domain name back amounted to them admitting jurisdiction. If he was a cop that would have been entrapment, his actions and his rulings prove that him remaining on the bench is a danger and he should lose his bench immediately for gross misconduct. In fact I would go a step further and say he shouldn't just lose his bench, he should be disbarred and lose his license to practice law in every state. Not only that but the Hollywood lawyers involved for the bank should also be disbarred for what they did as they clearly violated the federal procedural rules and gamed the system. Not only that but I wouldn't be surprised if you examined the record and there is a similar course of action taken by this judge when dealing with lawyers from this firm in the past. This was far to horrible to be a freak ruling or one time incident.
Don't defend the actions of this Judge, be horrified that he made such a terrible ruling and be shocked that no action will be taken against him for it.
I would consider 3 weeks of net profits to be a very MILD punishment when there was gross negligence at the hands of Exxon.
The supervisors of the captain didn't want to punish a friend even though they had known for over 3 weeks that he had started drinking on ship again after already being suspended and being provided treatment. This is all very well documented including internal emails indicating that not only immediate supervisors but higher level managers knew and is referred to in the judgement by both the judge and the jury as GROSS negligence.
The people in Alaska that were affected by the spill had their entire lively hoods taken away as tourism, fishing and seafood production was severely harmed and was the primary economy in Prince William sound (and much of Alaska for that matter). Losing all their ability to make money to the point of being completely gone for over 5 years after the spill. The damages covered part of that but don't think for a minute the damages awarded to the individuals covered all their loses, at best it covered what they could document and no more. Neither do the damages cover the time they had to wait to receive their award as the trial took years after the spill.
The punitive damages were originally awarded as 5 billion and reduced on appeal to 2.5 billion. The supreme court has set a baseline rule that punitive damages shouldn't exceed 9 times the actual damages and at 2.5 billion the punitive damages amount to ~5 times actual damages (well within the supreme court guidelines), along with being only 3 weeks of profit and the payout to each victim at a measly $70k when their ability to make a living and even acquire food was destroyed for over 5 years (and years to recover actual damages) is a mild punishment at best.
In addition, I'll never understand how someone could imply that the cleanup expenses were anything other than an absolute obligation for Exxon and have nothing at all to do with the damages and negligence involved. That 3.4 billion was mandatory in my opinion and plays no part in reducing their obligation to the people who's lives they destroyed nor does it play any role in the punitive damages they owe to punish them for their gross negligence. Exxon got off very easy IMO for something that should have cost them their company.
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Who cares about the glove? Seriously, lying to a customs official is a felony. Punishable by years and years in a Federal penitentiary where only getting the "glove" would have been a blessing.
Clearly you and I have different views of HUGE. The B-52 is HUGE, a 747 is HUGE. The SR-71 is about the width of a 1-1/2 F-16's and the length of about two F-16's tail to nose. It's a remarkably small plane, not even close to the size of your average 737, I'd wager the dimensions are about the same as a 12 seater regional jet. So either you've never seen an SR-71 in person and are full of shit or you have a very very different understanding of "huge" than the rest of the population. I'd recommend you stop by one of the many air force museums around the country that contain SR-71's and inspect their real size because they aren't a HUGE plane.
Rescue efforts in my state are paid for at the local level. My local taxes go to support fire/police and other city services, along with the occasional disaster related rescue. Your taxes have nothing to do with paying for rescue efforts in my area, if you come to my area and climb a mountain with no planning and assume your cell phone will save you if something happens you will get a bill. My tax money isn't to rescue you from your own stupidity.
That's not a search and rescue, that's an ambulance ride. Unless your taxes are supporting the ambulance (very unlikely) then of course you were billed.
Any routine back country rescue/search effort exceeds $500,000 in costs. The people involved are 99% of the time on overtime as they have regular jobs that have to be done. The equipment, fuel, supplies and time are expensive, even with hundereds of volunteers the rescue group can easily spend half a million just providing food, fuel, experts, aircraft and managers to the rescue effort.
My state was one of the first to propose charging for rescues because we had lots of people visiting from out of state that would decide to go hiking at 5pm in shorts and a tank top with a snow storm blowing in at 7pm. They hike upwards until 6:30pm and then it starts getting dark and cold and they start down but only get 10% of the way down. They then call emergency services on their cell phone, the one piece of equipment they have with them, and they don't know where they are, have no way to signal anyone, and will freeze to death in a few short hours. So a massive rescue effort is mobilized using paid local government workers on overtime, sometimes involving 50-100 people, helicopters and experienced rescue personal (a situation where volunteers can't be used because of the risks). After they find the people who at this point are fully in hypothermia and can't offer any assistence in their rescue even if people are close. Now the city and county (rescue is a local expense) are out 1/4 to 1/2 a million bucks because of shear stupidity.
IMO the people should be charged if they are stupid. If someone has an accident and gets a compound fracture while in the back country with all the proper equipment such that it's a rescue not necessarily a search effort then they shouldn't be charged. In general if the rescue/search are the result of something outside the control of the person involved and they were in general prepared for reasonable accidents/weather they shouldn't be charged but if they weren't prepared it's their fault and their $$$.
Responsible people:
1. Tell people where they are going including a detailed map that they don't vary from.
2. Tell people when they will be back and how long overdue they should wait till they call for help and they then stick to that schedule.
3. Carry proper equipment to survive/sustain changes in weather or common accidents. This includes first aid, extra clothes, food and water, flashlights, a sharp knife, fire starters and signaling gear (flares, beacons, mirrors)
4. That everyone in the party is aware of basic survival skills and first aid and can at a minimum secure a broken leg with splits and know when and when not to apply a tourniquet.
If you go hiking in the middle of September in the late afternoon in flip flops, shorts and a tank top and there is a winter storm scheduled for that evening and the only gear you take with you is a cell phone you deserve to pay for the rescue.
Because the cops think Sturgeon is a liar. When you confess to being a premeditated serial killer you usually know details of the case and how the police can A: find bodies or evidence of bodies, B: people are currently "missing", C: explain how you did it in great detail, D: Know the names of the people you killed (he claimed to target child molesters).
Lot of people confess to crimes they didn't commit and there is no evidence even happened. Sturgeon guy dressed in drag (he was the first lady at Han's wedding) and apparently convinced the cops he was a nut job to the point that his "confession" was a red herring at Han's trial. For all we know he conspired with Han's to make up this mass murder thing to provide "reasonable doubt", the judge was very correct in excluding that fact from the Jury. If he had confessed to killing Nina that would have been one thing, but confessing to killing 8 child molesters wouldn't even put Nina in the running even if he had actually killed 8 people.
I personally don't think that Han's would have been convicted if he had kept his mouth shut (the prosecution had motive and some erratic behavior but very little good forensic evidence), but if there is one thing you learn from watching Forensic Files and lot of CourtTV, smart people think they can sham a jury into believing anything because they are "smart". His explanations for his strange behavior were unbelievable. The Jury was shaking their head at his statements, that should have been his clue to shut up.
Notes is hardly the only competitor to the Exchange monopoly.
Novell Groupwise is another contender and is actually far cheaper. The Open Workgroup suite from Novell is $110 a seat with a yearly maintenance of $75 (http://www.novell.com/products/openworkgroupsuite/howtobuy.html), includes groupwise, openserver, Netware (edirectory included), and groupwise mobile for windows and palm mobile handhelds (also works with blackberry). I fail to see how notes is even slightly competitive in this area.
Not only does Novell give you a complete single sign-on solution that is equal to microsoft in ease of setup and user use, but they give you an exchange server replacement, Server licenses with no limit to accommodate the users you have AND support. Most small businesses show easily be able to afford $75 a seat when the equivalent MS solution is close to $300.
So when our ancestors got wounds and rubbed dirt into them they had it right all along? Or is it they had it wrong, you only rub special dirt in, and only if the wound is severe?
You forgot the most important part. This might be true, but only in the circumstance where the person being discussed has high quality private insurance, typically of the PPO type. Extract the same results to people with HMO's or no insurance the results are drastically different than the rest of the world. The US has the highest industrialized death rates for treatable conditions in the world due to the large number of uninsured people that die of simple treatable conditions.
Beyond that the system costs 2x what other countries are managing with national insurance programs. The fact is that basic healthcare, ie yearly routine visits to the doctor along with preventative care do far more to save costs in the long run than any other measure yet in this country that is exactly the care that the people that can't afford insurance are excluded from while being allowed by law to use the most expensive care in the system (emergency room). A simple basic national insurance program that removed the profit motive from the basis of medical costs while providing access to routine non-emergency care would do far more to lower the per capita medical expenses in this country than just about any other measure you can imagine.
In my state the public employee health insurance plan, managed by the state, administered by state employees and paid for by employee benefits at the various public agencies is by the far the best managed AND least expensive (in comparison to similar coverage levels in private insurance) insurance available in the state. Allow private businesses to join the plan which removes the insurance industry profit and the entire health care system would see an immediate cost savings of anywhere from 6-20%, but probably much higher because of the simplicity the system would provide.
The American Healthcare system is broken, if we don't fix it now it's going to get even more broken. It's not only expensive it makes US workers uncompetitive on the world scale and moves production and jobs outside the US. Not only is it a serious cost issue it's also an issue of national security and global competition. A US manufacturer cannot spend $10,000 a year on benefits for an employee while their foreign competitor has no such expense because it's handled at a national level. As essentially the only country in the world without universal healthcare it's done more damage to our industrial sector than almost any other factor. Although the early damage to the steel industry was a factor of dumping the largest single factor continuing to harm the industry is a legacy healthcare and pension obligation that causes the price of steel produced in the US to cost 20% more.
Every MMORPG suffers the same problem. How do you keep a game interesting and maintain incentive for people to keep playing the more they play? Every Single MMORPG, that I'm aware of, going all the way back to the very first network MUD's solved the problem with grindage. Grindage is play where all you do is hack and slash for experience/equipment. That the new generation of graphical MMORPG players is becoming aware of this and using the same techniques the text based predecessors used (scripting or bots) is absolutely not unexpected.
If every level is as easy to reach as the last then no one would play because there is no challenge in it. The grindage is a simple function of the game to make the higher levels and stuff more valuable as the time commitment goes up dramatically the higher you go. There are only a couple other tools you can use to keep things interesting and neither are perfect. Quests require massive continuing development of unique entertaining single player experiences (on MUD's this was handled by the volunteer development community of former players), the second solution is forcing everyone above a certain level to automatically accept Player killer status such that moving about in the world is much more dangerous. The only other option is to bring in elements of non killing group interactivity (true role playing), which graphical MMORPG's seem to be unusable for.
Don't blame Blizzard for the game being about grindage, it's a fact of the genre that you would know if you had been around long enough to have played MUD's back in their heyday. As a for profit company Blizzard has a goal of preventing people from cheating at the grindage because it can get people to stop playing because the achievement of working through the grindage means a lot less.
Snooping is one thing, using that snooping in a court is another thing. Remember, even though Bush is breaking the law and the telecommunications companies were complicit in it, the simple fact is that none of the information obtained can be used to put a single US citizen in jail. Part of the ongoing fight at Gitmo is to make sure that none of the information gained can be used in any court anywhere including those where they try to take away constitutional rights from non-citizens.
It's one thing to allow your government to listen and a completely different matter to allow your government to listen then use that against the citizens. This is the big difference between the west and China. Sure our governments listens, but without a court order and some reasonable suspicion to get the warrant none of listening can amount of much of anything, in China they execute you for portraying the state badly to the world and your own words can be used against you without any checks on the abuse of government.
I use bob@aol.com for situations similar to this or where it's just a spam harvesting operation. I sometimes feel bad for Bob, then I remember Bob uses aol and I don't feel so bad for Bob.
If you want to end this tactic you make some prominent politicians, preferably a significant number of very high ranking legislators and directors of executive law enforcement show up on that list. Not them directly as the FBI would avoid the warrants, but their favorite grandchild or their married daughter. Someone where the name doesn't give away the connection. As long as only ordinary people are harmed by the actions nothing will stop it but someone with connections get's harmed and there will be hearings.
As vivisection requires that the entity being dissected be alive at the time of dissection, hence the very definition of the word vivisection. You can't kill the grue then dissect it, you must capture it alive then find a way to secure it so you can vivisect it. My guess would be that the grue wouldn't like being vivisected and as a result the search for the non-trivial zero will involve the division of blood and flesh of the searcher, possibly by an amount of blood and flesh such that you end up with an imaginary number. And we all know what happens when imaginary numbers and grue's collide and it ain't pretty.
You can't ban an organization in the US. The government can take all their assests and arrest the leaders and even the members but the government can't stop the free association of people.
Are people this ignorant of the constitution?
Wikipedia shouldn't have to edit anything. As they don't create anything (everything being publicly generated) they are only responsible in an order to remove, not for any sort liability for statements made.
It's not good to say they would be liable, the MOST he could do is get a court order to force removal of certain phrases, not a rewrite to a positive light and then he has to prove it's defamatory and NOT opinion (when the every wikipedia page includes a note that this it everything is generated by the public.
Like these:
http://www.abetterbackyard.com/garden-bridges.html
or these:
http://www.roscoebridge.com/
or these:
http://www.bridgeamerica.com/
Keep in mind the only bridge selling construed as buying a sham would be the purchase of PUBLIC bridges as quite a number of private entities do sell bridges, all you have to provide is the ground to put the bridge on.
The PC Game industry makes more $$$ per year than Hollywood using the 10% he claims. His complaint is that he can't get beyond that 10%, but the problem is that most people aren't hardcore gamers. They want a cheap reliable graphics that does 2D in windows and maybe some 3D aero glass and don't care a whit about gaming performance at the time of purchase. Then when their child who is an aspiring hard core gamers tries to play Crysis they get upset that it can't run it.
The problem isn't necessarily Intel, it's box labeling. Instead of trying to sell copies to people that can't play it maybe they should make their boxes a little more clear and sacrifice the sales of the games to those who can't play the game.
I'm surprised they aren't collecting DNA as well. After all there is a penchant for the British police to get a cheek swab from every single person for absolutely any reason.
Just look at that guy that bought the laptop with the secret classified CDROM hidden under the keyboard, he had to give a cheek swab and all he did was buy a used a computer and turn in the classified CDROM as a punishment for being honest and doing the right thing.
He's not a victim.
According to the full account he's the instigator of a massive academic crime and deserves the academic death penalty (expulsion). Being a party to the academic crime all the other 147 other students should receive an academic public flogging (failing the course, or less depending on their level of involvement and whether or not they come completely clean on their involvement to the professor and school).
Working together is one thing, telling everyone in the group that to join they have to post their answers to the homework completely, as according to the facebook group page that was the only way he would let you in the group, is cheating. He led up a massive, by invitation only homework copying service. Just because of the inflammatory nature of the news posting doesn't mean you can't do a little research on your OWN before jumping to conclusions.
nVidia is telling you what you need to hear to conclude that they aren't threatened with extinction.
The fact is that in probably in a little more than two years there is going to be NO need for discrete graphics anymore. In roughly two years time Intel is going to be pushing 16 cores on a die, probably following the announced AMD strategy of mixing in some cores that are highly optimized and streamlined for operations that just happen to be very similar to what graphics technology needs (AMD calls them XPU cores). And if they can deliver ray-tracing in real time then it's more than likely going to be ray-tracing because it's an order of magnitude more precise than other techniques. The simple fact is once we move to 16+ cores there isn't going to be a need for discrete graphics anymore. Move the basic 2D stuff into the motherboard and run the graphics on the discrete cores. Hell that's the whole principle behind the PS3, 8 (7 usable) identical, programmable, highly optimized SIMD floating point cores and a power processor to run the OS. Just take the model and stick 8 of the cell like cores on the die with 8 x86 cores and you have highly programmable graphics without the need for discrete graphics.
nVidia is going to be in big trouble in about 2 years. If you're an investor watch the AMD and Intel roadmaps and when the multi-core processors come out with the cell like processors and x86 processors on the same die it's game over for nVidia and time to sell the stock if they don't have another plan to stay viable. Not to mention Linux will be MUCH better off as we'll have direct access to those cores and will be able to do some amazing things.
You make it sound so simple. Making an IC microchip is not like making a loaf of bread.
Microchips are created by creating a programming design. This design is then turned into a mask (a very complicated process) which is then used in the lithography to create the IC. Then after you get the engineering samples you spend months figuring out where your mask is recreating the programming wrong, then make the second revision with a new mask that you then more than likely use. Taking the mask (which the manufacturer has) and turning it back into the programing code so you can figure out what transistors and circuits to modify and then creating a new mask that you debug then create another mask so you can create new chips without the circuits is NOT trivial. Not only won't they be exact copies, it would be extremely laborious and very expensive to do as it would require many many hours by highly qualified and very intelligent EE's who have worked in the IC design for many years. The larger the circuit the more complicated and time consuming reverse engineering the mask would be. On complicated designs it would probably take longer than the revision cycle of the chip to properly reverse engineer. Unless there is some coordinated government need and outside funding the fabs engaged in this will be unable to make extra chips because they don't have the resources to do the reverse engineering required and stay in business. Again you won't stop a highly coordinated state effort to remove the lock but the outsource Fab's likely wouldn't be able to do it.
This is important to preserving high paid jobs, the more chips produced by the fabs and sold on the blackmarket the more the companies producing the chips are hurt. The ideal solution in my mind is to build the fabs in the US, the problem is the unfair trade conditions that make it more expensive to produce in the US. Until the currency and trade imbalance is corrected China will continue to dominate manufacturing, but anything we can do to stop them from black marketing over production the better. I imagine companies like nVidia and others that use foreign fabs will start using this technology immediately.
Well all real Christians (read southern baptists) know that Catholics are a bunch of Hell bound heretics.
You have to understand the mentality of the group that exposes these beliefs. They truly believe that the stories in the bible are not parable, but fact. They BELIEVE that the earth is 6436 years old (or whatever the number really is). You can present real solid evidence to the contrary and they WON'T believe you. They will discount real verifiable proof as it conflicts with their BELIEF. It doesn't matter that evolution is THE fundamental basis for ALL medical research. It doesn't matter that nearly every single medical advance for the last 20 years has relied on evolution as a basis not only for the discovery but the proof as well. It doesn't matter that the growing field of molecular biology (which holds the promise of a cure for cancer) wouldn't exist without evolutionary biology. It doesn't matter that the genetic conditions for disease, and the vestigial organs and body parts in not only humans but other animals wouldn't exist if evolution wasn't a fact.
It doesn't matter that Darwin's theory of evolution is not very well liked in the academic community, or that the real value of his work was the hundreds of pages and years of research documenting irrefutable evolution on the Galapagos. It doesn't matter that over 1000 collegiate level biological scientists signed a statement that they consider evolution a fact and the only thing in debate is the method by which it operates (the theory), there is no debate that evolution is an Observed, documented fact of this planet. It doesn't matter that evolution on both the micro and macro level has been observed, documented and verified. It doesn't matter that humans have seen the evolution of species, including over a dozen during our well documented research time (less than 200 years). It doesn't matter that domestication and selective breeding wouldn't be possible without evolution. The reality is the evidence is meaningless to those who believe they already have the answer.
This is the real danger of young earth religions and something I thought the dark ages did away with. A belief that you already have the answers for everything is a dangerous path to walk down. You end up like the Amish, refusing to participate in the advancement of society. Either that or you pretend that you can partake in the advancement while denying how the advancement occurs, that and handicap the children of this nation by teaching them nonsense and that their eyes and reason can't teach them about the world we live in. Because that's what science is, it's a method designed to be as objective as humanely possible for verifying what our eyes, ears and reason tells us about the world and universe we live in. It doesn't depend on religion, nor does it even concern itself with ideas that can't be verified. Anything that isn't falsifiable is philosophy, not science.
The point of ID is to try to co-opt the credibility of science and apply it to the belief in god. They make arguments that science isn't fair if it doesn't consider the option of sky wizards, and play to emotion rather than fact and reason. They make the claim of items so complex that they can't exist naturally, challenging that the item could not exist without the presence of a sky wizard. Yet the item exists so there must be a sky wizard, con men call this turning the argument around. Rather than saying X exists, and asking the question of how did it come to exist and studying such a thing, they turn the argument around, providing the answer and making the argument every other possibility is just too remote or improbable to occur. This conveniently ignor
Judge White made a terrible decision. A jaw dropping horrible decision. A decision so horrible it drew in briefs from the who's who of top civil rights defense organizations. Close to 20 separate nonprofit civil rights groups including the EFF, Librarians association, Public Citizen and ACLU.
He failed to even ask basic questions about why he was hearing a case by a foreign bank against an Australian living in Kenya. He failed to even ask basic questions about why he was in an exparte motion on document exposure with a foreign bank. He failed to verify that Wikileaks had been properly served. They HADN'T, unless you think a vague threat of court action possibly taking place in three separate countries by email counts as proper service. He failed to ask even rudimentary questions about why he was being asked to take down the domain name for an organization with over 20,000 documents exposing fraud and public misdeeds over the release of a single set of documents that purport to show company sanctioned money laundering by one of Switzerlands top banks. He failed to even consider that the public value of the document as press overrides the copyright considerations. He failed to even read the injunction he signed, as all he did was cross out the proposed on the top of what Baer's lawyers had given him. He absolutely failed to consider the freedom of press as it relates to these documents. He absolutely failed in almost every respect.
Judge White's actions, not only in allowing the case to go forward when it's CLEAR he has no jurisdiction in the case and his previous actions lead me to believe he is nothing short of incompetent in the job. Judge White is a danger to the American justice system and should be removed from the bench. His actions were clearly negligent and a breach of everything this country stands for and a slap in the face of justice.
And just to throw a little analogy your way what he did was the equivalent of removing a foreign citizens name from an international phone book at the request of a foreign company over the dispute of a published editorial on the conduct of said company. The decision was one of the worst made in the last 10 years by an American court. Jaw dropping horrible, not a single basis in law or even common sense for how he ruled.
Taking the time to defend his judgment to the press (and not the parties to the suit) shows just how bad the decision was and was simply an attempt to cover his ass. In fact I'm even more offended by the Judges actions by his attempt to defend his terrible ruling including blatantly lieing that WIkileaks was properly served. Had the Judge an ounce of honesty he would have admitted his negligence and transfered the case to another Judge to rule on the jurisdictional issue. Instead he rules that Wikileaks sending council to get their domain name back amounted to them admitting jurisdiction. If he was a cop that would have been entrapment, his actions and his rulings prove that him remaining on the bench is a danger and he should lose his bench immediately for gross misconduct. In fact I would go a step further and say he shouldn't just lose his bench, he should be disbarred and lose his license to practice law in every state. Not only that but the Hollywood lawyers involved for the bank should also be disbarred for what they did as they clearly violated the federal procedural rules and gamed the system. Not only that but I wouldn't be surprised if you examined the record and there is a similar course of action taken by this judge when dealing with lawyers from this firm in the past. This was far to horrible to be a freak ruling or one time incident.
Don't defend the actions of this Judge, be horrified that he made such a terrible ruling and be shocked that no action will be taken against him for it.
I would consider 3 weeks of net profits to be a very MILD punishment when there was gross negligence at the hands of Exxon.
The supervisors of the captain didn't want to punish a friend even though they had known for over 3 weeks that he had started drinking on ship again after already being suspended and being provided treatment. This is all very well documented including internal emails indicating that not only immediate supervisors but higher level managers knew and is referred to in the judgement by both the judge and the jury as GROSS negligence.
The people in Alaska that were affected by the spill had their entire lively hoods taken away as tourism, fishing and seafood production was severely harmed and was the primary economy in Prince William sound (and much of Alaska for that matter). Losing all their ability to make money to the point of being completely gone for over 5 years after the spill. The damages covered part of that but don't think for a minute the damages awarded to the individuals covered all their loses, at best it covered what they could document and no more. Neither do the damages cover the time they had to wait to receive their award as the trial took years after the spill.
The punitive damages were originally awarded as 5 billion and reduced on appeal to 2.5 billion. The supreme court has set a baseline rule that punitive damages shouldn't exceed 9 times the actual damages and at 2.5 billion the punitive damages amount to ~5 times actual damages (well within the supreme court guidelines), along with being only 3 weeks of profit and the payout to each victim at a measly $70k when their ability to make a living and even acquire food was destroyed for over 5 years (and years to recover actual damages) is a mild punishment at best.
In addition, I'll never understand how someone could imply that the cleanup expenses were anything other than an absolute obligation for Exxon and have nothing at all to do with the damages and negligence involved. That 3.4 billion was mandatory in my opinion and plays no part in reducing their obligation to the people who's lives they destroyed nor does it play any role in the punitive damages they owe to punish them for their gross negligence. Exxon got off very easy IMO for something that should have cost them their company.