Actually there are numerous militaries who would of done better. But it really depends on your definition of better and what the objective is.
If it is to find WMD's then no military is really needed, I don't think this needs to be elaborated on. If it is to simply conduct regime removal then yes it is doable in such a way that years of war are unnecessary. If it is to decapitate the entire government and social structure and then rebuild it then No, there's not much any military could do. If it is to pacify the population while attempting to gain cost recovery then Yes other militaries can do it better. (The Romans for example would of eliminated 10% of regional population for each attack on their personele.) If it is to do something not properly defined, in the glare of public scrutiny with lots of legal uncertanties then most militaries (especially those involving conscription) would have very heavily asked not to be involved and may well have revolted. I suspect the German populace with military support would have lynched their civilian government literally, if they had got Germany stuck in something like this.
I think the point is that no one and I do mean no one (including Bush here, he has publically restated reasons so many times) knows why the US is their or what any ongoing mission is, what has support or how to finish. I believe that was the point of a Iraq study group and even that is being seriously trashed by many people.
>1. Children can hurt themselves with all manner of household objects. Why should guns be any more regulated than swimming pools in this regard?
Hmmm. Once upon a time in a place far far away and a long time ago (Queensland, Australia, 1980's) the highest cause of death for children 7 and under was drowning in swimming pools. Yep that's right more than road deaths, more than infanticide, more than any single disease. After a couple of truely horrendous years, swimming pools were regulated. The regulations consist of enforced fencing with gates that have locks higher than 5 feet 6 inches. The Laws took several years to take effect and were fought tooth and nail by developers, some parents objected to having to supervise their children by opening the gate and some people simply didn't want to do it. Low and behold, the death of children to pool drowning collapsed (down to 3-4 per year), there was even a reduction in pool deaths in adults. Personally I see no difference between fencing a water filled death pit (a term that some people use for pools) for children, and the enforced fencing of other dangerous locations (waste dumps, building sites, uncapped mines and open pits.). It's just that many people do not consider their pool to be dangerous. At least not until the grandchild drowns, or the little kid from three doors up drowns or until they themselves fall on a wet path and drown.
I see sensible regulation of guns to simply be good policy. They are dangerous pieces of machinery, therefore get training just like you would for machinery. Lock them up so only their owner can use them, just like machinery. Force them to be correctly maintained, just like machinery.
So here in Aus, you need to take a gun safety course (which I can't believe anyone could fail but they do). Guns have to be licensed to an owner and secured by them (the owner had better damn well report theft as well). Gun owners can have their facilities inspected and you had better not be found to have your weapon sitting loaded on a table or something. The weapon can only be discharged in a lawful manner which effectively means safely, not unlike the way you must drive lawfully. I have no problem with the laws, I hunt regularly, I shoot competitively, I have conducted much more serious safety courses than government ones and wouldn't mind if some parts of the laws were tightened further.
Further to your point 3, with regards to the police being worse than civilians is a pretty good reason for systemically removing guns from the hands of police. Allow the police access to guns but do not make them available for standard carry by every patrolman. If a patrolman feels in anyway that he is in danger then he retires from the situation. At this point he returns with a weapon or he gains armed support (the armed support may be a stand off partner with a serious weapon). Mind you if you pull on a police officer or draw a knife or even take a swing, you go down in a big way.
In Britain I believe that is the standard method of operations. But once armed response occurs it is generally fairly severe. A team of 7-8 with handguns and SMG's for example. In Aus the police carry in most situations (for crowd enforcement they usually disarm due to a high chance of some drunk attempting to draw etc.) but they are more likely to shoot themselves or each other, than have a criminal shoot them.
I have seen reports now, that the police knew him to be a student(From official press releases from the Uni, trying to justify based on previous history of being a troublemaker. I think thats now backfiring along the lines of the police taking the troublemaker for a beating style argument). So it's all over the very petty requirement to show a piece of paper, even though he and those in authority who were telling himwhat to do knew he was allowed there. It has now also been allegged by several witnesses that he was attempting to comply with orders to leave when he was zapped for not moving fast enough, he certainly says he was agreeing at go at points in the video.
So yes he say's he took offence at racial profiling. The police are called to a known troublemaker, who they know on arrival can legally be there, he agrees to leave after a loud verbal discussion and they zap his little brown ass, all we need is a few shouted racial epiphettes and it get's really ugly.
"Huh, are you nuts? The person was unwilling to show his card. Fair enough, then escort him out. If necessary handcuff him."
Actually. The student apparently according to the police, (in the press conference) was a real student who had his ID. He refused to show it protesting the fact that he believed he (the only non american, face it arab looking terrorist type.) was the only person being asked for ID. He was protesting obvious racist profiling (you know trouble making, civil rights lawyering.). A point of pricipal if you will, a refusal to go to the back of the Bus, a wanting to use the white mans washroom.
The fact that the police have in several stories and reports now admitted to knowing he was a student when they spotted him makes it even worse. The rules are apparently, you must be a student to be in the library after 11pm, he was allowed there and they knew it, but you can't let the sheep realise they can stand up to the sheep dogs, time for a beating. You can almost see the thoughts, "We know he's a student but he's given us a good excuse to flog the crap out of his arab ass by loudly standing up for his rights so lets electrocute him."
The Id requests were for sexual harrassment apparently, to keep non students out. So why was he under the belief that only he was being asked for ID? At most his offence was beauracratic intransigence. He had the right to be there and believed he was being pressured to prove why he was. Call it a mental snapping or something, maybe this was the third time this week he and no one else had been asked for ID. Perfectly valid resistance to racist differential treatment under petty laws if you ask me.
I am fairly certain that you can't be arrested for what he did, you could be removed and then maybe able to be arrested for refusing a lawful order. But the order itself may not have been lawful. Maybe it was just a little administrative ruling and not actually a part of the regs of the university, then the order isn't even lawful just authoritive and we will find he has done absolutely nothing wrong even if he had been resisting. I sure hope the legal department of the university is having all their students have a long close look at the case, especially the civil rights students etc.
For a moment there I thought you were psychic, or had been cruising my PC;)
Mind you I have severe duplication of title in some of my collection, For example 6 versions of interstellar overdrive, No less than 200 covers of ACDC songs and a large selection of whole concert bootlegs or recordings.
All up there are only around 8000 odd individual songs. Of course there is a large section that I rarely listen too but sometimes the mood hits me for some ring cycle or bach and I'll spend a week listening to it. (Mind you it takes about a week to listen to the Ring Cycle.)
Personally I think I would go mad listening to only 500 or so musical pieces. I enjoy hearing the evolution of a band or even a single piece through time and different interpretation.
So far this collection has probably cost me close to 8000 dollars, maybe even more. But compared to my other hobbies thats cheap.
In a reply to both siblings. You are probably right, this is not specifically geek news. Maybe we should alter the story tital to "Tidal waves seek out and kills hundreds of computer users and destroy thousands of computers. Oh and 20000 poor people died." No that would be too cynical.
My main point though is wether or not the incident is natural or man made the story matters. The geek side comes in all over. This will probably see major tech spending on new facilities and warning systems. New research into quake prediction (if the Indian scientist was correctly predicting to within a short distance and less than a half hour then someone is about to throw money at him). There was likely a number of readers of slashdot killed by this ( with a million+ readers, someone was almst certainly in the area ). Geeks also dig, big natural disasters like volcanoes earthquakes etc, so that makes it geeky as well. Good grief the ultimate geek bit is the fact a worker from the special effects team of the LOTR's was in the area and unheard from so far.
Now as to the apple and oranges excuse as to why 911 was news for geeks (with numerous articles spread over weeks) and this isn't. I personally think it is pretty close to nationalist relativism or possibly even racism. Complaining about one story on a big disaster (which is at least 8 times worse in lives lost and 500 times worse in people directly effected and probably 5 times worse in monetary damage) while trying to justify the stories about a smaller disaster ( with just as little geekiness) appears simply wrong, and suggests ulterior motives.
Actually, what you have here is ethical considerations, effecting what is litterally a ranking exercise. Human minds ( without personal emotional impacts ) tend to rank things. How do you rank tragedy, easy, death count. In some western nations the death tolls are normally so low we fall back on monetary costs.
So why did 9/11 have more impact than an earthquake in India? that is simple. 1000 times greater airplay caused it to have a major human emotional impact to a lot of people. Now why did that happen, again simple, no one even had to move much to film and broadcast the disaster. The attacks on 9/11 were delivered to one of the most electronically and media dense places on the planet. While an earthquake in India may well have not even been appearing in papers on the far side of the nation after a week.
I have similar thoughts regarding ranking Genocide etc. When people attempt to rank genocides I simply state that each was an attempt to destroy a culture. The size of the culture is irrelevant, the thing that makes it bad is that the attempt was made at all.
Well actually there is no real black and white definition here. Anyone and everyone seems to be called a terrorist, but that's simply garbage. The vast majority of Insurgents/freedom foghters/terrorists are local defence militia. These militias have formed as a local police force created and guided by local religious and political groups generally organised on local tribal/town groupings.
City fathers of towns create these groups initially because much of the country is a mess and the town needs a security force. Eventually this leads to regional Balkinization and local paranoia, especially when communications media is lacking. Obviously ongoing privation leads to radicalism and fanatical influence can easily grow. Add in revenge for accidental killings and all of a sudden there is a fringe element still supported by their local comrades that are planting bombs in their own areas to disuade / defend them from interloping forces.
The snatch, kidnap murders of select targets is still generally disliked and many members of the basic militias dislike them a lot. The local defence militias support their own more active permanent security groups, who support their more radical insurgent sections, who may or may not support the occasional terroristing sub group. Now these groups are all orders of magnitude smaller than their base group. So 10 000 militia, leads to 1000 security militia, leads to 100 active insurgents which leads to 10 or so hard core terrorists.
Any attempt to go into an area to find and grab the 10 hardcore terrorists will almost always cause the active insurgents to help them either as allies or just as enemies of enemies, then that can escalate to the security troops and finally the regional / town / city militia.
Personally I believe a lot of the problem here is the massive number of ex Iraqi army weapons that just moved straight into the civilian sector at the conclusion of the first month or so of operations. This accelerated both the need for, and rapidity of the development of the militias, add in considerable animosity for civilian deaths and you rapidly generate a core of freedom fighter / insurgents, who attempt revenge. Add in the foreign terrorists as a core for the more murderous terrorists and the whole lot develops in just 2-3 months without much major direction.
As to your statement "please don't spread astroturf stories about 'recruiting more fighters.'", that's just stupid. Almost all governments and groups use vengeance as a recruiting tool and many societies have popular mythos of aggrieved vengeance. Just look at the remember pearl harbour posters and the popularising of Ivan gaining vengeance on the Nazi hordes for the death of his entire village stories from Russian propoganda. The statement of every 6 year old child killed generates enemies is so blindingly obvious that claiming it doesn't is simply stupid. If a bear kills a child the community sets out to kill the bear and for the next generation or two the Locals dislike bears a lot. Drag that into Iraq and a bunch of foreigners blast the crap out of Mrs Hamoud and her four children with little or no explanation and the local community will treat the foreigners like maddened bears.
It appears that quite a lot of the actual counted votes in some of the opti-scan counties in Florida look suspiciously like the counts have been given to the wrong candidate. If not then why would less than a third of the dem voters vote dem while the reps get more than double (in Calhoun it's closer to 500%) the count of registered Reps. It almost looks like a systemic failure that occurred in a number of counties.
In Baker for example there were 8926 registered Dems but only 2180 kerry votes, while there were 3126 registered reps but they got 7738 votes. In Liberty the figures look even worse 1927 Rep votes from 320 registered (600% up) while there were 1070 Dem votes from 3597 registered (down to under a third).
Unless people honestly believe that the dem vote was only 25% of registrations while the rep vote was 250% then it would indicate the wrong tally was allocated to the candidates. Apparently the exit polls for Baker county were out by a massive margin as well. (In fact there were more positive Dem responses then dem votes and generally the exit polls run around 50%.)
Now it is curious that the worst of these data irregularities are in the smaller counties, but it would also be these smaller counties that may well have had less money for testing etc. In larger counties it appears that the Repub vote is around +5 to +10% over registrations while the Dems are -10 to -50% under. In Duval the reps are 29000 up while the dems are 80000 down compared to raw registrations.
If you reverse the figures then both parties are running a lot closer to the raw registration figures but with the Reps still getting an extra percentage boost compared to Dems over their registrations.
It is certainly curious why publicised faults and problems are all benefitting the republicans though. What are the odds of 200+ errors across the country (depending on which site you look at) almost all going the republican way.
The data is available from a number of sources but has been tabulated below.
Indeed Moral relativism as a justification is simply as means of escaping the impact of your own actions.
For example people were saying 3 years ago that certain ares of the world needed depopulation etc. Emotional outburst etc but just the fact that a lot of people had thoughts that way, made war an easier thing to accept because "we could of done a lot worse". A sort of I was planning on killing your whole town but then I chose to do one in ten so you should be thankful type of idea. Of course exposing yourself to your own hypocricy is painful, For me that was the point at which 4 year olds without limbs etc were being shown on television.
Moral revisionism allows people to justify there actions through accusiatory excuses. We're not as bad as you used to be etc, has been used against the Germans, French, Turks and even the Belgians. as a justification for what people obviously find somewhat troubling. Of course eventually the realisation that comparing yourself favourably relative to 'Aushwitz', Algerian sanitation, Armenian Genocide and the Belgian Congo Corporation, does not necessarily hold you/I in good stead. Personally I think we fail vs 'Guernica', and in certain ways approach pre 1939 secret police activities and legal shicanery of Germany.
Now before everyone beats on me. I will state that I as a participating elector of a nation participating in this 'Coalition of freedom' accept that I still exist in my society even if I voted against it's activities. But I do not stop there, I have marched, I have chalked, I have communicated, heckled and hopefully persuaded some others of my society that they are wrong. Unfortunately in my nation as long as you can facetiously and falsely claim that you can keep interest rates down no matter what, even as you assist in morally ambiguous crusades you seem to retain power ( I will ignore all the other foibles of our current government). Selfish ignorance or possibly fear of loss of well being I do not know. Of course the heavily endebted are all going to be somewhat screwed anyway as Oil will continue it's inevitable supply/Demand rise to 80+ dollars and devestate the economies that depend on it anyway.
Alright as an Australian, I thank you for your visit. But just a couple of questions (I will assume answers and give political comment completely urelated to your own story. (typical slashdot eh.))
Was it an emergency, As in lots of blood is leaking out everywhere, or the foot is no longer attached? In such a situation you would of been seen more or less instantly by at least some form of doctor, and almost all treatment costs would be covered.
Was it painful but not life threatening? As in a break or major laceration. In such a situation you would of entered the 'fast' queue and been made comfortable. If there are problems with timing in this situation then hospitals will ask for relocation or suggest local 'private' (As in private hospitals but the costs are handled by medicare, A private hospital can not refuse this.) alternatives. A lot of emergency waiting lists are caused from where people refuse this form of assistance. For example lots of small regional centres are not able to pull there one scheduled qualified emergency doc without gaining additional coverage and in such a situation you wait until they can get coverage. What would happen if the one doc available was needed right now ('Bill' got his foot bitten off etc.), while he was stuck in surgery with you. Doctors are not slaves and if they do not want to go somewhere you can not force them, so some regional centres have a lot of problems getting the back up.
Finally was it more or less liveable, I mean something like a preexisting condition that would be good to be fixed or has flared up etc? In such a situation you are waiting for the resources to become available. This means you will be scheduled into a surgical rotation at your nearest facility able to handle such. Now many people do not want to go to possible alternatives (eg private, or even a not so near facility) and so these are the cases that see major waiting lists in some areas. If you agree to go anywhere (which effectively means the state capital) for the operation then the scheduled wait could be weeks, rather than months. Mind you even then, speak out if you have an issue and most doctors will be happy to fiddle times somewhat. In my situation last year I needed to get a growth removed from my leg (A calcified cysty thing, it had actually existed for over 10 years but I had ripped it open while fencing.) I saw the Surgeon in the second week of October he wanted to schedule me for mid november. I said it had to be earlier or later as november I was in Beijing. He said earlier if we could, both he and I did not want to be stuck doing it around christmas, and he squeezed it in (an hour max, under a local). so it was switched to just 8 days later and I was bounding around on the leg all over Beijing, 10 days after that.
So anyway, thanks for the visit, hope we didn't beat you up to bad about your government (not that we can talk).
Ps: Since when did doctors start employing distractors, as in seriously cute streetwise , goth/vampire masquerade playing nurses who simply sit there and talk to you (about GTA vice city of all things) throughout the operation, so you don't think about what is happening. I mean I almost felt like asking for an encore or giving myself another reason to come back.
Purchased copyright extensions and length of terms
Copyright as it stands now is one sided monopoly provided by the government, that requires no expense by the producer of a work for the monoploy, but gives potentially massive returns over increasingly longer periods of time. Originally designed to secure incomes of artists etc for a period of 7~14 years, while they were busy developing new products and works for the public good. This concept of public good and copyright has effectively been destroyed by corporate interest, copyright transference and long term extensions to periods of protection. Many people can barely even imagine a world without some form of Copyright anymore, but many know they do not like what exists at the moment. I believe it is time to revert back to something that approaches the original concept as devised 150 odd years ago.
I suggest that a new commercial approach is needed, one where only a short initial period of protection is given for free after which protection would become more and more expensive until it ceased to be in the owners good to stop the work progressing to the public domain. The system would put direct values on the copyrights. The system would be self funded or even better a earner for the Government just like old time purchased monopolies were for governments pre income tax days.
My suggestion would be that everyone receives free rights for a period (my preference would be 5 years) as long as they can prove ownership and a creation date. The producer of a work could register a work with a centralised authority for a fee. The fee would be enough to cover administration costs and would act as a proof of ownership. A major benefit is the fact that several copies of the work would have to be submitted and would exist for later for public release.
Now after the initial free protection period is completed the holder can reregister for another period at his/her/their cost, my belief is that $500 for example is not unreasonable for a written work.
Each iteration after the first multiplies the registration fee by a value. Again I think a factor of 5 is reasonable meaning most works would be released by their 20th birthday and almost all by their 30th.
The costs for registration would be 1st (5 years) - Admin Fee 2nd (10 years)- Admin Fee + Protection Fee 3rd (15 years)- Admin Fee + PF x 5 4th (20 years)- Admin Fee + PF x 25 5th (25 years)- Admin Fee + PF x 125 6th (30 years)- Admin Fee + PF x 625 7th (35 years)- Admin Fee + PF x 3125
I would expect the protection Fee to actually be different dependent on form of Work being protected. Lets say $500 for a written work, $1000 for an audio/software Item, $5000 for a movie, $10 for a Photograph/Image. The protection covers the period from the initial creation or the work and does not get renewed with new media or transformations for such. Of course added features can be protected separately, but the main work is still only protected for the given period. The Protection amount would also have to be incremented with inflation to maintain it's power to force the release of material to the public domain.
Now as most recorded musical works rely on initial hype for the vast majority of its sales this would cause most music to fall from protection after 10-15 years. Work that becomes Iconic and forever fashionable (music of a generation like the 'Beatles') could justifiably be restricted for 30 years but the 7th period of protection ($3,125,000) would be the (almost certainly) last period of protection for these. (A complete Protection to 35 years of the Beatles Library would be close to a Billion dollars vs. $200 million for the 30 year protection)
If the artist produces more and more iterations of the same musical piece then each needs to be protected separately but the first versions will probably join the public domain faster. Of course with new versions etc they are probably making more money out of the later versions. So numerous releases of live an
Actually I am fairly certain that 'Nemo' was the first Pixar film where the rights to sequels etc sat entirely with them rather than with Disney. I think I saw that in a documentary on Pixar/Nemo.
As to creative scripts I am fairly certain that their is quite a number available to Pixar, and even a 50% hit rate is still very good.
Well a guard post and check point situation is seriously obvious point to use them.
Have your men 50 meters behind (and under armour) 2-5 armoured trash cans at the guard/check/obo point and your men don't die when mr Kamikaze truck blows up the cans. If he tries charging through, the cans have a damn good chance of nailing the vehicle with auto fire and maybe even grenades. The machines have much faster reaction times and will always be ready, no such thing as surprise against a machine.
The simple answer is they are very expendable and can be made very structurally strong.
Now the longer answer: A ruggedized sedgeway (or better yet something that can place itself into a permanently low power stable position, eg 3 wheels or more.) would be able to be very rugged, armoured and would be fairly easy to repair. The same can not be said for soldiers. A armoured trash can, can afford to wait until it is attacked before returning fire safe in the fact it is not important, is highly survivable and will probably manage.5 of a second after it is attacked to lay a burst at it's attacker.
Now given the fact that mass production sedgeways cost $5000 odd and after you equip it for military purposes probably $50000. It is still a great deal. In fact I can see 10 000 being purchased at the drop of a hat.
Have two or three trundling along as point teams on patrol. (The bad guys can't let em get too close so they become the targets and that exposes the bad guys.) Set them as forward guards and you can keep the potential bad guys back. Make some that are very menacing (Big, black, with big stubby riot guns, maybe some big speakers, Bright strobes and nasty voices) and they could be very successful crowd controllers as well.
Most of the time in guerilla and urban areas they they sit still (unless patrolling) and so you could have 100's of guards set and flagging themselves for attention if something unusual or out of their ROE takes place. So you get 100 guys sitting in a comfy baracks somewhere, controlling, interdicting or at least observing a large area. Rather than 5 times that number actually being out in the thick of it.
Where they fail is in snatch sweeps where house searches are required but even there they can be used to secure rear areas of the searching troops, establish stop points and to act as covering roles or even anti sniper roles.
Some bigger ones can even act as a pack beast for supplies or maybe even crew served weapons. (Is that 50 kilo's of Machine gun and 1500 rounds of ammo weighing you down, just chuck it on the section trashcan) Having the Command element of a platoon gifted with 4 heavy weapon cans would make most soldiers, a lot happier. The extra firepower and much lessened load will be appreciated.
In more regular combat they are given sweep zones and much more liberal ROE. See enemy, (however defined) shoot it if close, otherwise identify them to command and assist in calling in fire.
Obviously development costs are huge to field basic autonamous combat machines. (somewhat less for command guided or standby and command machines) but once the work is done. A nation can probably afford to buy a fairly large number as supplements to their infantry and other forces. For example even at $50000 a copy a 100 000 would cost 5 billion but allow increased flexibility in the order of 30-50 000 additional on the ground troops. With almost certainly lower ongoing costs, much more rapid return to service if damaged ( A sedeway gets a wheel blown off it can be replaced. The same happen to a man and he's not playing soldier anymore.) and seriously reduced political consequences if one is totalled compared to a man, militaries will love them even if they only act as guards and scouts.
The key tech troubles are the power supply, the logic system, the comms system and possibly security. Loco, navigation, observation and weapon handling is effectively doable right now.
It seems to me that if the majority of people do not think of this problem and therefore the companies feel they can ignore it, it requires a major failure to highlight the problem to the public. Most people had no understanding of problems in the power system, now everyone in New York etc knows there is stuff wrong.
For example if at the next election a party was to have the first reports from a state (from the centralised tally.) read a massive swing to a stupid entry, or even better just be so out of whack with reality that a recount is ordered. Then it will be discovered and show to the public at large how broken the process is. Imagine a repeat of Florida several times with the blame placed at the feet of Diebold.
Maybe someone needs to hack the system and screw with the data just to force the issue. How though would the US handle such a situation. Can a rerun of the election be ordered, would 20% (or what ever portion) of the states be ignored, maybe Darth Vader is declared president.
Of course I am writing to you from a place that does the whole paper voting thing. (Actually worked in a booth twice now, quite fun and makes you feel useful.)
Here in Aus, the votes are counted in voting centre on the night, then counted again in the following week in the central electorate office. In the next month the count is redone, and during the period till the next election each electorate office does at least one dry run count of the old election and quite often does one for a different electorate. If there are discrepensies there are some serious investigations. And as everyone on the roll has to at least show up and submit a blank form there can not be ballot stuffing.
Here in Australia we had newspaper reports of a 5% drop in sales of CD's. In the article they had an interesting list of stats including the fact that the CD sales had dropped by X amount. Later in the article and in an attached table they also mentioned the great rise in music DVD sales. The M-DVD sales increase was actually greater than the drop in CD's. Maybe in that article they missed the fact that if you already own a (expensive)music DVD you may not buy the equivalent CD.
They also lumped the Singles in with the albums sales, which I believe is a mistake as they also mentioned that there was less singles released in Australia last year. I think that this fact alone means the total number of CD's sold would drop, as not all single sales would convert to album sales.
Now the article could of been simply wrong but the stats mentioned logically give a spin to the raw statement that 'CD sales are down'.
When I was a student, the universities student guild implemented a debit card system across campus. It allowed purchase at vending machines, from guild run shops, at the Student Pub, use of photocopiers etc. Unfortunately for them they did nothing in the way of testing the system too strongly. 3 days after the system was rushed into use, it became known that there was a way to reset the cards the cards to $999.99 credit. It worked only if you had taken the balance to less than a dollar but this was simple as most people bought the cards for a dollar and then filled them up. (Just buy the card and make a photocopy and it would be ready for resetting.)
The cards sold out on that friday night (after only 3-4 jours of the problem being found) and the vast majority were reset. Being the first week of semester there was loads of new students and the clothing and bookshops on campus noted a large swell in expensive purchases but didn't immeadiately catch on. Guild management was not operating over the weekend and it was only on the Monday afternoon that they stopped the system cold. They had sold out of clothing, almost all the snacks were gone and the Pub had seen almost all of it's bulk supplies for the first 2 weeks of parties sold in case lots.
The cause was simple, place annonymous debit card in the reader while less than a dollar in credit and turn off then on or on the photocopiers press the green eject button and the red cancel button at the same time. The reader system reset the cards to $999.99 while the Photocopier readers reset them to $99.99.
I lived off campus so only found out about it after the fact. I have no idea if I would of abused the system if I had been there but it would of been tempting.
I had a friend who bought an entire wardrobe and all his texts and stationary. There was stories, that I believe, of the Pub selling semester long quantities of alcohol to some students, and I saw a dorm room with over 20 cases of beer under the beds over a month later.
Legally the guild was in trouble because most of the cards were still legal and so they tried to ban any cards with more than 100 dollars on them. A number of students claimed that they had in fact put the money on and even had parental support etc, but the guild was able to show that the adding process would only work upto $100 dollars. The actual number of offending students was not large with most from just the one college/dorm so there was a number of deals made to get the reset cards out of circulation. There was some interesting attempts at justification though, with one girl in particular trying to justify her posession of over 100 cards with exactly 999.99 dollars on them. Eventually the guild was forced to re-accept the cards but was able to get the cards with more than $100 value banned. There was though 3 photocopiers in the comp sci area that never got changed and that continued to work with the reset cards.
They have only now after 10 years reinstitued a similar system and it has a hard maximum limit of 49 dollars and the cards are unique to students. They really learnt their lesson about testing.
Accuracy then was - Fly along a gyroscopically controlled line until the timer stops the fuel.
Moderately light aircraft today can carry GPS enabled auto pilots.
The difference is several orders of magnitude improvement in accuracy. 50Km -> 50m. It is true that they were militarily ineffective but they were incredibly effective in causing disruption and shifting the allocation of Allied resources.
The cost effectiveness of the V1's was one of the major success stories of WW2 for the Germans. Each V1 cost the same as about 1/2 of a heavy anti aircaft gun. The allies spent around 25 times more on stopping the V1's than the germans spent on firing them. That is without taking into account the operational misuse of assets, but rather simply their cost.
Interestingly I found a few sites 2-3 months back that described engineering projects at some Universities, where they built V-1's from scratch. They were actually easier to make these days with electronics than with the old methods. One project built a 1/2 scale one for $22000 and suggested that a full scale one would of cost $25-28000. Of course most of the expense was centred on determining what to do etc. The cost would of dropped for the second and later copies. They believed the physical cost of componentry if purchased in bulk would allow a 100 missile production run to cost around $10000 a missile.
Interestingly enough, I was recently debt free and owning a house. Unfortunately after a relationship breakdown and a general caning in the financial settlement I now have a $65 000 debt all over again. I am currently paying it off at ~30% of my income. For example I netted $1530 last fortnight including 8 hours of overtime and generating another 8 hours of TOIL that may be converted to money if I do not take it as leave within a year.
Of that $1530 I am paying $150 for Medical and additional retirement savings. Then $500 gets Paid straight to the loan. Then $300 to a living account. Then $50 into the holiday fund. The remaining $500+ goes into an offset account.
Whenever the Offset account hits $6000, $2000 gets directly shifted to the loan. Any major expences like the $4500 in legals over the past 3 months have also come from there. Those costs though have now stopped. The Offset currently has $4500 in it and at $1000 a month it will last almost 5 months including utilities, rates (Aussie Property taxes) and the minimum repayments of the loan.
Now at my current rate of repayment I will be paid off in 5 years. Add the Offset effect of the Bill and safety account as well as the overrun payments from it and I will be trying to get that down to 3 1/2 years.
Toss in a room rental or 2 and I get a lot more for an enhanced social life, as well as not sitting around alone at home. (Actually the rental who moved in a couple of months back just had his girlfriend and her sister from Britain over for 2 weeks and that greatly helped the general decor of the abode.) The room rental is cash and about every second fortnight I end up with extra sitting in the living account. The living account pays for most small bills and the once a fortnight house cleaner.
Personally I feel any single slashdotters out their with more than 1 bedroom can help themselves greatly by renting out a room or 2. Just pick whoever it is well and check their credentials and get a bond up front. If you find one you really like, you can even drop their rent after a while just because you want to, etc. You will though find the additional cash in the pocket very useful especially if you do not count it towards your income when budgetting.
Anyway before everyone thinks I am a self righteous P#$#%, I spent almost 18 months unemployed in 93-94 (occasional cash and short term jobs but generally very under employed) and learnt to live on very little. I realised that once I got a good job, I could simply spend everything, so I allowed myself a little increase in living money and all the excess went into savings and later debt payments. My principle was, 'never see it never miss it'. Everything substantial I bought was purchased with a credit card and then paid off within a week from already saved money from the living fund, I simply did not allow large impulse purchases at all (and being a Comp Geek they can be very expensive and rapidly depreciating). I have continued that until now and it has kept me in good stead.
Without the Book in front of me I am farily certain that BA got smashed the exact method of smashing was not defined. Seeing as they were throwing planetcracking nukes and that the Bugs had a space navy in the Book then it is a good bet that it was nuked.
The 'doogie' character also got killed in the book while working at a naval research facility out near Pluto. Why did they drop that part, why, why.
If instead of sterilising by radiation exposure, they actually held each little fly down and operated or got incredibly accurate rifles and shot the flies equivalents to testes off then those would be mutations too right?
The radiation is destroying the reproductive cells not changing them. Other means could be used to destroy the cells but nuking is the cheapest. Here in Aus we regularly use these methods for eradicating introduced or invading pests.
As to the food chain argument the Tetse has competitor flies in the same niche but they breed differently and don't cause mass illness and death in other populations. Remove the Tetse and the others will expand their populations slightly. Of course I am fairly certain that there are 2-3 species of tetse specific gut bacteria that we are also killing out here but so what.
The only real concern is what do we do with the extra animals and people that now aren't suffering horrible deaths or being crippled. Of course the people get to eat the extra surviving animals but the animals will need to eat more grass etc.
>The purpose of copyrights is to allow the creator to prosper from his/her creative works.
Well the other purpose is so he can prosper while preparing new works. Now if he can just sit back for 40 + 70 years he can make nothing new and his next 2-3 generations of offspring can just live off his ideas without doing anything productive. A limited period (7-10 years) is enough time to generate income, if successful, to make a second, new, good for the world, work.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there are numerous militaries who would of done better. But it really depends on your definition of better and what the objective is.
If it is to find WMD's then no military is really needed, I don't think this needs to be elaborated on. If it is to simply conduct regime removal then yes it is doable in such a way that years of war are unnecessary. If it is to decapitate the entire government and social structure and then rebuild it then No, there's not much any military could do. If it is to pacify the population while attempting to gain cost recovery then Yes other militaries can do it better. (The Romans for example would of eliminated 10% of regional population for each attack on their personele.) If it is to do something not properly defined, in the glare of public scrutiny with lots of legal uncertanties then most militaries (especially those involving conscription) would have very heavily asked not to be involved and may well have revolted. I suspect the German populace with military support would have lynched their civilian government literally, if they had got Germany stuck in something like this.
I think the point is that no one and I do mean no one (including Bush here, he has publically restated reasons so many times) knows why the US is their or what any ongoing mission is, what has support or how to finish. I believe that was the point of a Iraq study group and even that is being seriously trashed by many people.
>1. Children can hurt themselves with all manner of household objects. Why should guns be any more regulated than swimming pools in this regard?
Hmmm. Once upon a time in a place far far away and a long time ago (Queensland, Australia, 1980's) the highest cause of death for children 7 and under was drowning in swimming pools. Yep that's right more than road deaths, more than infanticide, more than any single disease. After a couple of truely horrendous years, swimming pools were regulated. The regulations consist of enforced fencing with gates that have locks higher than 5 feet 6 inches. The Laws took several years to take effect and were fought tooth and nail by developers, some parents objected to having to supervise their children by opening the gate and some people simply didn't want to do it. Low and behold, the death of children to pool drowning collapsed (down to 3-4 per year), there was even a reduction in pool deaths in adults. Personally I see no difference between fencing a water filled death pit (a term that some people use for pools) for children, and the enforced fencing of other dangerous locations (waste dumps, building sites, uncapped mines and open pits.). It's just that many people do not consider their pool to be dangerous. At least not until the grandchild drowns, or the little kid from three doors up drowns or until they themselves fall on a wet path and drown.
I see sensible regulation of guns to simply be good policy. They are dangerous pieces of machinery, therefore get training just like you would for machinery. Lock them up so only their owner can use them, just like machinery. Force them to be correctly maintained, just like machinery.
So here in Aus, you need to take a gun safety course (which I can't believe anyone could fail but they do). Guns have to be licensed to an owner and secured by them (the owner had better damn well report theft as well). Gun owners can have their facilities inspected and you had better not be found to have your weapon sitting loaded on a table or something. The weapon can only be discharged in a lawful manner which effectively means safely, not unlike the way you must drive lawfully. I have no problem with the laws, I hunt regularly, I shoot competitively, I have conducted much more serious safety courses than government ones and wouldn't mind if some parts of the laws were tightened further.
Further to your point 3, with regards to the police being worse than civilians is a pretty good reason for systemically removing guns from the hands of police. Allow the police access to guns but do not make them available for standard carry by every patrolman. If a patrolman feels in anyway that he is in danger then he retires from the situation. At this point he returns with a weapon or he gains armed support (the armed support may be a stand off partner with a serious weapon). Mind you if you pull on a police officer or draw a knife or even take a swing, you go down in a big way.
In Britain I believe that is the standard method of operations. But once armed response occurs it is generally fairly severe. A team of 7-8 with handguns and SMG's for example. In Aus the police carry in most situations (for crowd enforcement they usually disarm due to a high chance of some drunk attempting to draw etc.) but they are more likely to shoot themselves or each other, than have a criminal shoot them.
I have seen reports now, that the police knew him to be a student(From official press releases from the Uni, trying to justify based on previous history of being a troublemaker. I think thats now backfiring along the lines of the police taking the troublemaker for a beating style argument). So it's all over the very petty requirement to show a piece of paper, even though he and those in authority who were telling himwhat to do knew he was allowed there. It has now also been allegged by several witnesses that he was attempting to comply with orders to leave when he was zapped for not moving fast enough, he certainly says he was agreeing at go at points in the video.
So yes he say's he took offence at racial profiling. The police are called to a known troublemaker, who they know on arrival can legally be there, he agrees to leave after a loud verbal discussion and they zap his little brown ass, all we need is a few shouted racial epiphettes and it get's really ugly.
"Huh, are you nuts? The person was unwilling to show his card. Fair enough, then escort him out. If necessary handcuff him."
Actually. The student apparently according to the police, (in the press conference) was a real student who had his ID. He refused to show it protesting the fact that he believed he (the only non american, face it arab looking terrorist type.) was the only person being asked for ID. He was protesting obvious racist profiling (you know trouble making, civil rights lawyering.). A point of pricipal if you will, a refusal to go to the back of the Bus, a wanting to use the white mans washroom.
The fact that the police have in several stories and reports now admitted to knowing he was a student when they spotted him makes it even worse. The rules are apparently, you must be a student to be in the library after 11pm, he was allowed there and they knew it, but you can't let the sheep realise they can stand up to the sheep dogs, time for a beating. You can almost see the thoughts, "We know he's a student but he's given us a good excuse to flog the crap out of his arab ass by loudly standing up for his rights so lets electrocute him."
The Id requests were for sexual harrassment apparently, to keep non students out. So why was he under the belief that only he was being asked for ID? At most his offence was beauracratic intransigence. He had the right to be there and believed he was being pressured to prove why he was. Call it a mental snapping or something, maybe this was the third time this week he and no one else had been asked for ID. Perfectly valid resistance to racist differential treatment under petty laws if you ask me.
I am fairly certain that you can't be arrested for what he did, you could be removed and then maybe able to be arrested for refusing a lawful order. But the order itself may not have been lawful. Maybe it was just a little administrative ruling and not actually a part of the regs of the university, then the order isn't even lawful just authoritive and we will find he has done absolutely nothing wrong even if he had been resisting. I sure hope the legal department of the university is having all their students have a long close look at the case, especially the civil rights students etc.
Orson Scott Cards 'Pastwatch: the redemption of Christopher Columbus' is pretty good and is stand alone. This means it is often overlooked.
As to Brin, he changes style and outlook so often in some of the uplifts that I have trouble believing he is the same writer.
You could always recycle some early Heinlen and Philip K Dick, all good.
12134.
;)
For a moment there I thought you were psychic, or had been cruising my PC
Mind you I have severe duplication of title in some of my collection, For example 6 versions of interstellar overdrive, No less than 200 covers of ACDC songs and a large selection of whole concert bootlegs or recordings.
All up there are only around 8000 odd individual songs. Of course there is a large section that I rarely listen too but sometimes the mood hits me for some ring cycle or bach and I'll spend a week listening to it. (Mind you it takes about a week to listen to the Ring Cycle.)
Personally I think I would go mad listening to only 500 or so musical pieces. I enjoy hearing the evolution of a band or even a single piece through time and different interpretation.
So far this collection has probably cost me close to 8000 dollars, maybe even more. But compared to my other hobbies thats cheap.
Anyway each to his own.
In a reply to both siblings. You are probably right, this is not specifically geek news. Maybe we should alter the story tital to "Tidal waves seek out and kills hundreds of computer users and destroy thousands of computers. Oh and 20000 poor people died." No that would be too cynical.
My main point though is wether or not the incident is natural or man made the story matters. The geek side comes in all over. This will probably see major tech spending on new facilities and warning systems. New research into quake prediction (if the Indian scientist was correctly predicting to within a short distance and less than a half hour then someone is about to throw money at him). There was likely a number of readers of slashdot killed by this ( with a million+ readers, someone was almst certainly in the area ). Geeks also dig, big natural disasters like volcanoes earthquakes etc, so that makes it geeky as well. Good grief the ultimate geek bit is the fact a worker from the special effects team of the LOTR's was in the area and unheard from so far.
Now as to the apple and oranges excuse as to why 911 was news for geeks (with numerous articles spread over weeks) and this isn't. I personally think it is pretty close to nationalist relativism or possibly even racism. Complaining about one story on a big disaster (which is at least 8 times worse in lives lost and 500 times worse in people directly effected and probably 5 times worse in monetary damage) while trying to justify the stories about a smaller disaster ( with just as little geekiness) appears simply wrong, and suggests ulterior motives.
Actually, what you have here is ethical considerations, effecting what is litterally a ranking exercise. Human minds ( without personal emotional impacts ) tend to rank things. How do you rank tragedy, easy, death count. In some western nations the death tolls are normally so low we fall back on monetary costs.
So why did 9/11 have more impact than an earthquake in India? that is simple. 1000 times greater airplay caused it to have a major human emotional impact to a lot of people. Now why did that happen, again simple, no one even had to move much to film and broadcast the disaster. The attacks on 9/11 were delivered to one of the most electronically and media dense places on the planet. While an earthquake in India may well have not even been appearing in papers on the far side of the nation after a week.
I have similar thoughts regarding ranking Genocide etc. When people attempt to rank genocides I simply state that each was an attempt to destroy a culture. The size of the culture is irrelevant, the thing that makes it bad is that the attempt was made at all.
Well actually there is no real black and white definition here. Anyone and everyone seems to be called a terrorist, but that's simply garbage. The vast majority of Insurgents/freedom foghters/terrorists are local defence militia. These militias have formed as a local police force created and guided by local religious and political groups generally organised on local tribal/town groupings.
City fathers of towns create these groups initially because much of the country is a mess and the town needs a security force. Eventually this leads to regional Balkinization and local paranoia, especially when communications media is lacking. Obviously ongoing privation leads to radicalism and fanatical influence can easily grow. Add in revenge for accidental killings and all of a sudden there is a fringe element still supported by their local comrades that are planting bombs in their own areas to disuade / defend them from interloping forces.
The snatch, kidnap murders of select targets is still generally disliked and many members of the basic militias dislike them a lot. The local defence militias support their own more active permanent security groups, who support their more radical insurgent sections, who may or may not support the occasional terroristing sub group. Now these groups are all orders of magnitude smaller than their base group. So 10 000 militia, leads to 1000 security militia, leads to 100 active insurgents which leads to 10 or so hard core terrorists.
Any attempt to go into an area to find and grab the 10 hardcore terrorists will almost always cause the active insurgents to help them either as allies or just as enemies of enemies, then that can escalate to the security troops and finally the regional / town / city militia.
Personally I believe a lot of the problem here is the massive number of ex Iraqi army weapons that just moved straight into the civilian sector at the conclusion of the first month or so of operations. This accelerated both the need for, and rapidity of the development of the militias, add in considerable animosity for civilian deaths and you rapidly generate a core of freedom fighter / insurgents, who attempt revenge. Add in the foreign terrorists as a core for the more murderous terrorists and the whole lot develops in just 2-3 months without much major direction.
As to your statement "please don't spread astroturf stories about 'recruiting more fighters.'", that's just stupid. Almost all governments and groups use vengeance as a recruiting tool and many societies have popular mythos of aggrieved vengeance. Just look at the remember pearl harbour posters and the popularising of Ivan gaining vengeance on the Nazi hordes for the death of his entire village stories from Russian propoganda. The statement of every 6 year old child killed generates enemies is so blindingly obvious that claiming it doesn't is simply stupid. If a bear kills a child the community sets out to kill the bear and for the next generation or two the Locals dislike bears a lot. Drag that into Iraq and a bunch of foreigners blast the crap out of Mrs Hamoud and her four children with little or no explanation and the local community will treat the foreigners like maddened bears.
It appears that quite a lot of the actual counted votes in some of the opti-scan counties in Florida look suspiciously like the counts have been given to the wrong candidate. If not then why would less than a third of the dem voters vote dem while the reps get more than double (in Calhoun it's closer to 500%) the count of registered Reps. It almost looks like a systemic failure that occurred in a number of counties.
. htm m
d f / 2004pppParty.pdf
In Baker for example there were 8926 registered Dems but only 2180 kerry votes, while there were
3126 registered reps but they got 7738 votes. In Liberty the figures look even worse 1927 Rep votes from 320 registered (600% up) while there were 1070 Dem votes from 3597 registered (down to under a third).
Unless people honestly believe that the dem vote was only 25% of registrations while the rep vote was 250% then it would indicate the wrong tally was allocated to the candidates. Apparently the exit polls for Baker county were out by a massive margin as well. (In fact there were more positive Dem responses then dem votes and generally the exit polls run around 50%.)
Now it is curious that the worst of these data irregularities are in the smaller counties, but it would also be these smaller counties that may well have had less money for testing etc. In larger counties it appears that the Repub vote is around +5 to +10% over registrations while the Dems are -10 to -50% under. In Duval the reps are 29000 up while the dems are 80000 down compared to raw registrations.
If you reverse the figures then both parties are running a lot closer to the raw registration figures but with the Reps still getting an extra percentage boost compared to Dems over their registrations.
It is certainly curious why publicised faults and problems are all benefitting the republicans though. What are the odds of 200+ errors across the country (depending on which site you look at) almost all going the republican way.
The data is available from a number of sources but has been tabulated below.
A 'friendly' representation of florida data
http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats
Graphic of the worst 8 small counties
http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.ht
Raw Stats -
Returns by county
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/pdf/canvassing1.p
Registrations by county
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/pdf/2004
By the way I didn't vote, I am simply a very concerned world/Aussie citizen.
Indeed Moral relativism as a justification is simply as means of escaping the impact of your own actions.
For example people were saying 3 years ago that certain ares of the world needed depopulation etc. Emotional outburst etc but just the fact that a lot of people had thoughts that way, made war an easier thing to accept because "we could of done a lot worse". A sort of I was planning on killing your whole town but then I chose to do one in ten so you should be thankful type of idea. Of course exposing yourself to your own hypocricy is painful, For me that was the point at which 4 year olds without limbs etc were being shown on television.
Moral revisionism allows people to justify there actions through accusiatory excuses. We're not as bad as you used to be etc, has been used against the Germans, French, Turks and even the Belgians. as a justification for what people obviously find somewhat troubling. Of course eventually the realisation that comparing yourself favourably relative to 'Aushwitz', Algerian sanitation, Armenian Genocide and the Belgian Congo Corporation, does not necessarily hold you/I in good stead. Personally I think we fail vs 'Guernica', and in certain ways approach pre 1939 secret police activities and legal shicanery of Germany.
Now before everyone beats on me. I will state that I as a participating elector of a nation participating in this 'Coalition of freedom' accept that I still exist in my society even if I voted against it's activities. But I do not stop there, I have marched, I have chalked, I have communicated, heckled and hopefully persuaded some others of my society that they are wrong. Unfortunately in my nation as long as you can facetiously and falsely claim that you can keep interest rates down no matter what, even as you assist in morally ambiguous crusades you seem to retain power ( I will ignore all the other foibles of our current government). Selfish ignorance or possibly fear of loss of well being I do not know. Of course the heavily endebted are all going to be somewhat screwed anyway as Oil will continue it's inevitable supply/Demand rise to 80+ dollars and devestate the economies that depend on it anyway.
Alright as an Australian, I thank you for your visit. But just a couple of questions (I will assume answers and give political comment completely urelated to your own story. (typical slashdot eh.))
Was it an emergency, As in lots of blood is leaking out everywhere, or the foot is no longer attached? In such a situation you would of been seen more or less instantly by at least some form of doctor, and almost all treatment costs would be covered.
Was it painful but not life threatening? As in a break or major laceration. In such a situation you would of entered the 'fast' queue and been made comfortable. If there are problems with timing in this situation then hospitals will ask for relocation or suggest local 'private' (As in private hospitals but the costs are handled by medicare, A private hospital can not refuse this.) alternatives. A lot of emergency waiting lists are caused from where people refuse this form of assistance. For example lots of small regional centres are not able to pull there one scheduled qualified emergency doc without gaining additional coverage and in such a situation you wait until they can get coverage. What would happen if the one doc available was needed right now ('Bill' got his foot bitten off etc.), while he was stuck in surgery with you. Doctors are not slaves and if they do not want to go somewhere you can not force them, so some regional centres have a lot of problems getting the back up.
Finally was it more or less liveable, I mean something like a preexisting condition that would be good to be fixed or has flared up etc? In such a situation you are waiting for the resources to become available. This means you will be scheduled into a surgical rotation at your nearest facility able to handle such. Now many people do not want to go to possible alternatives (eg private, or even a not so near facility) and so these are the cases that see major waiting lists in some areas. If you agree to go anywhere (which effectively means the state capital) for the operation then the scheduled wait could be weeks, rather than months. Mind you even then, speak out if you have an issue and most doctors will be happy to fiddle times somewhat. In my situation last year I needed to get a growth removed from my leg (A calcified cysty thing, it had actually existed for over 10 years but I had ripped it open while fencing.) I saw the Surgeon in the second week of October he wanted to schedule me for mid november. I said it had to be earlier or later as november I was in Beijing. He said earlier if we could, both he and I did not want to be stuck doing it around christmas, and he squeezed it in (an hour max, under a local). so it was switched to just 8 days later and I was bounding around on the leg all over Beijing, 10 days after that.
So anyway, thanks for the visit, hope we didn't beat you up to bad about your government (not that we can talk).
Ps: Since when did doctors start employing distractors, as in seriously cute streetwise , goth/vampire masquerade playing nurses who simply sit there and talk to you (about GTA vice city of all things) throughout the operation, so you don't think about what is happening. I mean I almost felt like asking for an encore or giving myself another reason to come back.
Purchased copyright extensions and length of terms
Copyright as it stands now is one sided monopoly provided by the government, that requires no expense by the producer of a work for the monoploy, but gives potentially massive returns over increasingly longer periods of time. Originally designed to secure incomes of artists etc for a period of 7~14 years, while they were busy developing new products and works for the public good. This concept of public good and copyright has effectively been destroyed by corporate interest, copyright transference and long term extensions to periods of protection. Many people can barely even imagine a world without some form of Copyright anymore, but many know they do not like what exists at the moment. I believe it is time to revert back to something that approaches the original concept as devised 150 odd years ago.
I suggest that a new commercial approach is needed, one where only a short initial period of protection is given for free after which protection would become more and more expensive until it ceased to be in the owners good to stop the work progressing to the public domain. The system would put direct values on the copyrights. The system would be self funded or even better a earner for the Government just like old time purchased monopolies were for governments pre income tax days.
My suggestion would be that everyone receives free rights for a period (my preference would be 5 years) as long as they can prove ownership and a creation date. The producer of a work could register a work with a centralised authority for a fee. The fee would be enough to cover administration costs and would act as a proof of ownership. A major benefit is the fact that several copies of the work would have to be submitted and would exist for later for public release.
Now after the initial free protection period is completed the holder can reregister for another period at his/her/their cost, my belief is that $500 for example is not unreasonable for a written work.
Each iteration after the first multiplies the registration fee by a value. Again I think a factor of 5 is reasonable meaning most works would be released by their 20th birthday and almost all by their 30th.
The costs for registration would be
1st (5 years) - Admin Fee
2nd (10 years)- Admin Fee + Protection Fee
3rd (15 years)- Admin Fee + PF x 5
4th (20 years)- Admin Fee + PF x 25
5th (25 years)- Admin Fee + PF x 125
6th (30 years)- Admin Fee + PF x 625
7th (35 years)- Admin Fee + PF x 3125
I would expect the protection Fee to actually be different dependent on form of Work being protected. Lets say $500 for a written work, $1000 for an audio/software Item, $5000 for a movie, $10 for a Photograph/Image. The protection covers the period from the initial creation or the work and does not get renewed with new media or transformations for such. Of course added features can be protected separately, but the main work is still only protected for the given period. The Protection amount would also have to be incremented with inflation to maintain it's power to force the release of material to the public domain.
Now as most recorded musical works rely on initial hype for the vast majority of its sales this would cause most music to fall from protection after 10-15 years. Work that becomes Iconic and forever fashionable (music of a generation like the 'Beatles') could justifiably be restricted for 30 years but the 7th period of protection ($3,125,000) would be the (almost certainly) last period of protection for these. (A complete Protection to 35 years of the Beatles Library would be close to a Billion dollars vs. $200 million for the 30 year protection)
If the artist produces more and more iterations of the same musical piece then each needs to be protected separately but the first versions will probably join the public domain faster. Of course with new versions etc they are probably making more money out of the later versions. So numerous releases of live an
Actually I am fairly certain that 'Nemo' was the first Pixar film where the rights to sequels etc sat entirely with them rather than with Disney. I think I saw that in a documentary on Pixar/Nemo.
As to creative scripts I am fairly certain that their is quite a number available to Pixar, and even a 50% hit rate is still very good.
Well a guard post and check point situation is seriously obvious point to use them.
Have your men 50 meters behind (and under armour) 2-5 armoured trash cans at the guard/check/obo point and your men don't die when mr Kamikaze truck blows up the cans. If he tries charging through, the cans have a damn good chance of nailing the vehicle with auto fire and maybe even grenades. The machines have much faster reaction times and will always be ready, no such thing as surprise against a machine.
The simple answer is they are very expendable and can be made very structurally strong.
.5 of a second after it is attacked to lay a burst at it's attacker.
Now the longer answer: A ruggedized sedgeway (or better yet something that can place itself into a permanently low power stable position, eg 3 wheels or more.) would be able to be very rugged, armoured and would be fairly easy to repair. The same can not be said for soldiers. A armoured trash can, can afford to wait until it is attacked before returning fire safe in the fact it is not important, is highly survivable and will probably manage
Now given the fact that mass production sedgeways cost $5000 odd and after you equip it for military purposes probably $50000. It is still a great deal. In fact I can see 10 000 being purchased at the drop of a hat.
Have two or three trundling along as point teams on patrol. (The bad guys can't let em get too close so they become the targets and that exposes the bad guys.) Set them as forward guards and you can keep the potential bad guys back. Make some that are very menacing (Big, black, with big stubby riot guns, maybe some big speakers, Bright strobes and nasty voices) and they could be very successful crowd controllers as well.
Most of the time in guerilla and urban areas they they sit still (unless patrolling) and so you could have 100's of guards set and flagging themselves for attention if something unusual or out of their ROE takes place. So you get 100 guys sitting in a comfy baracks somewhere, controlling, interdicting or at least observing a large area. Rather than 5 times that number actually being out in the thick of it.
Where they fail is in snatch sweeps where house searches are required but even there they can be used to secure rear areas of the searching troops, establish stop points and to act as covering roles or even anti sniper roles.
Some bigger ones can even act as a pack beast for supplies or maybe even crew served weapons. (Is that 50 kilo's of Machine gun and 1500 rounds of ammo weighing you down, just chuck it on the section trashcan) Having the Command element of a platoon gifted with 4 heavy weapon cans would make most soldiers, a lot happier. The extra firepower and much lessened load will be appreciated.
In more regular combat they are given sweep zones and much more liberal ROE. See enemy, (however defined) shoot it if close, otherwise identify them to command and assist in calling in fire.
Obviously development costs are huge to field basic autonamous combat machines. (somewhat less for command guided or standby and command machines) but once the work is done. A nation can probably afford to buy a fairly large number as supplements to their infantry and other forces. For example even at $50000 a copy a 100 000 would cost 5 billion but allow increased flexibility in the order of 30-50 000 additional on the ground troops. With almost certainly lower ongoing costs, much more rapid return to service if damaged ( A sedeway gets a wheel blown off it can be replaced. The same happen to a man and he's not playing soldier anymore.) and seriously reduced political consequences if one is totalled compared to a man, militaries will love them even if they only act as guards and scouts.
The key tech troubles are the power supply, the logic system, the comms system and possibly security. Loco, navigation, observation and weapon handling is effectively doable right now.
It seems to me that if the majority of people do not think of this problem and therefore the companies feel they can ignore it, it requires a major failure to highlight the problem to the public. Most people had no understanding of problems in the power system, now everyone in New York etc knows there is stuff wrong.
For example if at the next election a party was to have the first reports from a state (from the centralised tally.) read a massive swing to a stupid entry, or even better just be so out of whack with reality that a recount is ordered. Then it will be discovered and show to the public at large how broken the process is. Imagine a repeat of Florida several times with the blame placed at the feet of Diebold.
Maybe someone needs to hack the system and screw with the data just to force the issue. How though would the US handle such a situation. Can a rerun of the election be ordered, would 20% (or what ever portion) of the states be ignored, maybe Darth Vader is declared president.
Of course I am writing to you from a place that does the whole paper voting thing. (Actually worked in a booth twice now, quite fun and makes you feel useful.)
Here in Aus, the votes are counted in voting centre on the night, then counted again in the following week in the central electorate office. In the next month the count is redone, and during the period till the next election each electorate office does at least one dry run count of the old election and quite often does one for a different electorate. If there are discrepensies there are some serious investigations. And as everyone on the roll has to at least show up and submit a blank form there can not be ballot stuffing.
Here in Australia we had newspaper reports of a 5% drop in sales of CD's. In the article they had an interesting list of stats including the fact that the CD sales had dropped by X amount. Later in the article and in an attached table they also mentioned the great rise in music DVD sales. The M-DVD sales increase was actually greater than the drop in CD's. Maybe in that article they missed the fact that if you already own a (expensive)music DVD you may not buy the equivalent CD.
They also lumped the Singles in with the albums sales, which I believe is a mistake as they also mentioned that there was less singles released in Australia last year. I think that this fact alone means the total number of CD's sold would drop, as not all single sales would convert to album sales.
Now the article could of been simply wrong but the stats mentioned logically give a spin to the raw statement that 'CD sales are down'.
When I was a student, the universities student guild implemented a debit card system across campus. It allowed purchase at vending machines, from guild run shops, at the Student Pub, use of photocopiers etc. Unfortunately for them they did nothing in the way of testing the system too strongly. 3 days after the system was rushed into use, it became known that there was a way to reset the cards the cards to $999.99 credit. It worked only if you had taken the balance to less than a dollar but this was simple as most people bought the cards for a dollar and then filled them up. (Just buy the card and make a photocopy and it would be ready for resetting.)
The cards sold out on that friday night (after only 3-4 jours of the problem being found) and the vast majority were reset. Being the first week of semester there was loads of new students and the clothing and bookshops on campus noted a large swell in expensive purchases but didn't immeadiately catch on. Guild management was not operating over the weekend and it was only on the Monday afternoon that they stopped the system cold. They had sold out of clothing, almost all the snacks were gone and the Pub had seen almost all of it's bulk supplies for the first 2 weeks of parties sold in case lots.
The cause was simple, place annonymous debit card in the reader while less than a dollar in credit and turn off then on or on the photocopiers press the green eject button and the red cancel button at the same time. The reader system reset the cards to $999.99 while the Photocopier readers reset them to $99.99.
I lived off campus so only found out about it after the fact. I have no idea if I would of abused the system if I had been there but it would of been tempting.
I had a friend who bought an entire wardrobe and all his texts and stationary. There was stories, that I believe, of the Pub selling semester long quantities of alcohol to some students, and I saw a dorm room with over 20 cases of beer under the beds over a month later.
Legally the guild was in trouble because most of the cards were still legal and so they tried to ban any cards with more than 100 dollars on them. A number of students claimed that they had in fact put the money on and even had parental support etc, but the guild was able to show that the adding process would only work upto $100 dollars. The actual number of offending students was not large with most from just the one college/dorm so there was a number of deals made to get the reset cards out of circulation. There was some interesting attempts at justification though, with one girl in particular trying to justify her posession of over 100 cards with exactly 999.99 dollars on them. Eventually the guild was forced to re-accept the cards but was able to get the cards with more than $100 value banned. There was though 3 photocopiers in the comp sci area that never got changed and that continued to work with the reset cards.
They have only now after 10 years reinstitued a similar system and it has a hard maximum limit of 49 dollars and the cards are unique to students. They really learnt their lesson about testing.
Hydrogen does not spontaneously combust in the presence of oxygen. Just like Gasoline it needs a spark flame or heat to initiate combustion.
Accuracy then was - Fly along a gyroscopically controlled line until the timer stops the fuel.
Moderately light aircraft today can carry GPS enabled auto pilots.
The difference is several orders of magnitude improvement in accuracy. 50Km -> 50m. It is true that they were militarily ineffective but they were incredibly effective in causing disruption and shifting the allocation of Allied resources.
The cost effectiveness of the V1's was one of the major success stories of WW2 for the Germans. Each V1 cost the same as about 1/2 of a heavy anti aircaft gun. The allies spent around 25 times more on stopping the V1's than the germans spent on firing them. That is without taking into account the operational misuse of assets, but rather simply their cost.
Interestingly I found a few sites 2-3 months back that described engineering projects at some Universities, where they built V-1's from scratch. They were actually easier to make these days with electronics than with the old methods. One project built a 1/2 scale one for $22000 and suggested that a full scale one would of cost $25-28000. Of course most of the expense was centred on determining what to do etc. The cost would of dropped for the second and later copies. They believed the physical cost of componentry if purchased in bulk would allow a 100 missile production run to cost around $10000 a missile.
Interestingly enough, I was recently debt free and owning a house. Unfortunately after a relationship breakdown and a general caning in the financial settlement I now have a $65 000 debt all over again. I am currently paying it off at ~30% of my income. For example I netted $1530 last fortnight including 8 hours of overtime and generating another 8 hours of TOIL that may be converted to money if I do not take it as leave within a year.
Of that $1530 I am paying $150 for Medical and additional retirement savings.
Then $500 gets Paid straight to the loan.
Then $300 to a living account.
Then $50 into the holiday fund.
The remaining $500+ goes into an offset account.
Whenever the Offset account hits $6000, $2000 gets directly shifted to the loan. Any major expences like the $4500 in legals over the past 3 months have also come from there. Those costs though have now stopped. The Offset currently has $4500 in it and at $1000 a month it will last almost 5 months including utilities, rates (Aussie Property taxes) and the minimum repayments of the loan.
Now at my current rate of repayment I will be paid off in 5 years. Add the Offset effect of the Bill and safety account as well as the overrun payments from it and I will be trying to get that down to 3 1/2 years.
Toss in a room rental or 2 and I get a lot more for an enhanced social life, as well as not sitting around alone at home. (Actually the rental who moved in a couple of months back just had his girlfriend and her sister from Britain over for 2 weeks and that greatly helped the general decor of the abode.) The room rental is cash and about every second fortnight I end up with extra sitting in the living account. The living account pays for most small bills and the once a fortnight house cleaner.
Personally I feel any single slashdotters out their with more than 1 bedroom can help themselves greatly by renting out a room or 2. Just pick whoever it is well and check their credentials and get a bond up front. If you find one you really like, you can even drop their rent after a while just because you want to, etc. You will though find the additional cash in the pocket very useful especially if you do not count it towards your income when budgetting.
Anyway before everyone thinks I am a self righteous P#$#%, I spent almost 18 months unemployed in 93-94 (occasional cash and short term jobs but generally very under employed) and learnt to live on very little. I realised that once I got a good job, I could simply spend everything, so I allowed myself a little increase in living money and all the excess went into savings and later debt payments. My principle was, 'never see it never miss it'. Everything substantial I bought was purchased with a credit card and then paid off within a week from already saved money from the living fund, I simply did not allow large impulse purchases at all (and being a Comp Geek they can be very expensive and rapidly depreciating). I have continued that until now and it has kept me in good stead.
Without the Book in front of me I am farily certain that BA got smashed the exact method of smashing was not defined. Seeing as they were throwing planetcracking nukes and that the Bugs had a space navy in the Book then it is a good bet that it was nuked.
The 'doogie' character also got killed in the book while working at a naval research facility out near Pluto. Why did they drop that part, why, why.
If instead of sterilising by radiation exposure, they actually held each little fly down and operated or got incredibly accurate rifles and shot the flies equivalents to testes off then those would be mutations too right?
The radiation is destroying the reproductive cells not changing them. Other means could be used to destroy the cells but nuking is the cheapest. Here in Aus we regularly use these methods for eradicating introduced or invading pests.
As to the food chain argument the Tetse has competitor flies in the same niche but they breed differently and don't cause mass illness and death in other populations. Remove the Tetse and the others will expand their populations slightly. Of course I am fairly certain that there are 2-3 species of tetse specific gut bacteria that we are also killing out here but so what.
The only real concern is what do we do with the extra animals and people that now aren't suffering horrible deaths or being crippled. Of course the people get to eat the extra surviving animals but the animals will need to eat more grass etc.
>The purpose of copyrights is to allow the creator to prosper from his/her creative works.
Well the other purpose is so he can prosper while preparing new works. Now if he can just sit back for 40 + 70 years he can make nothing new and his next 2-3 generations of offspring can just live off his ideas without doing anything productive. A limited period (7-10 years) is enough time to generate income, if successful, to make a second, new, good for the world, work.