I remember when you could get DSL from various competitive providers over the same bare copper wires, which the Bells were required to share access to. ("Remembering" this isn't hard, since it only requires going back to 2000 or so, before the Bush administration gutted the rules and gave Verizon its monopoly back.) It wasn't exactly "balkanization," nor is that an honest description of the situation in many other countries where line-sharing rules exist.
Frankly, that sounds like telco FUD. There's no advantage, to the customer, of having only one choice of ISP per wire coming into their house. The only one who benefits from this are the cable and telcos, because it effectively means that in order to compete with them, you need to independently solve the last-mile problem. It makes the startup costs of being an ISP immense, thus eliminating competition.
Back when the line-sharing rules were abolished, the telco apologists said that ending line-sharing would result in more physical last-mile options. Instead of just cable coax and Bell copper, we'd have IP over water mains, gas lines, sewer pipes, wireless mesh networks, etc. Of course, it's now 2009, we've had no mandatory line-sharing for the better part of 10 years, and none of those alternatives have materialized. Because, as it turns out, running the last mile is really, really hard. And we can look at other countries, ones who didn't happily take the collective dick of the phone companies in their mouth, and see that shared infrastructure seems to work better, on the whole.
It's not a choice between monopoly and balkanization, it's a choice between having four or five companies try -- and most of them fail -- to provide paltry broadband service to your house, duplicating effort with each other all the way, versus having one or two good, high-speed links to your house and then having those same four or five companies compete to provide transit over that shared infrastructure.
All of the stories seem to be very short on details. How did the scheme work? How were they getting users to their site instead of Hotmail? Was it something stupid, like a spam email with a link? Or was it DNS forgery or something more subtle?
Everyone is reporting that it was a particularly big haul for a phishing campaign, but nobody seems to be reporting what the deal was, or why this was more successful than your typical, run-of-the-mill phishing attack.
Then you're not looking hard enough. Lots of libertarians--lots of people I've actually met, and, to a certain extent, myself included--will support limited government intervention when it's aimed at addressing a bona fide market failure or imbalance of information. What many libertarians have a problem with is the tendency of governments to not stop there when they regulate, and instead start meddling much more deeply.
In terms of actual, practical policy (as opposed to philosophical discussions about what's optimal or preferable in the abstract), I doubt you'll find many libertarians opposed to all cases of government regulation. And, frankly, if you ever found anyone who did I'd be right with you calling them on their bullshit, because that's not realistic. But that's not representative of most libertarians I've met, and is pretty much a strawman.
I agree that leaving the mess for the hotel maid staff to find was a bit inconsiderate. The choice of the closet, also odd. The bathroom shower stall would have been easier to clean and then replace as a unit, and he could have called the paramedics, or better yet left some sort of message with an undertaker or other professional, before he shot himself.
But I think a lot of that might be a result of the negative stigma that suicide has; it's tough to tell someone "by the way, I'm going to kill myself, could you arrange to have somebody come by and find my body so that it doesn't cause some poor maid to have to go to therapy for the next five years" without having them try and stop you. I can only imagine that's why he did it the way he did.
Of course it's possible it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, but given his medical condition it doesn't seem likely. I suspect he was just being private about it, and didn't consider the cleaning staff or the fact that someone was going to have to replace a lot of bloodstained drywall and flooring due to his choice of venue. Regrettable, but not worth total condemnation of the guy.
Well, assuming you are in a society where you can get another job, that's why it's #2 and not #1. It's not an irreversible state.
However, hypothetically, I guess I can imagine a society where a job loss really wouldn't be reversible. There are probably some historical examples. Some situation where, even though you're physically fine, you're essentially doomed for some social reason. In that particular, admittedly contrived, situation, I think it would be more like #1 and not #2. Of course, the long-term solution in that situation would be to try and fix society so that people don't get trapped like that, just like the long-term solution to people killing themselves because they have untreatable cancer ought to be to improve cancer treatment, but that doesn't mean that someone who chooses to kill themselves should be branded a coward, if their situation really was unwinnable and likely to bring them and others ignominy for the rest of their lives. We should abhor the social systems that produce such outcomes but the suicides themselves could be reasonable as individual decisions, even if the system isn't.
It's a question of circumstance which doesn't lend itself to black-and-white "always good" or "always wrong" judgment. Demanding that it either always be a valid or invalid choice for all "personal problems" is convenient, but the world is not that simple.
So you were careful, then, to total up all of your out-of-state and Internet purchases, and submit the correct amount of Use Tax for your state of residence? Because anything less is, technically, fraud, and you've made it quite clear what you think of people who cheat the system.
Unless you are from one of the five no-sales-tax states, if you purchased anything from an Internet retailer who didn't charge sales tax, and you didn't pay the required tax voluntarily, then you, sir, are a tax cheat.
Except what you seem to ignore is that all the runners in this particular race, every single goddamn one of us, is going to make it to the end. The same end. There's no different finish line for people who get there by suicide and people who don't conk out until someone shuts off their ventilator and pulls their breathing tube out. Either way, you're dead. What's beyond that is a point of debate, but we're all crossing the same finish line.
So it's just a matter of picking the route you want to run. You, apparently, seem to think that the slow-death route is the more scenic one; quite a few people believe the exact opposite -- that since we're all going to the same place anyway, no need to slog through a briar patch just to prove that it can be done. Quite a bit easier, especially if you have a pretty good idea of what going through the briar patch is going to involve, to just go around.
The type of suicide we are talking about here, stemming from the actual case in question, are people facing long, drawn-out death and intensive medical treatment that will only minimally extend their lives and provide them little quality-of-life.
There is no valid comparison to murder except in the most trivial sense, namely that someone ends up dead. But that is stupid, and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're not seriously advancing such an argument. "Murder" -- which in this case I'll take as someone murdering someone else more or less at random, or at least who doesn't want to die -- kills someone and cuts short what might have been many years of productive labor.
You could, I suppose, compare medical suicide to forced euthanasia of the (hypothetical) "death panel" variety, and that comparison -- on purely economic grounds -- would be valid. Of course, that just demonstrates the futility and danger of making judgment calls based on economics. The reason why forced euthanasia is repellent isn't because it's economically bad, but because it's morally repugnant to most people who believe in any concept of individual autonomy and self-determination.
Ironically, it's many of the same moral arguments that one can make against forced euthanasia -- individual autonomy, self-determination -- that seem to argue most strongly in favor of allowing and de-stigmatizing medical suicide.
> Suicide for release of suffering has a singular beneficiary. Suicide in protest benefits all but that individual. The distinction is obvious.
That's where you're wrong. Someone who decides to commit suicide rather than undergoing expensive medical treatment to stave off death as long as possible has many beneficiaries. Everyone in society benefits, in some way, by that person not demanding that resources be wasted on prolonging a life that they don't want to lead anymore anyway, and which they think will only bring themselves and others pain.
In a less material sense, someone who commits suicide may do so less to spare themselves pain and suffering (or in addition to that), but rather to spare others the truly dismal experience of having to watch someone they loved waste slowly away, until they finally expire, a shadow of what they used to be, a living corpse kept alive by machines and attendants. The wrenching dilemmas of final medical decisions are avoided; relatives and children are not forced by social convention to stand at the bedside of someone who no longer even resembles, in mind or body, anyone they have ever known; fond memories are not polluted by the gross indignities of slow, wasting death.
The person who kills themselves is often the least of the beneficiaries involved. In many cases, it is a far more selfless action than it is a selfish one.
Life is not a battle that can be won or lost. In the end, we are all dead. I do not fault those who find it necessary to resist death to the very end and with every resource that they can muster or cause to be mustered on their behalf, but I do not see anything laudable about it.
The problem is that there's not going to be one single number that you can simply generate for each car, that's going to be useful to all drivers. With a purely gasoline-powered car, you can look at MPG, and although they do vary based on driving habits (hence the city/highway ratings), they are more or less consistent, at least enough to serve for comparison. If you and I both have cars that are rated at 22 MPG, it's unlikely that you're going to get 7 MPG and I'm going to get 68.
However, when you get into plug-in electrics, that sort of spread can happen -- instead of one driver's "mileage" perhaps being a few percent more or less than another's (in the case of a hypermiler, perhaps a few tens of percent), you might have literal orders of magnitude difference based on two driving patterns.
Someone who drives only a few miles per day and plugs in the car at both ends is going to have near-infinite "mileage" and, depending on their electric rate, very low overall fuel costs. But someone who drives enough to exhaust the battery and require use of the gasoline engine is going to be down in the 60-100 MPG range, depending on distance traveled and the percent on battery, and their operating costs are going to be a lot higher.
I'm sure the EPA will come up with some "average" driving pattern and use that to construct MPG numbers, and they could use that to come up with $/mi numbers, it's not really that useful.
What you need instead is an equation or curve that people can easily plug their own values into, and get a number that's useful to them. If you imagine a plot that has $/mi on one axis, and miles traveled per day on the other ("typical commute distance"), each car is going to have a distinct curve. Cars with bigger batteries are going to have a knee-point that's much further out than ones with shorter batteries. Cars with more efficient gasoline engines are going to have a different slope on the latter part of the curve (beyond the all-electric point).
The EPA ought to standardize a graph or curve and require its inclusion on the sticker of all plug-in hybrids, so that people would be able to look at various cars and see immediately what kind of milage it's going to give them, rather than some hypothetical "average driver" which may be completely ridiculous given where they live. (To someone who lives in the exurbs, a 10-mile commute is laughable and wouldn't suffice for getting to the grocery store; to someone in the city it might be longer than they ever drive in a typical month.) Also, it would be easy for comparison tools, especially online ones, to superimpose the curves and show meaningful comparisons between vehicles.
A realistic assessment of a plug-in hybrid vehicle requires more information than just a single number. A two-dimensional plot would be far better, and would still be simple and practical enough for consumers to understand.
The opposition to new powerplants will disappear as electricity rates increase, or blackouts start.
The NIMBYs will never go away, but no politician is going to risk a horde of people stuck in the dark when push comes to shove. The plants will get built, probably wherever there's the smallest number of rich people to oppose them.
Unfortunately, if we put off new plant construction, the ones we're likely to build are the types that create the greatest baseload capacity in the shortest amount of construction time: coal, oil, and gas. (The use of natural gas for power is particularly egregious, since it can be used as a motor vehicle fuel, while coal and the heavy fuel oils can't without a lot of energy-intensive conversion. We should be doing what we can to save gas for the demands that can't use anything else.) Alternative energy systems and nuclear plants require longer build times, and there won't be time for that when people are screaming at the government to "do something."
Well, okay -- but that's not really a superior system to checks; while the OP could use money orders, if the babysitter is willing to accept checks, I don't understand why he would.
At least that I've ever experienced, the only situations where money orders are appropriate are:
1. Someone without a checking account needing to make a payment to a payee that won't accept cash. (I knew some "off the grid" types who used Western Union money orders to pay rent, because they didn't want to have a checking account... something about outstanding judgments against them.)
2. Making a payment via mail to a payee who won't accept a personal check due to the risk of fraud. (E.g. eBay purchases before they started mandating PayPal for everything. The money order is guaranteed not to bounce, so the payee can ship the item immediately, but it's safer than sending cash in an envelope through the mail. A certified check or "cashiers check" would also work for this, but many people are hesitant to take them either because they're afraid of forgeries or because they don't understand the difference from personal checks.) USPS MO's are the preferred product for this purpose.
In both cases, you're paying a premium for the money order, because the easier methods of payment are for some reason not available. (Cash and personal checks.) While you can in theory use a MO for anything that you'd pay via a check, I'm not sure why you'd want to outside some very specific scenarios.
Given the high cost of processing cheques, I'm at a complete loss as to why they still exist let alone are in day to day use.
I think the reason paper checks (or cheques, whichever you prefer) have hung on in the US is because, at least in part, the cost of processing them is borne by the Federal Reserve. Thus it's not a direct cost to the banks. In Europe, I don't think this was ever the case -- the banks there had a much greater direct incentive to replace the paper-check system with one that was electronic, and didn't involve hauling pieces of paper around. Maybe international borders figured into it, too (more red tape in hauling the bags of checks around?).
For a US bank to accept checks, in the sense of letting you deposit them into your account, doesn't involve that much. The really expensive parts -- transporting the checks around, operating the "clearinghouse" -- are run by the Federal Reserve. And although the Fed is theoretically a private organization, it might as well be a government agency at least in this instance. Since the banks aren't paying directly for the cost of processing, they don't feel the pain as much as they otherwise might. There's no incentive for them to start charging customers for the privilege of depositing checks (at least not personal customers; some business accounts do) -- they'd just lose customers to other banks who didn't. In a sense, it's a quasi-public agency doing what they're supposed to do: taking an expensive operation that each bank would have to do themselves (and would involve a lot of duplicated effort), and running it as efficiently as possible in a manner that all banks can take advantage of.
Arguably it's held back development of alternatives to checks, but in general the system does work very well. Although the Fed doesn't move around nearly as much paper as it used to (they started to go electronic on the backend after 9/11, when the grounded airplanes slowed down check processing tremendously), it's still a pretty impressive system. As I've said elsewhere in the thread, I'd prefer a giro-based "push" system rather than the "pull"-based draft one we have, but it's still better than a shoddy electronic system, which is all I'd trust the banks to deliver on their own.
The giro system is still superior to cheques / drafts -- it's a "push" system instead of a "pull", and for that reason a lot less prone to fraud. Typical check-fraud strategies don't work with giro, because the transfer is initiated from the payor's side, not the payee's.
It's unfortunate that the US never transitioned over to the giro system, but my understanding is that it's something that occurred in Europe post-war, when they had an opportunity to change things around that the US never got. Cheques and drafts are an older concept.
Just because both systems involve paper doesn't mean they're in any way equal. Nor does it mean that an electronic system would be, just for being electronic, superior to one or both: it's quite easy, actually, to make an electronic system that's less secure and more prone to fraud than a paper-based one. I'd much rather see a paper-based giro system in the US than an electronic version of the "pull"-based check, where anyone can suck money out of your account using nothing but the ABA routing and account numbers.
Either there are some details involved in the case that you're leaving out, or the decision was a very poor one and should have been appealed.
In much of the US (at least where many copyright cases are heard), Bridgeman v. Corel is one of the more recent cases establishing precedent. It dealt with photographs -- arguably more "transformative" than photocopies -- of famous paintings.
The most famous USSC case (Bridgeman was a Federal District Court case, it never went to the Supreme Court) is Feist v. Rural Telephone Service, which was notable because it eliminated the so-called "brow sweat doctrine" where anything with substantial effort invested in it was apparently subject to protection. Feist replaced this with a test based on originality. There are some similar cases dealing with recipes, which I think are more interesting, since you can make a fair argument that developing a recipe is creative: nonetheless, the recipe itself -- the list of ingredients and the process itself, detached from the narrative text that describes it -- aren't subject to copyright protections. (I think the idea is that they're properly something that should be protected by patents or trade secrets law, if protected at all. The recipes case is interesting because Canada and some other Commonwealth countries have gone the other way with it.)
A photocopy pretty clearly fails the originality test of Feist, and isn't transformative in a way that would satisfy Bridgeman (within the districts where it's applicable), so I can't see any way that it would fall under copyright (if the image or work being photocopied was public domain). Maybe there were specific circumstances that made the issue more complex for some reason, but in general it seems at odds with the direction of US jurisprudence in the past few decades.
Might want to be careful with the PERC 5/i. I did some looking into them a while back and I was surprised to find out they don't have any audible alarm in the case of a drive failure. That struck me as pretty crappy, since several times I've had long-running RAID boxes that have notified me of impending doom (or a near-miss of doom) via the drive alarm. Apparently they have (Windows) software-based monitoring, but it's supposed to run on a separate machine and word is it sucks real bad. Not sure what the Linux driver or management-software support is like; hopefully there's some way to get at the RAID status like you can on the old ones and write some notification scripts, but I really didn't like that there's no last-resort audible alarm.
Maybe not a deal breaker for everyone, particularly if you're wed to Dell because of corporate policy, but it's enough to push it a bit down the list of alternatives for me.
This is not to put down any effort to get rid of X11, rather, my guess that cross-operating system application porting will once again go to hell, cause conditional compiles, and much Zantac consumption.
All of which matters... not at all. The whole purpose of the device is to run ONE application, the browser. Everything else is there to support that.
I suppose they'll have to design some other applications, to manage machine-specific configuration (WiFi settings, etc.) but maybe they'll just do that through a localhost web interface as well.
Google doesn't care if it's impossible to build standard applications on it; actually from their perspective it's probably a plus if you can't. (And I expect they'll probably lock it down to make it intentionally hard to do.) Easier to support.
Based on what's been made available so far, the device is squarely targeted at people who do all their work in the browser, or could start doing it. It's essentially a thin client to Google's web apps.
If it works anything as well as DARE has, I predict the Pirate Party will sweep the midterm elections in 2022 and we'll be singing "Arr to the Chief" in 2024.
Same here. Netbooks are such a good candidate for the TrackPoint (and generally have such tiny, crappy touchpads) that I can't believe Lenovo or someone else hasn't produced one yet. At least not one that I've seen.
Just taking the drives and boring a hole in them with a drill press, or dropping them in an industrial shredder, has several advantages:
1. It's faster. 2. It can be done by someone with minimal training. 3. It's obvious -- no confusing a 'safe' drive that's ready for the trash with an 'unsafe' one that hasn't been decommissioned. 4. It's satisfactory -- when you do a drive wipe, you have to explain to clients why it works. If you just destroy the drive, how it works is obvious.
Wiping the drives is obviously better from the perspective of a home user, or if you only have one or two drives to wipe and aren't going to get them confused. It's effective and it lets you re-use the drives. Win/win.
But if you had a stack of 50 of them, and you didn't care about reusing them and they were all headed for the trash anyway, and all you wanted to do was eliminate the data risk as quickly as possible? Destruction is easier.
Personally the only time I've physically destroyed a drive was when the mechanism died and it wasn't possible to wipe it. It was probably safe to just toss in the trash, but over the years I've had drives suddenly come back to life once in a while, and I didn't want to take the risk that somebody might plug it in someday and pull a couple of files off before it conked out again. So I just drilled a couple of big holes in it, enough so that you'd never get the platters balanced and spinning again, and didn't think another minute of it.
But the average system that I'm selling on CraigsList or something, or giving away? I just pop a copy of Boot & Nuke in the drive, take it through the random 1/0 cycle, and out the door it goes. Anything else is an unnecessary waste in my case.
You might be running a program that's CPU limited on one processor, then upgrade the processor and discover that it's suddenly discover that instead of being CPU-bound, now you're memory-bound. Or I/O bound. Or whatever.
Point is, just because you've hit the wall in terms of CPU doesn't mean you'll get a 50% improvement with a 50% increase in CPU... you'll only get that if all the rest of the server's systems have 50% overhead to spare. And in most cases they don't. One of them will hit the performance wall before you return to being CPU-bound with the shiny new processor.
There are exceptions to this -- renderfarms, for instance, or some distributed HPC stuff -- where you really can reasonably expect to get 50% more performance out of 50% more CPU, but they're exceptions not the rule.
The PC Guide people are morons. Maybe that's what "JBOD" means in the Windows world, but if I hooked up a bunch of drives and told the controller I wanted JBOD, and what I got was a single volume spanned across the drives, I'd probably toss the thing out for being defective. Or at least criminally poorly documented.
JBOD means "just a bunch of disks." Emphasis on bunch. It means "don't RAID this, don't span it, just give me a bunch of goddamn block devices." Typically this is because you want to do something with the devices at a higher level than the disk controller. (Like you're going to do a software RAID, or you're using some application that spreads its files across multiple disks and does redundancy itself, like some enterprise storage management products do.)
Spanning is a whole different story. I don't really like spanning (why would you span and get all the downsides of RAID 0 stripes, without the I/O?), but I can understand some situations where it might be appropriate. However, it's something that you build at the filesystem/OS level across a JBOD arrangement that's presented by a disk controller.
All you idiotic "high-density, no-need-for-cars, easiest-to-serve" morons have no answer at all as to why the areas that meet all those criteria are -- the fucking projects -- where we warehouse all the poor people.
Actually I do have an answer: most of those projects were built during the "white flight" periods, when gas was cheap and people were leaving the cities in droves. It was a stupid thing to do, but there you go.
Now, with the price of gas going up and the appeal of the suburbs -- and the accompanying traffic, long commutes, and cookie-cutter communities -- declining, the urban centers are starting to appeal to buyers again.
In many cities, housing projects are rapidly being torn down, sold off, or converted into "mixed income" housing (sometimes to the detriment of the people living there), because the real estate they're sitting on is now phenomenally valuable.
It seems entirely plausible that in another 20 or 30 years, the suburbs will be where we warehouse all the poor people, and the former housing projects will have been replaced with mixed-use condo complexes for hipsters and yuppies.
The people with the money get to make the rules, and poor people get shifted around wherever they don't want to live. A generation ago, that meant urban centers. That's no longer the case.
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I remember when you could get DSL from various competitive providers over the same bare copper wires, which the Bells were required to share access to. ("Remembering" this isn't hard, since it only requires going back to 2000 or so, before the Bush administration gutted the rules and gave Verizon its monopoly back.) It wasn't exactly "balkanization," nor is that an honest description of the situation in many other countries where line-sharing rules exist.
Frankly, that sounds like telco FUD. There's no advantage, to the customer, of having only one choice of ISP per wire coming into their house. The only one who benefits from this are the cable and telcos, because it effectively means that in order to compete with them, you need to independently solve the last-mile problem. It makes the startup costs of being an ISP immense, thus eliminating competition.
Back when the line-sharing rules were abolished, the telco apologists said that ending line-sharing would result in more physical last-mile options. Instead of just cable coax and Bell copper, we'd have IP over water mains, gas lines, sewer pipes, wireless mesh networks, etc. Of course, it's now 2009, we've had no mandatory line-sharing for the better part of 10 years, and none of those alternatives have materialized. Because, as it turns out, running the last mile is really, really hard. And we can look at other countries, ones who didn't happily take the collective dick of the phone companies in their mouth, and see that shared infrastructure seems to work better, on the whole.
It's not a choice between monopoly and balkanization, it's a choice between having four or five companies try -- and most of them fail -- to provide paltry broadband service to your house, duplicating effort with each other all the way, versus having one or two good, high-speed links to your house and then having those same four or five companies compete to provide transit over that shared infrastructure.
All of the stories seem to be very short on details. How did the scheme work? How were they getting users to their site instead of Hotmail? Was it something stupid, like a spam email with a link? Or was it DNS forgery or something more subtle?
Everyone is reporting that it was a particularly big haul for a phishing campaign, but nobody seems to be reporting what the deal was, or why this was more successful than your typical, run-of-the-mill phishing attack.
Then you're not looking hard enough. Lots of libertarians--lots of people I've actually met, and, to a certain extent, myself included--will support limited government intervention when it's aimed at addressing a bona fide market failure or imbalance of information. What many libertarians have a problem with is the tendency of governments to not stop there when they regulate, and instead start meddling much more deeply.
In terms of actual, practical policy (as opposed to philosophical discussions about what's optimal or preferable in the abstract), I doubt you'll find many libertarians opposed to all cases of government regulation. And, frankly, if you ever found anyone who did I'd be right with you calling them on their bullshit, because that's not realistic. But that's not representative of most libertarians I've met, and is pretty much a strawman.
I agree that leaving the mess for the hotel maid staff to find was a bit inconsiderate. The choice of the closet, also odd. The bathroom shower stall would have been easier to clean and then replace as a unit, and he could have called the paramedics, or better yet left some sort of message with an undertaker or other professional, before he shot himself.
But I think a lot of that might be a result of the negative stigma that suicide has; it's tough to tell someone "by the way, I'm going to kill myself, could you arrange to have somebody come by and find my body so that it doesn't cause some poor maid to have to go to therapy for the next five years" without having them try and stop you. I can only imagine that's why he did it the way he did.
Of course it's possible it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, but given his medical condition it doesn't seem likely. I suspect he was just being private about it, and didn't consider the cleaning staff or the fact that someone was going to have to replace a lot of bloodstained drywall and flooring due to his choice of venue. Regrettable, but not worth total condemnation of the guy.
Well, assuming you are in a society where you can get another job, that's why it's #2 and not #1. It's not an irreversible state.
However, hypothetically, I guess I can imagine a society where a job loss really wouldn't be reversible. There are probably some historical examples. Some situation where, even though you're physically fine, you're essentially doomed for some social reason. In that particular, admittedly contrived, situation, I think it would be more like #1 and not #2. Of course, the long-term solution in that situation would be to try and fix society so that people don't get trapped like that, just like the long-term solution to people killing themselves because they have untreatable cancer ought to be to improve cancer treatment, but that doesn't mean that someone who chooses to kill themselves should be branded a coward, if their situation really was unwinnable and likely to bring them and others ignominy for the rest of their lives. We should abhor the social systems that produce such outcomes but the suicides themselves could be reasonable as individual decisions, even if the system isn't.
It's a question of circumstance which doesn't lend itself to black-and-white "always good" or "always wrong" judgment. Demanding that it either always be a valid or invalid choice for all "personal problems" is convenient, but the world is not that simple.
So you were careful, then, to total up all of your out-of-state and Internet purchases, and submit the correct amount of Use Tax for your state of residence? Because anything less is, technically, fraud, and you've made it quite clear what you think of people who cheat the system.
Unless you are from one of the five no-sales-tax states, if you purchased anything from an Internet retailer who didn't charge sales tax, and you didn't pay the required tax voluntarily, then you, sir, are a tax cheat.
Except what you seem to ignore is that all the runners in this particular race, every single goddamn one of us, is going to make it to the end. The same end. There's no different finish line for people who get there by suicide and people who don't conk out until someone shuts off their ventilator and pulls their breathing tube out. Either way, you're dead. What's beyond that is a point of debate, but we're all crossing the same finish line.
So it's just a matter of picking the route you want to run. You, apparently, seem to think that the slow-death route is the more scenic one; quite a few people believe the exact opposite -- that since we're all going to the same place anyway, no need to slog through a briar patch just to prove that it can be done. Quite a bit easier, especially if you have a pretty good idea of what going through the briar patch is going to involve, to just go around.
That doesn't even make a damn bit of sense.
The type of suicide we are talking about here, stemming from the actual case in question, are people facing long, drawn-out death and intensive medical treatment that will only minimally extend their lives and provide them little quality-of-life.
There is no valid comparison to murder except in the most trivial sense, namely that someone ends up dead. But that is stupid, and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're not seriously advancing such an argument. "Murder" -- which in this case I'll take as someone murdering someone else more or less at random, or at least who doesn't want to die -- kills someone and cuts short what might have been many years of productive labor.
You could, I suppose, compare medical suicide to forced euthanasia of the (hypothetical) "death panel" variety, and that comparison -- on purely economic grounds -- would be valid. Of course, that just demonstrates the futility and danger of making judgment calls based on economics. The reason why forced euthanasia is repellent isn't because it's economically bad, but because it's morally repugnant to most people who believe in any concept of individual autonomy and self-determination.
Ironically, it's many of the same moral arguments that one can make against forced euthanasia -- individual autonomy, self-determination -- that seem to argue most strongly in favor of allowing and de-stigmatizing medical suicide.
> Suicide for release of suffering has a singular beneficiary. Suicide in protest benefits all but that individual. The distinction is obvious.
That's where you're wrong. Someone who decides to commit suicide rather than undergoing expensive medical treatment to stave off death as long as possible has many beneficiaries. Everyone in society benefits, in some way, by that person not demanding that resources be wasted on prolonging a life that they don't want to lead anymore anyway, and which they think will only bring themselves and others pain.
In a less material sense, someone who commits suicide may do so less to spare themselves pain and suffering (or in addition to that), but rather to spare others the truly dismal experience of having to watch someone they loved waste slowly away, until they finally expire, a shadow of what they used to be, a living corpse kept alive by machines and attendants. The wrenching dilemmas of final medical decisions are avoided; relatives and children are not forced by social convention to stand at the bedside of someone who no longer even resembles, in mind or body, anyone they have ever known; fond memories are not polluted by the gross indignities of slow, wasting death.
The person who kills themselves is often the least of the beneficiaries involved. In many cases, it is a far more selfless action than it is a selfish one.
Life is not a battle that can be won or lost. In the end, we are all dead. I do not fault those who find it necessary to resist death to the very end and with every resource that they can muster or cause to be mustered on their behalf, but I do not see anything laudable about it.
The problem is that there's not going to be one single number that you can simply generate for each car, that's going to be useful to all drivers. With a purely gasoline-powered car, you can look at MPG, and although they do vary based on driving habits (hence the city/highway ratings), they are more or less consistent, at least enough to serve for comparison. If you and I both have cars that are rated at 22 MPG, it's unlikely that you're going to get 7 MPG and I'm going to get 68.
However, when you get into plug-in electrics, that sort of spread can happen -- instead of one driver's "mileage" perhaps being a few percent more or less than another's (in the case of a hypermiler, perhaps a few tens of percent), you might have literal orders of magnitude difference based on two driving patterns.
Someone who drives only a few miles per day and plugs in the car at both ends is going to have near-infinite "mileage" and, depending on their electric rate, very low overall fuel costs. But someone who drives enough to exhaust the battery and require use of the gasoline engine is going to be down in the 60-100 MPG range, depending on distance traveled and the percent on battery, and their operating costs are going to be a lot higher.
I'm sure the EPA will come up with some "average" driving pattern and use that to construct MPG numbers, and they could use that to come up with $/mi numbers, it's not really that useful.
What you need instead is an equation or curve that people can easily plug their own values into, and get a number that's useful to them. If you imagine a plot that has $/mi on one axis, and miles traveled per day on the other ("typical commute distance"), each car is going to have a distinct curve. Cars with bigger batteries are going to have a knee-point that's much further out than ones with shorter batteries. Cars with more efficient gasoline engines are going to have a different slope on the latter part of the curve (beyond the all-electric point).
The EPA ought to standardize a graph or curve and require its inclusion on the sticker of all plug-in hybrids, so that people would be able to look at various cars and see immediately what kind of milage it's going to give them, rather than some hypothetical "average driver" which may be completely ridiculous given where they live. (To someone who lives in the exurbs, a 10-mile commute is laughable and wouldn't suffice for getting to the grocery store; to someone in the city it might be longer than they ever drive in a typical month.) Also, it would be easy for comparison tools, especially online ones, to superimpose the curves and show meaningful comparisons between vehicles.
A realistic assessment of a plug-in hybrid vehicle requires more information than just a single number. A two-dimensional plot would be far better, and would still be simple and practical enough for consumers to understand.
The opposition to new powerplants will disappear as electricity rates increase, or blackouts start.
The NIMBYs will never go away, but no politician is going to risk a horde of people stuck in the dark when push comes to shove. The plants will get built, probably wherever there's the smallest number of rich people to oppose them.
Unfortunately, if we put off new plant construction, the ones we're likely to build are the types that create the greatest baseload capacity in the shortest amount of construction time: coal, oil, and gas. (The use of natural gas for power is particularly egregious, since it can be used as a motor vehicle fuel, while coal and the heavy fuel oils can't without a lot of energy-intensive conversion. We should be doing what we can to save gas for the demands that can't use anything else.) Alternative energy systems and nuclear plants require longer build times, and there won't be time for that when people are screaming at the government to "do something."
Well, okay -- but that's not really a superior system to checks; while the OP could use money orders, if the babysitter is willing to accept checks, I don't understand why he would.
At least that I've ever experienced, the only situations where money orders are appropriate are:
1. Someone without a checking account needing to make a payment to a payee that won't accept cash. (I knew some "off the grid" types who used Western Union money orders to pay rent, because they didn't want to have a checking account ... something about outstanding judgments against them.)
2. Making a payment via mail to a payee who won't accept a personal check due to the risk of fraud. (E.g. eBay purchases before they started mandating PayPal for everything. The money order is guaranteed not to bounce, so the payee can ship the item immediately, but it's safer than sending cash in an envelope through the mail. A certified check or "cashiers check" would also work for this, but many people are hesitant to take them either because they're afraid of forgeries or because they don't understand the difference from personal checks.) USPS MO's are the preferred product for this purpose.
In both cases, you're paying a premium for the money order, because the easier methods of payment are for some reason not available. (Cash and personal checks.) While you can in theory use a MO for anything that you'd pay via a check, I'm not sure why you'd want to outside some very specific scenarios.
Given the high cost of processing cheques, I'm at a complete loss as to why they still exist let alone are in day to day use.
I think the reason paper checks (or cheques, whichever you prefer) have hung on in the US is because, at least in part, the cost of processing them is borne by the Federal Reserve. Thus it's not a direct cost to the banks. In Europe, I don't think this was ever the case -- the banks there had a much greater direct incentive to replace the paper-check system with one that was electronic, and didn't involve hauling pieces of paper around. Maybe international borders figured into it, too (more red tape in hauling the bags of checks around?).
For a US bank to accept checks, in the sense of letting you deposit them into your account, doesn't involve that much. The really expensive parts -- transporting the checks around, operating the "clearinghouse" -- are run by the Federal Reserve. And although the Fed is theoretically a private organization, it might as well be a government agency at least in this instance. Since the banks aren't paying directly for the cost of processing, they don't feel the pain as much as they otherwise might. There's no incentive for them to start charging customers for the privilege of depositing checks (at least not personal customers; some business accounts do) -- they'd just lose customers to other banks who didn't. In a sense, it's a quasi-public agency doing what they're supposed to do: taking an expensive operation that each bank would have to do themselves (and would involve a lot of duplicated effort), and running it as efficiently as possible in a manner that all banks can take advantage of.
Arguably it's held back development of alternatives to checks, but in general the system does work very well. Although the Fed doesn't move around nearly as much paper as it used to (they started to go electronic on the backend after 9/11, when the grounded airplanes slowed down check processing tremendously), it's still a pretty impressive system. As I've said elsewhere in the thread, I'd prefer a giro-based "push" system rather than the "pull"-based draft one we have, but it's still better than a shoddy electronic system, which is all I'd trust the banks to deliver on their own.
The giro system is still superior to cheques / drafts -- it's a "push" system instead of a "pull", and for that reason a lot less prone to fraud. Typical check-fraud strategies don't work with giro, because the transfer is initiated from the payor's side, not the payee's.
It's unfortunate that the US never transitioned over to the giro system, but my understanding is that it's something that occurred in Europe post-war, when they had an opportunity to change things around that the US never got. Cheques and drafts are an older concept.
Just because both systems involve paper doesn't mean they're in any way equal. Nor does it mean that an electronic system would be, just for being electronic, superior to one or both: it's quite easy, actually, to make an electronic system that's less secure and more prone to fraud than a paper-based one. I'd much rather see a paper-based giro system in the US than an electronic version of the "pull"-based check, where anyone can suck money out of your account using nothing but the ABA routing and account numbers.
Either there are some details involved in the case that you're leaving out, or the decision was a very poor one and should have been appealed.
In much of the US (at least where many copyright cases are heard), Bridgeman v. Corel is one of the more recent cases establishing precedent. It dealt with photographs -- arguably more "transformative" than photocopies -- of famous paintings.
The most famous USSC case (Bridgeman was a Federal District Court case, it never went to the Supreme Court) is Feist v. Rural Telephone Service, which was notable because it eliminated the so-called "brow sweat doctrine" where anything with substantial effort invested in it was apparently subject to protection. Feist replaced this with a test based on originality. There are some similar cases dealing with recipes, which I think are more interesting, since you can make a fair argument that developing a recipe is creative: nonetheless, the recipe itself -- the list of ingredients and the process itself, detached from the narrative text that describes it -- aren't subject to copyright protections. (I think the idea is that they're properly something that should be protected by patents or trade secrets law, if protected at all. The recipes case is interesting because Canada and some other Commonwealth countries have gone the other way with it.)
A photocopy pretty clearly fails the originality test of Feist, and isn't transformative in a way that would satisfy Bridgeman (within the districts where it's applicable), so I can't see any way that it would fall under copyright (if the image or work being photocopied was public domain). Maybe there were specific circumstances that made the issue more complex for some reason, but in general it seems at odds with the direction of US jurisprudence in the past few decades.
This is typically called "diversity," and yes, a lot of schools spend a lot of effort maximizing it. Even at the cost of admitting 'slower' students.
Might want to be careful with the PERC 5/i. I did some looking into them a while back and I was surprised to find out they don't have any audible alarm in the case of a drive failure. That struck me as pretty crappy, since several times I've had long-running RAID boxes that have notified me of impending doom (or a near-miss of doom) via the drive alarm. Apparently they have (Windows) software-based monitoring, but it's supposed to run on a separate machine and word is it sucks real bad. Not sure what the Linux driver or management-software support is like; hopefully there's some way to get at the RAID status like you can on the old ones and write some notification scripts, but I really didn't like that there's no last-resort audible alarm.
Maybe not a deal breaker for everyone, particularly if you're wed to Dell because of corporate policy, but it's enough to push it a bit down the list of alternatives for me.
I think he means "OK" in that it's currently running on a smartphone that you can go out and buy today, and has sold about a million units so far.
This is not to put down any effort to get rid of X11, rather, my guess that cross-operating system application porting will once again go to hell, cause conditional compiles, and much Zantac consumption.
All of which matters ... not at all. The whole purpose of the device is to run ONE application, the browser. Everything else is there to support that.
I suppose they'll have to design some other applications, to manage machine-specific configuration (WiFi settings, etc.) but maybe they'll just do that through a localhost web interface as well.
Google doesn't care if it's impossible to build standard applications on it; actually from their perspective it's probably a plus if you can't. (And I expect they'll probably lock it down to make it intentionally hard to do.) Easier to support.
Based on what's been made available so far, the device is squarely targeted at people who do all their work in the browser, or could start doing it. It's essentially a thin client to Google's web apps.
If it works anything as well as DARE has, I predict the Pirate Party will sweep the midterm elections in 2022 and we'll be singing "Arr to the Chief" in 2024.
Same here. Netbooks are such a good candidate for the TrackPoint (and generally have such tiny, crappy touchpads) that I can't believe Lenovo or someone else hasn't produced one yet. At least not one that I've seen.
Just taking the drives and boring a hole in them with a drill press, or dropping them in an industrial shredder, has several advantages:
1. It's faster.
2. It can be done by someone with minimal training.
3. It's obvious -- no confusing a 'safe' drive that's ready for the trash with an 'unsafe' one that hasn't been decommissioned.
4. It's satisfactory -- when you do a drive wipe, you have to explain to clients why it works. If you just destroy the drive, how it works is obvious.
Wiping the drives is obviously better from the perspective of a home user, or if you only have one or two drives to wipe and aren't going to get them confused. It's effective and it lets you re-use the drives. Win/win.
But if you had a stack of 50 of them, and you didn't care about reusing them and they were all headed for the trash anyway, and all you wanted to do was eliminate the data risk as quickly as possible? Destruction is easier.
Personally the only time I've physically destroyed a drive was when the mechanism died and it wasn't possible to wipe it. It was probably safe to just toss in the trash, but over the years I've had drives suddenly come back to life once in a while, and I didn't want to take the risk that somebody might plug it in someday and pull a couple of files off before it conked out again. So I just drilled a couple of big holes in it, enough so that you'd never get the platters balanced and spinning again, and didn't think another minute of it.
But the average system that I'm selling on CraigsList or something, or giving away? I just pop a copy of Boot & Nuke in the drive, take it through the random 1/0 cycle, and out the door it goes. Anything else is an unnecessary waste in my case.
Not necessarily, no.
It's all about how CPU limited the workload is.
You might be running a program that's CPU limited on one processor, then upgrade the processor and discover that it's suddenly discover that instead of being CPU-bound, now you're memory-bound. Or I/O bound. Or whatever.
Point is, just because you've hit the wall in terms of CPU doesn't mean you'll get a 50% improvement with a 50% increase in CPU ... you'll only get that if all the rest of the server's systems have 50% overhead to spare. And in most cases they don't. One of them will hit the performance wall before you return to being CPU-bound with the shiny new processor.
There are exceptions to this -- renderfarms, for instance, or some distributed HPC stuff -- where you really can reasonably expect to get 50% more performance out of 50% more CPU, but they're exceptions not the rule.
The PC Guide people are morons. Maybe that's what "JBOD" means in the Windows world, but if I hooked up a bunch of drives and told the controller I wanted JBOD, and what I got was a single volume spanned across the drives, I'd probably toss the thing out for being defective. Or at least criminally poorly documented.
JBOD means "just a bunch of disks." Emphasis on bunch. It means "don't RAID this, don't span it, just give me a bunch of goddamn block devices." Typically this is because you want to do something with the devices at a higher level than the disk controller. (Like you're going to do a software RAID, or you're using some application that spreads its files across multiple disks and does redundancy itself, like some enterprise storage management products do.)
Spanning is a whole different story. I don't really like spanning (why would you span and get all the downsides of RAID 0 stripes, without the I/O?), but I can understand some situations where it might be appropriate. However, it's something that you build at the filesystem/OS level across a JBOD arrangement that's presented by a disk controller.
Actually I do have an answer: most of those projects were built during the "white flight" periods, when gas was cheap and people were leaving the cities in droves. It was a stupid thing to do, but there you go.
Now, with the price of gas going up and the appeal of the suburbs -- and the accompanying traffic, long commutes, and cookie-cutter communities -- declining, the urban centers are starting to appeal to buyers again.
In many cities, housing projects are rapidly being torn down, sold off, or converted into "mixed income" housing (sometimes to the detriment of the people living there), because the real estate they're sitting on is now phenomenally valuable.
It seems entirely plausible that in another 20 or 30 years, the suburbs will be where we warehouse all the poor people, and the former housing projects will have been replaced with mixed-use condo complexes for hipsters and yuppies.
The people with the money get to make the rules, and poor people get shifted around wherever they don't want to live. A generation ago, that meant urban centers. That's no longer the case.