The NPT was never meant to be an agreement which permanently legitimises nuclear apartheid.
That's your interpretation. Personally, I think that's EXACTLY what the treaty was for. It was never meant to de-nuclearize the major powers, it was just intended to keep the riffraff out of the club.
The USA and the USSR would never have signed anything that actually would have meant nuclear disarmament. It doesn't matter what the words on the piece of paper said at the time, that was never and probably will never be an option.
The purpose of the NPT was to keep every tinpot dictator in Latin America, and every border state on the Soviets' frontier, from getting the bomb. If you really think that the major players in the world meant to deprive themselves of the source of much of their power, you're deluding yourself. The pretty words in the text of the NPT are just that, words. In politics, they seldom have much of a connection to reality.
I don't believe the Iranian leadership are insane enough to launch a nuclear first strike even if they could
See, that's where I'm unconvinced. I don't think anyone really knows what's going on in the heads of the people in charge there. If starting a war with Israel is the best way of maintaining their grip on power, then I think they're going to do it, even if it means utter ruin in the longer run.
People don't necessarily act rationally: it's like a poker game. Once people have pushed enough into the pot, they're committed. It would make sense for them to just step back and cut their losses, but instead they just push it further and further. I don't think the Iranian senior leadership will necessarily take that step back, until the missiles are headed to their targets and a few million people are about to meet their respective deities.
Iran can't win against Israel; I don't think anyone rationally disputes that. (Iran and Israel can certainly both lose, but not win.) However, to admit that would be A Fate Worse Than Death for Ahmadinejad and the mullahs, and I'm not sure that they won't turn the whole country into one big Martyrdom Operation, if it saves them face personally.
I think that the timescales involved in the splitting up of the continents from Pangea, and the evolution of humans, are totally different.
The Pangea breakup was going on back at around the same time the dinosaurs were in business; definitely pre-humans. According to WP, Pangea (or Pangaea) broke up between 55 and 100 million years ago, in the Cretaceous. Modern (genus Homo) humanoids didn't appear until around 2.5 million years, in the Pliocene.
I suspect that by the time the first proto-humans stood up and looked around, the map of of the world looked pretty similar to what's around now.
The value of a machine is directly proportional to the number of distinct tasks that an average user can realistically accomplish with it.
There, fixed that for you.
Having a word processor and a spreadsheet adds a definite amount of value to a platform. Maybe even two word processors and two spreadsheets. But the value of additional pieces of software to do the same thing rapidly diminish. The value is in the things you can do with the tools, not with the number of tools themselves.
They brought with them European technology and domestic animals. When you have draft horses or oxen, suddenly farming in North America is a whole lot more practical than it is when you just have your own to hands and some light tools. One guy and an ox can put a few acres into production, which would probably take a whole village otherwise.
c.f. Guns, Germs, and Steel.
The North American natives just got a cruddy piece of real estate to bootstrap a civilization on. They managed to do pretty well in some places, but in the end they just couldn't compete with the Eurasians.
Not wrong, just possibly flawed.
on
DRM Causes Piracy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is perfectly fair, however, what's happening is that the at-risk business model really isn't practical anymore. Once the movie is made, it's difficult to monetize it, because copying it is trivial.
I don't really have any problem with people trying to make movies, or even to make money by making movies. That's a legitimate occupation in my book.
What I have a problem with, is when they try to alter the economic and technological landscape in order to make it easier for them to use a particular business model. That's where I draw the line. I could think of a lot of ways that I could change the world that would make it easier for me to make money, but that's just not how it works. The rest of us basically have to work within reality as it's presented to us, and we have to figure out ways of making money and otherwise surviving within that.
The content producers want to, and are petitioning (read: bribing) government for, is to entrench their business model at the expense of other possibilities, and at the expense of a whole lot of other things besides (not least of which is my freedom to do whatever the hell I want with the equipment I've purchased).
There's nothing inherently wrong with their business model, it just may not work. They're welcome to try, but if it doesn't work, I expect them to pick up and go back to the drawing board and figure out another way to finance movies, if making movies is what they want to do. For them to instead pour a ton of cash into, and generally mess up and corrupt, government, in order to keep a flawed business model around, is unacceptable.
Yeah, I suppose we'd just have to get along with a much smaller government. Pity.
Personally, I think they should get rid of withholding, and everyone should have to pay their income tax, in full, once a year, as a lump sum. And if you couldn't pay, the IRS would come and haul you off to debtor's prison.
Not because I'm sadistic, but because I think the withholding system hides the true tax burden from average people. I think people ought to feel the pain of every cent they pay in taxes. I want people to really have that money, before they hand it over to the government. I want that feeling burned into their minds in a very personal way, so that every time they see some government waste, every time they see a government employee wasting time, every time they hear about a pork-barrel project, or about Congress increasing the size of their paychecks, they'll think back to their money that they had to turn over to the government so it could be squandered.
I think we'd see a rapid decrease in government spending, if we did that. It's easy to spend somebody else's money; it's damn painful when it's your own.
You're probably right, except for the part about taking the computer as a business expense. That's almost guaranteed to be more trouble than it's worth, if done legally. The IRS doesn't let you deduct the whole computer's value, just because you use for business occasionally. If you use it for personal use at all, then you are required to pro-rate it, and if you get audited, you might be asked for some sort of proof or documentation of your use. Plus, I don't think you can take the whole value of the computer as a deduction in one year; it's a capital expenditure so you have to deduct its depreciation, over the course of a few years. So you're talking about a pro-rated depreciation, of a computer that you probably only use a few percent of the time for bona fide business purposes. Not going to be worth it.
I looked into the IRS rules for home offices and they're similar. The fact that I have a home office, which doubles as a personal space when I'm not working, makes it devilishly difficult to claim as a deduction (and that's assuming that I could get a note from my employer saying that I work from home at their "convenience" rather than my own).
without breaking too many anti-trust laws, or anti-competitive laws
When has this bothered them? You seem to think that these companies modify their business model in order to conform to the laws, when in reality, it is the exact opposite.
They decide on their business model, and then they get it via carefully purchased legislation.
It's those pesky users that are the problem.
on
AACS Device Key Found
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Simple on a computer today, sure. But if you follow the path laid by DRM and the desires of the studios and media companies, I'm not sure it would be so simple in a decade or so.
First they'll just make precompiled debuggers illegal. And then when that doesn't work, they'll make compilers illegal. And when people go after the hardware, they'll pot the whole motherboard in epoxy, doped with iron filing and wired with self-destruct mechanisms. And only signed code will run as root or system, so even if you do get a compiler, you'll have to somehow forge Microsoft Central Control's signature to run it on the bare metal. Oh, and the whole thing will probably brick itself if it doesn't dial in for re-verification and updates on a weekly basis. Hell -- don't even let the user install any software: if they want something, they can call Microsoft with their MasterCard in hand, pay for it, and it'll get downloaded to their machine overnight.
There's precedent for most of this already; the US government has already mandated that all VCRs look for and cripple themselves if they detect Macrovision signals, so it's really not much of a hop from there to a "full length" mandatory HDCP. Since the only way you can make DRM stick is by not letting the user actually do anything, that's the obvious solution. Just lock them out.
Solution is easy, pity it's illegal.
on
AACS Device Key Found
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Rip the disc, disable Macrovision, and burn it back out to a blank DVD. Problem solved.
You can also get rid of the obnoxious "No UOP" functions, and other garbage. If you're like me, you can just do a title rip, and strip out all the crap besides the movie itself, and pretend you're in a theater. (Well, without the 15 minutes of ads and previews. So basically, not like a theater at all, anymore.)
I used to do this to most of my DVDs, but then I built a MythTV box, and started using its built-in DVD player, which is a beautiful little thing* that doesn't do anything besides just play the main title, sans mandatory-previews, menus, and other shit normally foisted off on the viewer by the studio. I tried testing a scratched disc in a regular player after getting used to it, and I wanted to claw my eyes out, just waiting for it to craw though the mandatory-view crud.
* I think it's MPlayer. If you really want, I think you can use Xine instead and get the menus back, but I'd sooner shove a hot poker in my eye.
I think that where MD really fell down was that Sony hadn't quite realized that people were ready to start treating their music as a digital resource that could be manipulated by computer. MiniDisc is a format that is based around MD player/recorders functioning as single-use appliances. Most people changed how they thought about music somewhere between 1996-2002, depending on how wired they were. They realized that music formats were digital and that music could be downloaded, stored, and manipulated on computer. MD was a format that didn't allow these functions, and so it was useless. Not a bad format for what it did, but it missed a shift in how people thought about what music did.
You're absolutely correct, I think. However, Sony could have used the MD platform to its advantage, when it became clear around 1997/8 that something was changing in the music world, and MP3s had started to catch on. They could have leveraged the MD systems and turned it into a "bit bucket" format, like little mini CD-Rs, that people could put stuff on without regard to format (except if they wanted to play it back on a portable device, it would need to be one of the formats supported by the player, obviously). IIRC they made a move in this direction, which I think was called NetMD, but it was horribly crippled. I don't think they ever just made a Mass Storage Class driver for it, and of course the players only played ATRAC, even though by then anyone could tell that MP3 was the future.
MD definitely predated the digital audio revolution, in terms of the portability and standardization of digital audio on personal computers, but if Sony had more foresight and hadn't been so concerned about the threat to their other businesses as a result of the changes that digitization and portability would bring, they could have been a leader.
I think one of the reasons that Apple succeeded with the iPod, is that they could really commit themselves. In some ways, they didn't have a whole lot to lose. Apple had a string of basically utter failures when it came to making consumer electronics, and if the iPod had flopped, I don't think anyone would have said anything besides "told you so." But they were able to really go for it and commit to their product and their approach with a singlemindedness that a conglomerate like Sony couldn't touch.
I've always wanted to like MD as a format, and I think in the hands of someone besides Sony, it could have done well. Maybe not as well as hard-disk based players have done, but it could have been a much more serious contender, if it had a company pushing it that didn't have ulterior motives holding it back.
The whole "force" thing is a red herring; the government isn't really forcing anyone to do anything. You can opt out of any of the vaccines, including the HPV one. So people who are hell-bent on not getting their kids vaccinated can still do so.
Really, the purpose of making the vaccine required, rather than optional, is to require the huge 'silent majority' of people who don't have a strong opinion either way, and will just do whatever is easiest and requires the least amount of effort from them, to get their kids vaccinated. Without a requirement to do so, they won't bother, regardless of the long-term benefits. They just want to get the kid off to school; they'll schedule a doctor's appointment and cough up the cash if that's what it takes, but otherwise they never will.
Basically, the purpose of the requirement is to make sure girls whose parents are too stupid, ignorant, or lazy to have an opinion either way, don't get punished later on. Parents with a strong opinion in favor of vaccination aren't really affected, because their daughters would have gotten it anyway, and parents who are strongly opposed can always opt out along with the Christian Scientists.
This isn't really a policy that's aimed at the extreme ends of the spectrum, it's aimed at the middle, but as usual it's really being argued on by people who really have the least at stake.
Once upon a time, kids used to be able to bring their target rifles to school, if the school had a marksmanship program, and many did. My highschool still had a nice indoor range in the basement at the time I went to it, although it was being used for storage -- the program having fallen victim to political correctness before my time (sometime in the early 70s).
Perhaps if more young people learned about and actually used firearms in a safe and productive way, during their more formative years, they wouldn't have the same mystique. It certainly seems like a whole lot less bizarre stuff got done with firearms when they were something more people were familiar and attached less significance to. It's when a kid sees a firearm and the first thing they see is a weapon or killing tool, rather than a particularly specialized sporting or hunting tool, that we have a definite cultural problem. Kids shouldn't have their first exposure to firearms through violent entertainment and general culture, which takes a few ounces of steel and presents it to children as though it's the only thing standing between them and being powerful.
But then again, I also think that kids should probably learn about sex in a Health class, and not through Hollywood's or pornography's alternately twisted or idealized visions of it. Guess I'm probably on the losing side of the war on all fronts.
(And for the record, I don't support banning, or even really limiting children's access to, either violent entertainment or pornography. Neither one are particularly harmful, if you've already been educated prior to viewing them. It's when they're the first exposure and thus the learning experience, that misunderstandings seem to be inevitable. The solution isn't to try and keep kids away from violence and porn, which they'll inevitably find anyway, the solution is to indulge their curiosity in a productive way first.)
I think the argument is that it's far easier to get the vaccine to all school-aged girls and young women, than it is to get the under-served women in to clinics for pap smears once they've left the public education system. Setting up the sort of health infrastructure that you'd need for the latter path, would probably far exceed the public cost of giving the vaccine to all girls in school, since the vaccine uses the existing school system and requires little in the way of additional infrastructure. (And because the cost of the vaccine for many girls would be borne by their parents; assumedly only those who couldn't afford it would qualify for some sort of taxpayer-funded discount.)
That those women are underserved is a structural problem within the U.S., and is (to put it mildly) non-trivial. You could probably give $400 shot to every school girl in the U.S. for the cost of the Congressional hearings to draw up the rules for the subcommittee that would produce a report investigating whether it would be feasible to begin thinking about implementing a system to serve underserved post-school-aged women. And it would take 15 years. And it probably wouldn't ever happen anyway, because you'd undoubtedly have to touch the abortion issue at some point, and nobody's going to go near that, as if "healthcare" generally wasn't politically toxic enough.
Mod parent up. That identity theft is (apparently/allegedly) less common in Europe has nothing to do with identity cards, and identity cards would not do anything to curb identity theft in the US. Actually, I could think of a few ways in which they'd probably make it worse.
I suspect that the prevalence of identity theft / fraud here, is mostly the result (as the parent suggests) of shady creditors' practices of extending large amounts of credit to people more or less anonymously -- on nothing except their name and address, basically, and with no real check to make sure that either piece of information is particularly valid.
I've never tried it, but I suspect that it would be trivially possible for me to go out, today, and get enough credit so that when maxed out, it would be utterly impossible for me to ever pay off without declaring bankruptcy. Now, this really wouldn't be hard for a potential creditor to see; all they'd have to do is ask for a pay stub and look at how much money I'm making, and look at my other outstanding lines of credit, and do the math. The interest on a few hundred thousand dollars would probably be more than my income (less basic expenses), at the rates some creditors charge. However, it's easy to find creditors who don't bother to check. Hell, there are creditors who pretty much advertise that they don't check.
Now, in most circumstances, I firmly believe that in a free society, it's each persons right to destroy themselves in whatever manner they choose, whether it's driving without a seat belt, or ingesting inadvisable chemicals, or blowing their money on Beanie Babies and freezing to death in the street. That would all be peachy with me. But I would not have a problem with a law that forced the responsibility for debtors onto their creditors, if the creditors extended credit to them inappropriately -- not because I really give a damn about people who can't be bothered to manage their money, but because it makes it too easy for someone to steal an responsible person's identity and destroy it in a hurry. The banks are contributing to identity crime in the same way that a "no questions asked" pawn shop does, when they fence obviously stolen goods. Basically, I want the lenders to have a vested interest in going over potential borrowers with a fine-toothed comb. This could be most easily accomplished by making high-risk loans unprofitable: those $100k credit lines that they seem to hand out like candy, only exist because they're profitable. If it wasn't possible for the banks to collect on the debt, they would instantly stop issuing credit without making sure that the borrower was who they said they were, and that they really were able to pay it back.
It is easier to make crime unprofitable, than it is to make it impossible; criminals only steal people's identities because they can be used to readily obtain large quantities of cash. If you eliminate the identity-to-cash conversion, or at least make it harder, you make the crime less profitable and lucrative overall.
My understanding (and granted, I'm not a virologist) is that there are many strains of HPV, including many that have nothing to do with sex, or cervical cancer. Some are your basic skin infections / cold sores, others cause genital warts, etc. And there are sexually-transmitted strains that aren't linked to cancer.
The vaccine doesn't target all these strains, it goes after several specific ones that have been empirically linked to cervical cancer and abnormal pap smears / precancerous cellular growth.
So getting the Guardisil injections won't help stop you from picking up cold sores, or genital warts. It's targeted specifically at cervical cancer-causing strains of the virus.
It's interesting that this perfectly reasonable objection seems to only be used as a rationalization for other, borderline-bizarre, "moral" objections. I could almost get behind this one, but most of the people questioning the safety of the drug really aren't interested in its safety per se, and wouldn't ever be satisfied by any amount of evidence as to its efficacy, because they're just using it as a sham argument.
I'm not saying you are, but as I've been following the progress of this issue, it's seemed to progress something like this:
1) Religious-right insists that anything which might make sex 'safer' is a tool of Satan, and has no purpose besides corrupting their little darlings. 2) Basically everyone else raises eyebrows, questions their sanity. 3) Religious-right folks have a powwow, try to think up rational justification for #1. Failing that, they find a totally different, seemingly rational justification for their position, but which has nothing to do with their actual motives. 4) Everyone else spends a whole lot of time and effort responding to the seemingly rational objection from #3, but are just wasting their time, because the real objection is not rational or practical. It's entirely religious (and somewhat Freudian).
So, in short, you have a good point, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get anyone to take it seriously.
Pap smears are an effective diagnostic tool, a way to tell if a woman is already infected with HPV and has precancerous cells, but it's not a preventative tool that does anything about the infection in the first place. It's a related issue, but neither one is a replacement for the other.
There's a difference between preventative tools and diagnostic tools; given the choice between something that actually prevents cervical cancer, and a system that will probably catch it so that it can be treated surgically, I think most patients are going to prefer the former. (And I also suspect that when you add in all factors, it has lower social and economic costs over time.)
I also doubt that the vaccine is going to be $400 forever; just like any other products, drugs start off expensive and come down in price over time (and start to approach the cost of production+distribution once they go off patent). Right now they're targeting the section of the market that's willing to pay $400 for the treatment; once that's been saturated, the price will go down.
The FDA's lack of approval is silly. And Merck has studies in men going right now which will soon remedy that.
I think you just answered your own question, or at least responded to your own argument, there.
There's probably no FDA approval for men, because Merck didn't submit any data for men, which they didn't do, because they didn't do studies on men. They didn't do studies on men, because it wasn't as cost-effective, because there are more straight women in the world than there are gay men.
I don't think there's any active anti-homosexual agenda there, it's just economics. Straight or otherwise 'majority' people are going to get drugs for themselves approved first, because if you're a drug company, it's most profitable to get your drug out to the biggest market first. Once you've got the big market served, then it makes sense to go after the niches. It sounds like that's exactly what Merck is doing.
Mod parent up. A while ago, I was at work when The Network Went Out. It really drove home how useless we all were without data service. People stood around at their desks, rebooted, etc., for the first five minutes, and then proceeded to take coffee breaks / mill around the water cooler / shuffle dead-tree papers. Eventually, people went out to lunch. When it became evident that things weren't coming up again soon, everyone just packed up and went home.
Without the network, everything just stopped. No email, no file sharing, no printing... heck, you couldn't even use the photocopiers, because they require logins and authenticate against a single-sign-on server. Everything just stopped. The only difference between it and a power+generator outage was that the lights and the microwave still worked, but lights and a microwave make a 7-Eleven, not an IT company.
I never did hear what caused the network outage. I can only assume that someone was fired, or perhaps impaled, for it, though.
That's a big price bump, though. Sun Ray I's are selling on eBay for $60 + $20 shipping (and that was Buy It Now, I suspect they even go for less via actual auctions). For one or two units, it might be easy enough to justify the difference, but if you were outfitting a lab or cafe, a 3x price difference upfront could be a no-go.
As opposed to guiding it via GPS, like we can do right now?
Note that the GPS-guided method is totally undetectable to the target; you don't have any idea that one is coming towards you, like you would if you noticed a laser or radar beam bouncing off of you, providing terminal guidance to a missile.
Slashdot Mirror
The NPT was never meant to be an agreement which permanently legitimises nuclear apartheid.
That's your interpretation. Personally, I think that's EXACTLY what the treaty was for. It was never meant to de-nuclearize the major powers, it was just intended to keep the riffraff out of the club.
The USA and the USSR would never have signed anything that actually would have meant nuclear disarmament. It doesn't matter what the words on the piece of paper said at the time, that was never and probably will never be an option.
The purpose of the NPT was to keep every tinpot dictator in Latin America, and every border state on the Soviets' frontier, from getting the bomb. If you really think that the major players in the world meant to deprive themselves of the source of much of their power, you're deluding yourself. The pretty words in the text of the NPT are just that, words. In politics, they seldom have much of a connection to reality.
I don't believe the Iranian leadership are insane enough to launch a nuclear first strike even if they could
See, that's where I'm unconvinced. I don't think anyone really knows what's going on in the heads of the people in charge there. If starting a war with Israel is the best way of maintaining their grip on power, then I think they're going to do it, even if it means utter ruin in the longer run.
People don't necessarily act rationally: it's like a poker game. Once people have pushed enough into the pot, they're committed. It would make sense for them to just step back and cut their losses, but instead they just push it further and further. I don't think the Iranian senior leadership will necessarily take that step back, until the missiles are headed to their targets and a few million people are about to meet their respective deities.
Iran can't win against Israel; I don't think anyone rationally disputes that. (Iran and Israel can certainly both lose, but not win.) However, to admit that would be A Fate Worse Than Death for Ahmadinejad and the mullahs, and I'm not sure that they won't turn the whole country into one big Martyrdom Operation, if it saves them face personally.
I think that the timescales involved in the splitting up of the continents from Pangea, and the evolution of humans, are totally different.
The Pangea breakup was going on back at around the same time the dinosaurs were in business; definitely pre-humans. According to WP, Pangea (or Pangaea) broke up between 55 and 100 million years ago, in the Cretaceous. Modern (genus Homo) humanoids didn't appear until around 2.5 million years, in the Pliocene.
I suspect that by the time the first proto-humans stood up and looked around, the map of of the world looked pretty similar to what's around now.
The value of a machine is directly proportional to the number of distinct tasks that an average user can realistically accomplish with it.
There, fixed that for you.
Having a word processor and a spreadsheet adds a definite amount of value to a platform. Maybe even two word processors and two spreadsheets. But the value of additional pieces of software to do the same thing rapidly diminish. The value is in the things you can do with the tools, not with the number of tools themselves.
They brought with them European technology and domestic animals. When you have draft horses or oxen, suddenly farming in North America is a whole lot more practical than it is when you just have your own to hands and some light tools. One guy and an ox can put a few acres into production, which would probably take a whole village otherwise.
c.f. Guns, Germs, and Steel.
The North American natives just got a cruddy piece of real estate to bootstrap a civilization on. They managed to do pretty well in some places, but in the end they just couldn't compete with the Eurasians.
This is perfectly fair, however, what's happening is that the at-risk business model really isn't practical anymore. Once the movie is made, it's difficult to monetize it, because copying it is trivial.
I don't really have any problem with people trying to make movies, or even to make money by making movies. That's a legitimate occupation in my book.
What I have a problem with, is when they try to alter the economic and technological landscape in order to make it easier for them to use a particular business model. That's where I draw the line. I could think of a lot of ways that I could change the world that would make it easier for me to make money, but that's just not how it works. The rest of us basically have to work within reality as it's presented to us, and we have to figure out ways of making money and otherwise surviving within that.
The content producers want to, and are petitioning (read: bribing) government for, is to entrench their business model at the expense of other possibilities, and at the expense of a whole lot of other things besides (not least of which is my freedom to do whatever the hell I want with the equipment I've purchased).
There's nothing inherently wrong with their business model, it just may not work. They're welcome to try, but if it doesn't work, I expect them to pick up and go back to the drawing board and figure out another way to finance movies, if making movies is what they want to do. For them to instead pour a ton of cash into, and generally mess up and corrupt, government, in order to keep a flawed business model around, is unacceptable.
Yeah, I suppose we'd just have to get along with a much smaller government. Pity.
Personally, I think they should get rid of withholding, and everyone should have to pay their income tax, in full, once a year, as a lump sum. And if you couldn't pay, the IRS would come and haul you off to debtor's prison.
Not because I'm sadistic, but because I think the withholding system hides the true tax burden from average people. I think people ought to feel the pain of every cent they pay in taxes. I want people to really have that money, before they hand it over to the government. I want that feeling burned into their minds in a very personal way, so that every time they see some government waste, every time they see a government employee wasting time, every time they hear about a pork-barrel project, or about Congress increasing the size of their paychecks, they'll think back to their money that they had to turn over to the government so it could be squandered.
I think we'd see a rapid decrease in government spending, if we did that. It's easy to spend somebody else's money; it's damn painful when it's your own.
You're probably right, except for the part about taking the computer as a business expense. That's almost guaranteed to be more trouble than it's worth, if done legally. The IRS doesn't let you deduct the whole computer's value, just because you use for business occasionally. If you use it for personal use at all, then you are required to pro-rate it, and if you get audited, you might be asked for some sort of proof or documentation of your use. Plus, I don't think you can take the whole value of the computer as a deduction in one year; it's a capital expenditure so you have to deduct its depreciation, over the course of a few years. So you're talking about a pro-rated depreciation, of a computer that you probably only use a few percent of the time for bona fide business purposes. Not going to be worth it.
I looked into the IRS rules for home offices and they're similar. The fact that I have a home office, which doubles as a personal space when I'm not working, makes it devilishly difficult to claim as a deduction (and that's assuming that I could get a note from my employer saying that I work from home at their "convenience" rather than my own).
without breaking too many anti-trust laws, or anti-competitive laws
When has this bothered them? You seem to think that these companies modify their business model in order to conform to the laws, when in reality, it is the exact opposite.
They decide on their business model, and then they get it via carefully purchased legislation.
Simple on a computer today, sure. But if you follow the path laid by DRM and the desires of the studios and media companies, I'm not sure it would be so simple in a decade or so.
First they'll just make precompiled debuggers illegal. And then when that doesn't work, they'll make compilers illegal. And when people go after the hardware, they'll pot the whole motherboard in epoxy, doped with iron filing and wired with self-destruct mechanisms. And only signed code will run as root or system, so even if you do get a compiler, you'll have to somehow forge Microsoft Central Control's signature to run it on the bare metal. Oh, and the whole thing will probably brick itself if it doesn't dial in for re-verification and updates on a weekly basis. Hell -- don't even let the user install any software: if they want something, they can call Microsoft with their MasterCard in hand, pay for it, and it'll get downloaded to their machine overnight.
There's precedent for most of this already; the US government has already mandated that all VCRs look for and cripple themselves if they detect Macrovision signals, so it's really not much of a hop from there to a "full length" mandatory HDCP. Since the only way you can make DRM stick is by not letting the user actually do anything, that's the obvious solution. Just lock them out.
Rip the disc, disable Macrovision, and burn it back out to a blank DVD. Problem solved.
You can also get rid of the obnoxious "No UOP" functions, and other garbage. If you're like me, you can just do a title rip, and strip out all the crap besides the movie itself, and pretend you're in a theater. (Well, without the 15 minutes of ads and previews. So basically, not like a theater at all, anymore.)
I used to do this to most of my DVDs, but then I built a MythTV box, and started using its built-in DVD player, which is a beautiful little thing* that doesn't do anything besides just play the main title, sans mandatory-previews, menus, and other shit normally foisted off on the viewer by the studio. I tried testing a scratched disc in a regular player after getting used to it, and I wanted to claw my eyes out, just waiting for it to craw though the mandatory-view crud.
* I think it's MPlayer. If you really want, I think you can use Xine instead and get the menus back, but I'd sooner shove a hot poker in my eye.
I think that where MD really fell down was that Sony hadn't quite realized that people were ready to start treating their music as a digital resource that could be manipulated by computer. MiniDisc is a format that is based around MD player/recorders functioning as single-use appliances. Most people changed how they thought about music somewhere between 1996-2002, depending on how wired they were. They realized that music formats were digital and that music could be downloaded, stored, and manipulated on computer. MD was a format that didn't allow these functions, and so it was useless. Not a bad format for what it did, but it missed a shift in how people thought about what music did.
You're absolutely correct, I think. However, Sony could have used the MD platform to its advantage, when it became clear around 1997/8 that something was changing in the music world, and MP3s had started to catch on. They could have leveraged the MD systems and turned it into a "bit bucket" format, like little mini CD-Rs, that people could put stuff on without regard to format (except if they wanted to play it back on a portable device, it would need to be one of the formats supported by the player, obviously). IIRC they made a move in this direction, which I think was called NetMD, but it was horribly crippled. I don't think they ever just made a Mass Storage Class driver for it, and of course the players only played ATRAC, even though by then anyone could tell that MP3 was the future.
MD definitely predated the digital audio revolution, in terms of the portability and standardization of digital audio on personal computers, but if Sony had more foresight and hadn't been so concerned about the threat to their other businesses as a result of the changes that digitization and portability would bring, they could have been a leader.
I think one of the reasons that Apple succeeded with the iPod, is that they could really commit themselves. In some ways, they didn't have a whole lot to lose. Apple had a string of basically utter failures when it came to making consumer electronics, and if the iPod had flopped, I don't think anyone would have said anything besides "told you so." But they were able to really go for it and commit to their product and their approach with a singlemindedness that a conglomerate like Sony couldn't touch.
I've always wanted to like MD as a format, and I think in the hands of someone besides Sony, it could have done well. Maybe not as well as hard-disk based players have done, but it could have been a much more serious contender, if it had a company pushing it that didn't have ulterior motives holding it back.
The whole "force" thing is a red herring; the government isn't really forcing anyone to do anything. You can opt out of any of the vaccines, including the HPV one. So people who are hell-bent on not getting their kids vaccinated can still do so.
Really, the purpose of making the vaccine required, rather than optional, is to require the huge 'silent majority' of people who don't have a strong opinion either way, and will just do whatever is easiest and requires the least amount of effort from them, to get their kids vaccinated. Without a requirement to do so, they won't bother, regardless of the long-term benefits. They just want to get the kid off to school; they'll schedule a doctor's appointment and cough up the cash if that's what it takes, but otherwise they never will.
Basically, the purpose of the requirement is to make sure girls whose parents are too stupid, ignorant, or lazy to have an opinion either way, don't get punished later on. Parents with a strong opinion in favor of vaccination aren't really affected, because their daughters would have gotten it anyway, and parents who are strongly opposed can always opt out along with the Christian Scientists.
This isn't really a policy that's aimed at the extreme ends of the spectrum, it's aimed at the middle, but as usual it's really being argued on by people who really have the least at stake.
Once upon a time, kids used to be able to bring their target rifles to school, if the school had a marksmanship program, and many did. My highschool still had a nice indoor range in the basement at the time I went to it, although it was being used for storage -- the program having fallen victim to political correctness before my time (sometime in the early 70s).
Perhaps if more young people learned about and actually used firearms in a safe and productive way, during their more formative years, they wouldn't have the same mystique. It certainly seems like a whole lot less bizarre stuff got done with firearms when they were something more people were familiar and attached less significance to. It's when a kid sees a firearm and the first thing they see is a weapon or killing tool, rather than a particularly specialized sporting or hunting tool, that we have a definite cultural problem. Kids shouldn't have their first exposure to firearms through violent entertainment and general culture, which takes a few ounces of steel and presents it to children as though it's the only thing standing between them and being powerful.
But then again, I also think that kids should probably learn about sex in a Health class, and not through Hollywood's or pornography's alternately twisted or idealized visions of it. Guess I'm probably on the losing side of the war on all fronts.
(And for the record, I don't support banning, or even really limiting children's access to, either violent entertainment or pornography. Neither one are particularly harmful, if you've already been educated prior to viewing them. It's when they're the first exposure and thus the learning experience, that misunderstandings seem to be inevitable. The solution isn't to try and keep kids away from violence and porn, which they'll inevitably find anyway, the solution is to indulge their curiosity in a productive way first.)
Isn't this against the Geneva conventions?
Sadly, computers don't have rights, so moral arguments aside, I'm afraid it's quite legal to run Windows on them.
I think the argument is that it's far easier to get the vaccine to all school-aged girls and young women, than it is to get the under-served women in to clinics for pap smears once they've left the public education system. Setting up the sort of health infrastructure that you'd need for the latter path, would probably far exceed the public cost of giving the vaccine to all girls in school, since the vaccine uses the existing school system and requires little in the way of additional infrastructure. (And because the cost of the vaccine for many girls would be borne by their parents; assumedly only those who couldn't afford it would qualify for some sort of taxpayer-funded discount.)
That those women are underserved is a structural problem within the U.S., and is (to put it mildly) non-trivial. You could probably give $400 shot to every school girl in the U.S. for the cost of the Congressional hearings to draw up the rules for the subcommittee that would produce a report investigating whether it would be feasible to begin thinking about implementing a system to serve underserved post-school-aged women. And it would take 15 years. And it probably wouldn't ever happen anyway, because you'd undoubtedly have to touch the abortion issue at some point, and nobody's going to go near that, as if "healthcare" generally wasn't politically toxic enough.
Mod parent up. That identity theft is (apparently/allegedly) less common in Europe has nothing to do with identity cards, and identity cards would not do anything to curb identity theft in the US. Actually, I could think of a few ways in which they'd probably make it worse.
I suspect that the prevalence of identity theft / fraud here, is mostly the result (as the parent suggests) of shady creditors' practices of extending large amounts of credit to people more or less anonymously -- on nothing except their name and address, basically, and with no real check to make sure that either piece of information is particularly valid.
I've never tried it, but I suspect that it would be trivially possible for me to go out, today, and get enough credit so that when maxed out, it would be utterly impossible for me to ever pay off without declaring bankruptcy. Now, this really wouldn't be hard for a potential creditor to see; all they'd have to do is ask for a pay stub and look at how much money I'm making, and look at my other outstanding lines of credit, and do the math. The interest on a few hundred thousand dollars would probably be more than my income (less basic expenses), at the rates some creditors charge. However, it's easy to find creditors who don't bother to check. Hell, there are creditors who pretty much advertise that they don't check.
Now, in most circumstances, I firmly believe that in a free society, it's each persons right to destroy themselves in whatever manner they choose, whether it's driving without a seat belt, or ingesting inadvisable chemicals, or blowing their money on Beanie Babies and freezing to death in the street. That would all be peachy with me. But I would not have a problem with a law that forced the responsibility for debtors onto their creditors, if the creditors extended credit to them inappropriately -- not because I really give a damn about people who can't be bothered to manage their money, but because it makes it too easy for someone to steal an responsible person's identity and destroy it in a hurry. The banks are contributing to identity crime in the same way that a "no questions asked" pawn shop does, when they fence obviously stolen goods. Basically, I want the lenders to have a vested interest in going over potential borrowers with a fine-toothed comb. This could be most easily accomplished by making high-risk loans unprofitable: those $100k credit lines that they seem to hand out like candy, only exist because they're profitable. If it wasn't possible for the banks to collect on the debt, they would instantly stop issuing credit without making sure that the borrower was who they said they were, and that they really were able to pay it back.
It is easier to make crime unprofitable, than it is to make it impossible; criminals only steal people's identities because they can be used to readily obtain large quantities of cash. If you eliminate the identity-to-cash conversion, or at least make it harder, you make the crime less profitable and lucrative overall.
My understanding (and granted, I'm not a virologist) is that there are many strains of HPV, including many that have nothing to do with sex, or cervical cancer. Some are your basic skin infections / cold sores, others cause genital warts, etc. And there are sexually-transmitted strains that aren't linked to cancer.
The vaccine doesn't target all these strains, it goes after several specific ones that have been empirically linked to cervical cancer and abnormal pap smears / precancerous cellular growth.
So getting the Guardisil injections won't help stop you from picking up cold sores, or genital warts. It's targeted specifically at cervical cancer-causing strains of the virus.
It's interesting that this perfectly reasonable objection seems to only be used as a rationalization for other, borderline-bizarre, "moral" objections. I could almost get behind this one, but most of the people questioning the safety of the drug really aren't interested in its safety per se, and wouldn't ever be satisfied by any amount of evidence as to its efficacy, because they're just using it as a sham argument.
I'm not saying you are, but as I've been following the progress of this issue, it's seemed to progress something like this:
1) Religious-right insists that anything which might make sex 'safer' is a tool of Satan, and has no purpose besides corrupting their little darlings.
2) Basically everyone else raises eyebrows, questions their sanity.
3) Religious-right folks have a powwow, try to think up rational justification for #1. Failing that, they find a totally different, seemingly rational justification for their position, but which has nothing to do with their actual motives.
4) Everyone else spends a whole lot of time and effort responding to the seemingly rational objection from #3, but are just wasting their time, because the real objection is not rational or practical. It's entirely religious (and somewhat Freudian).
So, in short, you have a good point, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get anyone to take it seriously.
Pap smears are an effective diagnostic tool, a way to tell if a woman is already infected with HPV and has precancerous cells, but it's not a preventative tool that does anything about the infection in the first place. It's a related issue, but neither one is a replacement for the other.
There's a difference between preventative tools and diagnostic tools; given the choice between something that actually prevents cervical cancer, and a system that will probably catch it so that it can be treated surgically, I think most patients are going to prefer the former. (And I also suspect that when you add in all factors, it has lower social and economic costs over time.)
I also doubt that the vaccine is going to be $400 forever; just like any other products, drugs start off expensive and come down in price over time (and start to approach the cost of production+distribution once they go off patent). Right now they're targeting the section of the market that's willing to pay $400 for the treatment; once that's been saturated, the price will go down.
The FDA's lack of approval is silly. And Merck has studies in men going right now which will soon remedy that.
I think you just answered your own question, or at least responded to your own argument, there.
There's probably no FDA approval for men, because Merck didn't submit any data for men, which they didn't do, because they didn't do studies on men. They didn't do studies on men, because it wasn't as cost-effective, because there are more straight women in the world than there are gay men.
I don't think there's any active anti-homosexual agenda there, it's just economics. Straight or otherwise 'majority' people are going to get drugs for themselves approved first, because if you're a drug company, it's most profitable to get your drug out to the biggest market first. Once you've got the big market served, then it makes sense to go after the niches. It sounds like that's exactly what Merck is doing.
It's a common way of representing underlining in unformatted ASCII, or in HTML where the actual underline tag isn't supported (like Slashdot).
Mod parent up. A while ago, I was at work when The Network Went Out. It really drove home how useless we all were without data service. People stood around at their desks, rebooted, etc., for the first five minutes, and then proceeded to take coffee breaks / mill around the water cooler / shuffle dead-tree papers. Eventually, people went out to lunch. When it became evident that things weren't coming up again soon, everyone just packed up and went home.
... heck, you couldn't even use the photocopiers, because they require logins and authenticate against a single-sign-on server. Everything just stopped. The only difference between it and a power+generator outage was that the lights and the microwave still worked, but lights and a microwave make a 7-Eleven, not an IT company.
Without the network, everything just stopped. No email, no file sharing, no printing
I never did hear what caused the network outage. I can only assume that someone was fired, or perhaps impaled, for it, though.
That's a big price bump, though. Sun Ray I's are selling on eBay for $60 + $20 shipping (and that was Buy It Now, I suspect they even go for less via actual auctions). For one or two units, it might be easy enough to justify the difference, but if you were outfitting a lab or cafe, a 3x price difference upfront could be a no-go.
As opposed to guiding it via GPS, like we can do right now?
Note that the GPS-guided method is totally undetectable to the target; you don't have any idea that one is coming towards you, like you would if you noticed a laser or radar beam bouncing off of you, providing terminal guidance to a missile.