I think Thoreau's vast military experience makes him the ideal person to get perspective from.
What, you have to have been a part of the military to be able to have a meaningful opinion about it? Do you also hold that to be true for Al Qaeda, the Peace Corps, Scientology, the EFF, NAMBLA, the Communist party, the Catholic Church, or the Girl Scouts? Or does your theory that "to meaningfully critique an organization, you must approve of it enough to join it" apply only to the U.S. military?
The biggest threat to your right to whine is the US government, the same group, in fact, that established your right to whine in the first place.
Remarkable that so few people understand the concept of rights upon which this nation is founded. Rights are not created or established by government; government is created by people to protect their rights.
Have Iraqi insurgents, or Taliban fighters, ever come over here and put someone in a cage to shut them up? No. Has the U.S. government done so? Yes. (If you think Ralph Nader has a hard time in his run for president, look up Eugene Debs. So, yes, the U.S. government is the biggest threat to my free speech.
I guess you are just such a radical that the FBI has set up an observation post in your neighbor's house, just another instance of the man trying to keep you down.
I'm sure they have better things to do with their time. But I'd be surprised if I wasn't on some list somewhere - I know enough people with high security clearances that some background investigator must have tripped across my name at some point in check out their known associates. Probably next to it is noted, "Mostly harmless".
That's ok - he'll still put his life on the line to protect your right to continue to whine.
Protect it from whom?
The group that is the biggest threat to my right to continue to whine is the government of the United States, the group this guy has promised to put his life on the line to serve, the group he has turned his conscience over to.
Never confuse being of service to your country with putting your body at the service of your government.
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be "clay," and "stop a hole to keep the wind away," but leave that office to his dust at least: --
"I am too high-born to be propertied,
To be a secondary at control,
Or useful serving-man and instrument
To any sovereign state throughout the world."
That's exactly why you usually don't call them "laptop" or "notebook", but "desktop replacement".
Actually, my full-featured laptop is much smaller than what most people refer to as a "desktop replacement". They even call it "ultra-portable" - I call that hogwash, it's over a pound heavier than my Vaio, thicker by a centimeter, and significantly larger in footprint.
I guess I've been spoiled by my old Vaio and have high standards of portability - some people would my new box a subnotebook, I call it a little bigger than I'd like.
your deep thoughts aren't so important that you should worry about getting every single one of them down. You are not Hemingway and will never be Hemingway.
Who wants to be Hemingway? I'm a poet, not a novelist (at least so far), and a decent enough one to get invited to be the headliner at readings and to appear on a new CD. (Tracks 19 and 37, if anyone wants to have a listen to the CDBaby previews.) My Zaurus has just taken the place of the small notebooks I carried for years.
Conversely, if fully-featured smartphones (i.e. pc-equivalent) come down in price, one could expect to see laptop sales dwindling.
Really? How do you intend to get a PC class keyboard and display into a smartphone?
I love my Centro. I love my Zaurus. And I love my little old Sony Vaio "ultraportable" notebook. They all hit different points in the tradeoff between keyboard and display size versus portability.
Why get an underpowered ultraportable when a normal laptop costs just as much?
Because it's ultraportable.
My real ultraportable is a Zaurus SLC3000. It will fit in my back pocket. I use it for writing, it can also be used for emergency SSH sessions and cramped web broswing. It's usually in my backpack, ready for when poetic inspiration strikes. That's ultraportable. (The only thing more portable is my Centro. The neat thing is, my Centro becomes a modem, my Zaurus runs a terminal, and bam! SSH or browsing from anywhere I can get a cell signal, with gear that fits in my pockets.)
My ultraportable-as-this-article-is-using-the-term is an old Sony Vaio SRX77 that I've fitted with a solid state harddrive, and installed Puppy Linux on. Good sized keyboard, adequate power, under three pounds and smaller than a standard looseleaf binder. I take it when I'm headed down to the cafe to sit and write or browse for a while. Not pocketsized, by easily portable.
My full sized laptop is heavy, big, and sucks battery. It's a full-featured beast that goes with me on long trips, to replace my desktop.
Ok, Mr smart guy, please explain how you find people who want this job and have an extensive knowledge of consumer electronics.. how do you retain them?
Same way you retain anyone. Good pay, good working conditions. Hell, if what they're doing is so critical to our nation's security, if they're fighting the "War on Terror", consider them an armed service and offer them veteran's benefits. Yes, that would mean a few extra dollars in the price of your ticket and or higher taxes. If what these people are doing is actually keeping us safe, it would be worth it.
If, on the other hand, what they're doing is meaningless and not contributing to our safety, then rather than doing a bad job of it they ought not to be doing it at all.
But whether they're underpaid or not, whether they're keeping us safe or putting on a show, they each still have the individual obligation to be sufficiently informed to use their authority with some sort of sense.
A horrible, horrible excuse. While the security theater being perpetrated here is merely lame and inconvenient, not horribly wicked, still "I was just trying to do my job" is the same justification as the guy running the slave market, or the pilot dropping bombs on civilians. People have responsibility for their own actions.
If your job is to screen electronics for hazardous devices, it's your gorram responsibility to know something about consumer electronics.
Anyone who's ever tried to bring a less-than-common piece of electronics through airport security has probably had them happen to this.
I've flown with my Sharp Zaurus C3000 several times. Never got a second look at it from security, even though I often draw attention when use it in a bar or cafe.
But the TI-89 looks like it might be a remote control for something, which might warrant attention. (Especially as some remotes work by radio - the remote for my satellite box sends UHF signals, probably a bad thing to have on a plane...)
All socialist politicians pushing variations of plans that have already been tried and failed in other places...
Uh, where are all these "socialist politicians" in the U.S.? Where are any elected officials advocating an economic system based on the exchange of labor, rather than the state-backed control of capital by an class of "owners"?
Proposing a few regulations or a few government services does not make one a socialist. The Palmer raids and McCarthyism did their jobs quite well, destroying the left in the U.S. so thoroughly during the early 20th century that we've been left with two right-wing parties and a population that is so maleducated that many Americans think that the notion that a government might protect and serve citizens by means other than an army and a police force is some sort of radical communist idea.
a medical system that is the envy of the world currently...All socialist politicians pushing variations of plans that have already been tried and failed in other places....
Our healthcare system - or lack thereof - is the laughingstock of the world. The World Health Organization ranks us 37th in health care system performance. Our infant mortality rate is scandalous, our life expectancy mediocre at best for an industrialized nation, our costs out of control as insurers rake in profits, and our large numbers without good access to health care leave us more vulnerable to the outbreak of an epidemic - natural or bioterrorist.
Still, a cop determined to stalk a hottie would be able to do so off the basis of her DL
Which illustrates the problem: we've confused a driver's license with an ID card.
All that needs to be on a license is my photo and description and an identifer for linking it with my driver's record. The cop who pulls me over for doing 75 in a 65 zone doesn't need to know my address, he just needs to be able to verify that the license I'm carrying is valid and belongs to me, and to record that a citation was issued to the bearer of license number 98742017. Of course, the MVA will have my name and address as part of my driver's record, but that should be very strictly protected.
A license is a certificate that a person is allowed to drive on the public roads, and should not be pressed into use as an ID card.
1. How many people over the age of 16 or so DON'T have a driver's license or state issued ID card?
Few, but some (I doubt many Amish have driver's licenses). But the ID card isn't the problem. It would be entirely possible for the state to issue an ID card which merely associated a name and date of birth with a photo, and had record keeping.
The problem is the ID number assigned on that card, and the tracking database to which it forms the key, and the nefarious uses to which this database can and will be put, ranging from bad cops stalking hotties to presidents tracking and harassing their political opponents.
It's a pretty much accepted scientific theory that the universe was created in the Big Bang (or 'let there be light' for the more religious amongst us) and it expanded from there.
The observable universe universe began 13.73 billion years ago, yes. There are various cosmological speculations about an "oscillating" universe - old school, Bing Bang, Big Crunch, lather, rinse, repeat forever; new school, colliding branes! Branes!
There are also concepts of an endless string of universes, such as each black hole in our universe forming a whole new cosmos, and our universe being a black hole in some other universe, all up and down the line forever.
And of course, it could be that if t=0 is the Big Bang, there's an infinite amount of "negative" time before.
Any of these give you a universe that has always been here. Of course, it's all completely speculative - but about an order of magnitude less speculative than positing some intelligent designer who hacks the whole thing up in his basement workshop.
It really just means a day is a long long time. hence AS a thousand years and not IS a thousand years. SO it is plausible he created the universe AND still have the big bang theory still be in harmony.
Uh, no. Even if you somehow wiggle out of the age of the universe problem with "six days isn't really six days!", you've got the rather large problems that 1) the Biblical account has things happening in the wrong order - "the Spirit of God moved upon
the face of the waters" before there was light; trees and grasses precede the sun and moon, and so on; and 2) the accounts chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis contradict each other - chapter 1 has animals created before man, chapter 2 has them after;
You want to believe that some deity created the Universe? There's no good evidence for it, but hey, it can't really be disproven, so knock yourself out. You want to believe that the old Hebrew folktales collected in the Bible are any sort of meaningful account of such a creation? Then you've left critical thinking far behind, my friend.
A new word has entered the lexicon by accident of hyphen: "cow-orker".
You kids today, no sense of history. "Cow-orker" is at least 15 years old, it was common on alt.folklore.urban when I was a USENET junkie. (USENET. You know, USENET? Newsgroups? The original peer-to-peer system? Ah, forget it. I gotta go yell at some kids to get off my lawn.)
You are only protected again unreasonable searches.
Uh, yes. And how do we determine if a search is unreasonable? We make the searchers present their case to a court to obtain a warrant.
Do you realy think that the cop who pulls you over for having tinted windows or doing a rolling stop at a 4 way stop sign and ends up searching your car went through the process to get a warrant?
If the law were followed, yes. The "Carroll doctrine" is highly refined bullshit that's led to pretext stops - "driving while black" and the like.
You want to search my car? Let's wait while you make your case to a magistrate. It's the 21st century, with modern communications technology it shouldn't take fifteen minutes. If it takes hours, I'll wait: freedom sometimes occasions inconveniences.
Do you really think they got a warrant to hand cuff you and search your pockets when they arrest you for looking stupid in public?
I'm not aware that "looking stupid in public" is a crime. Now, if I'm arrested because the cops have probable cause - sound reason to believe that I've criminally caused injury - then while I'm in their custody a search incident to arrest is permissible. But that's very limited to a scope that prevents destruction of evidence and to prevents access to a weapon, it doesn't allow them to go fishing for evidence. They're basically just taking custody of the stuff on my person along with my person.
You don't want a cop to stop and think if he is going to goto prison if he shoots the guy who just slit your wifes throat and has turned the knife on you. After all, he would probably stop killing people after he kills you so would the cop be justified in shooting them before he kills you.
Every person has the right - indeed, the obligation - to use reasonable force to respond to a clear and present danger of a heinous crime. Cops do not need and should not have any additional protection in this regard; if it's not legal for me to shoot you, cops shouldn't be shooting you either.
What the does this have to do with the lawless behavior of LEOs who perform warrantless searches, or of legislators who pretend to "authorize" them? Not a damned thing.
the metric should be "Nationwide crime rates are down 20%". That's a goal worth making a few sacrifices.
Only if we define "crime" as "an action that violates, or credibly threatens to violate, the rights of another". Reducing prostitution, drug use, etcetera, by 20% isn't a goal worth sacrificing a damn thing.
Reducing real crime is a worthy goal - but we must understand that every unjust arrest is a kidnapping, every warrantless search is an instance of trespass, every unjustified shooting by a cop is a murder. It won't do to reduce "street crime" by increasing "state crime".
it could be the requests were sufficiently vague that the telcos thought they were submitting the right amount of information.
If the FBI is submitting vague requests, it's acting illegally. Amendment IV: "...no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
If the telcos are rolling over and complying with vague requests, then they are accessories to the FBI's crimes.
In a sane world, the FBI and telco officials would be tried for their crimes against the security and dignity of American citizens, and those found responsible would be made to make restitution and would barred from any position of trust until they had proven their rehabilitation. However, I've long since given up hope of living in a sane world...
Isn't it sad when people think of piracy in terms of music, when the REAL piracy problems (counterfeiting) are those which involve fake electrical/safety/baby equipment (or food)?
The REAL piracy problem is the 13 to 16 billion dollars per year lost to maritime robbery.
Let's call counterfeiting by its proper name, okay? Confusing people who commit armed robbery on the high seas with people who make counterfeit items (whether safety-critical ones or DVDs) is unlikely to help us talk clearly about the problems.
In broad terms, the only forms of radiation that can cause cancer are ionizing radiation.
This is often stated, but really the biological effects of non-ionizing EM radiation remain largely unknown - which is why we still have argument about whether cell phones will give you cancer or not.
prophecies which have been so accurate that in many cases it's been accused of being written after the fact which is wrong considering that Daniel had the book of Isaiah before the fall of Babylon
Uh, no. For starters, remember the whole captivity in Egypt thing? Big part of the Old Testiment? Archaeological evidence - none. Herod's slaughter of young boys around Bethlehem? No evidence outside the Gospels.
As literature and myth, some parts of the Bible have some merit. As history or as a sensible guide to ethics or philosophy, it's badly wanting.
All they need to do is either find or start an auction site that doesn't do the dumb things that ebay's been doing (like making them accept credit cards through paypal or not at all) and get a significant (~25%) portion of the actions and buyers to come to that site.
Uh, right. And what auction site can they find? Yahoo! Auctions was probably the closest competitor, they shut down. There are a few niche players - uBid does inventory liquidation via auction, Bidtopia was started by one large eBay seller as a private auction site and has allowed others to play too. But Ebay is auctions on the web. See the graph of their dominance here.
The only way eBay will be displaced is if some other large player with the resources to grab mindshare and bleed a loss for the first year or two - Google, maybe - decides to get into the game.
Apparently the study covered only household electricity use. Since offices, shops, etcetera use plenty of power, that would seem to leave a huge data in the data.
It's about time. The very first hybrid I ever heard about was a VW diesel prototype. IIRC that was back in the 90s, and it was basically an electric car with a diesel generator built in.
Slashdot Mirror
What, you have to have been a part of the military to be able to have a meaningful opinion about it? Do you also hold that to be true for Al Qaeda, the Peace Corps, Scientology, the EFF, NAMBLA, the Communist party, the Catholic Church, or the Girl Scouts? Or does your theory that "to meaningfully critique an organization, you must approve of it enough to join it" apply only to the U.S. military?
Remarkable that so few people understand the concept of rights upon which this nation is founded. Rights are not created or established by government; government is created by people to protect their rights.
Have Iraqi insurgents, or Taliban fighters, ever come over here and put someone in a cage to shut them up? No. Has the U.S. government done so? Yes. (If you think Ralph Nader has a hard time in his run for president, look up Eugene Debs. So, yes, the U.S. government is the biggest threat to my free speech.
I'm sure they have better things to do with their time. But I'd be surprised if I wasn't on some list somewhere - I know enough people with high security clearances that some background investigator must have tripped across my name at some point in check out their known associates. Probably next to it is noted, "Mostly harmless".
Protect it from whom?
The group that is the biggest threat to my right to continue to whine is the government of the United States, the group this guy has promised to put his life on the line to serve, the group he has turned his conscience over to.
Never confuse being of service to your country with putting your body at the service of your government.
Actually, my full-featured laptop is much smaller than what most people refer to as a "desktop replacement". They even call it "ultra-portable" - I call that hogwash, it's over a pound heavier than my Vaio, thicker by a centimeter, and significantly larger in footprint.
I guess I've been spoiled by my old Vaio and have high standards of portability - some people would my new box a subnotebook, I call it a little bigger than I'd like.
Who wants to be Hemingway? I'm a poet, not a novelist (at least so far), and a decent enough one to get invited to be the headliner at readings and to appear on a new CD. (Tracks 19 and 37, if anyone wants to have a listen to the CDBaby previews.) My Zaurus has just taken the place of the small notebooks I carried for years.
Nice troll attempt, though.
Really? How do you intend to get a PC class keyboard and display into a smartphone?
I love my Centro. I love my Zaurus. And I love my little old Sony Vaio "ultraportable" notebook. They all hit different points in the tradeoff between keyboard and display size versus portability.
Because it's ultraportable.
My real ultraportable is a Zaurus SLC3000. It will fit in my back pocket. I use it for writing, it can also be used for emergency SSH sessions and cramped web broswing. It's usually in my backpack, ready for when poetic inspiration strikes. That's ultraportable. (The only thing more portable is my Centro. The neat thing is, my Centro becomes a modem, my Zaurus runs a terminal, and bam! SSH or browsing from anywhere I can get a cell signal, with gear that fits in my pockets.)
My ultraportable-as-this-article-is-using-the-term is an old Sony Vaio SRX77 that I've fitted with a solid state harddrive, and installed Puppy Linux on. Good sized keyboard, adequate power, under three pounds and smaller than a standard looseleaf binder. I take it when I'm headed down to the cafe to sit and write or browse for a while. Not pocketsized, by easily portable.
My full sized laptop is heavy, big, and sucks battery. It's a full-featured beast that goes with me on long trips, to replace my desktop.
Same way you retain anyone. Good pay, good working conditions. Hell, if what they're doing is so critical to our nation's security, if they're fighting the "War on Terror", consider them an armed service and offer them veteran's benefits. Yes, that would mean a few extra dollars in the price of your ticket and or higher taxes. If what these people are doing is actually keeping us safe, it would be worth it.
If, on the other hand, what they're doing is meaningless and not contributing to our safety, then rather than doing a bad job of it they ought not to be doing it at all.
But whether they're underpaid or not, whether they're keeping us safe or putting on a show, they each still have the individual obligation to be sufficiently informed to use their authority with some sort of sense.
A horrible, horrible excuse. While the security theater being perpetrated here is merely lame and inconvenient, not horribly wicked, still "I was just trying to do my job" is the same justification as the guy running the slave market, or the pilot dropping bombs on civilians. People have responsibility for their own actions.
If your job is to screen electronics for hazardous devices, it's your gorram responsibility to know something about consumer electronics.
I've flown with my Sharp Zaurus C3000 several times. Never got a second look at it from security, even though I often draw attention when use it in a bar or cafe.
But the TI-89 looks like it might be a remote control for something, which might warrant attention. (Especially as some remotes work by radio - the remote for my satellite box sends UHF signals, probably a bad thing to have on a plane...)
Uh, where are all these "socialist politicians" in the U.S.? Where are any elected officials advocating an economic system based on the exchange of labor, rather than the state-backed control of capital by an class of "owners"?
Proposing a few regulations or a few government services does not make one a socialist. The Palmer raids and McCarthyism did their jobs quite well, destroying the left in the U.S. so thoroughly during the early 20th century that we've been left with two right-wing parties and a population that is so maleducated that many Americans think that the notion that a government might protect and serve citizens by means other than an army and a police force is some sort of radical communist idea.
Our healthcare system - or lack thereof - is the laughingstock of the world. The World Health Organization ranks us 37th in health care system performance. Our infant mortality rate is scandalous, our life expectancy mediocre at best for an industrialized nation, our costs out of control as insurers rake in profits, and our large numbers without good access to health care leave us more vulnerable to the outbreak of an epidemic - natural or bioterrorist.
Which illustrates the problem: we've confused a driver's license with an ID card.
All that needs to be on a license is my photo and description and an identifer for linking it with my driver's record. The cop who pulls me over for doing 75 in a 65 zone doesn't need to know my address, he just needs to be able to verify that the license I'm carrying is valid and belongs to me, and to record that a citation was issued to the bearer of license number 98742017. Of course, the MVA will have my name and address as part of my driver's record, but that should be very strictly protected.
A license is a certificate that a person is allowed to drive on the public roads, and should not be pressed into use as an ID card.
Few, but some (I doubt many Amish have driver's licenses). But the ID card isn't the problem. It would be entirely possible for the state to issue an ID card which merely associated a name and date of birth with a photo, and had record keeping.
The problem is the ID number assigned on that card, and the tracking database to which it forms the key, and the nefarious uses to which this database can and will be put, ranging from bad cops stalking hotties to presidents tracking and harassing their political opponents.
The observable universe universe began 13.73 billion years ago, yes. There are various cosmological speculations about an "oscillating" universe - old school, Bing Bang, Big Crunch, lather, rinse, repeat forever; new school, colliding branes! Branes!
There are also concepts of an endless string of universes, such as each black hole in our universe forming a whole new cosmos, and our universe being a black hole in some other universe, all up and down the line forever.
And of course, it could be that if t=0 is the Big Bang, there's an infinite amount of "negative" time before.
Any of these give you a universe that has always been here. Of course, it's all completely speculative - but about an order of magnitude less speculative than positing some intelligent designer who hacks the whole thing up in his basement workshop.
Uh, no. Even if you somehow wiggle out of the age of the universe problem with "six days isn't really six days!", you've got the rather large problems that 1) the Biblical account has things happening in the wrong order - "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" before there was light; trees and grasses precede the sun and moon, and so on; and 2) the accounts chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis contradict each other - chapter 1 has animals created before man, chapter 2 has them after;
You want to believe that some deity created the Universe? There's no good evidence for it, but hey, it can't really be disproven, so knock yourself out. You want to believe that the old Hebrew folktales collected in the Bible are any sort of meaningful account of such a creation? Then you've left critical thinking far behind, my friend.
You kids today, no sense of history. "Cow-orker" is at least 15 years old, it was common on alt.folklore.urban when I was a USENET junkie. (USENET. You know, USENET? Newsgroups? The original peer-to-peer system? Ah, forget it. I gotta go yell at some kids to get off my lawn.)
Uh, yes. And how do we determine if a search is unreasonable? We make the searchers present their case to a court to obtain a warrant.
If the law were followed, yes. The "Carroll doctrine" is highly refined bullshit that's led to pretext stops - "driving while black" and the like.
You want to search my car? Let's wait while you make your case to a magistrate. It's the 21st century, with modern communications technology it shouldn't take fifteen minutes. If it takes hours, I'll wait: freedom sometimes occasions inconveniences.
I'm not aware that "looking stupid in public" is a crime. Now, if I'm arrested because the cops have probable cause - sound reason to believe that I've criminally caused injury - then while I'm in their custody a search incident to arrest is permissible. But that's very limited to a scope that prevents destruction of evidence and to prevents access to a weapon, it doesn't allow them to go fishing for evidence. They're basically just taking custody of the stuff on my person along with my person.
Every person has the right - indeed, the obligation - to use reasonable force to respond to a clear and present danger of a heinous crime. Cops do not need and should not have any additional protection in this regard; if it's not legal for me to shoot you, cops shouldn't be shooting you either.
What the does this have to do with the lawless behavior of LEOs who perform warrantless searches, or of legislators who pretend to "authorize" them? Not a damned thing.
Only if we define "crime" as "an action that violates, or credibly threatens to violate, the rights of another". Reducing prostitution, drug use, etcetera, by 20% isn't a goal worth sacrificing a damn thing.
Reducing real crime is a worthy goal - but we must understand that every unjust arrest is a kidnapping, every warrantless search is an instance of trespass, every unjustified shooting by a cop is a murder. It won't do to reduce "street crime" by increasing "state crime".
If the FBI is submitting vague requests, it's acting illegally. Amendment IV: "...no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
If the telcos are rolling over and complying with vague requests, then they are accessories to the FBI's crimes.
In a sane world, the FBI and telco officials would be tried for their crimes against the security and dignity of American citizens, and those found responsible would be made to make restitution and would barred from any position of trust until they had proven their rehabilitation. However, I've long since given up hope of living in a sane world...
The REAL piracy problem is the 13 to 16 billion dollars per year lost to maritime robbery.
Let's call counterfeiting by its proper name, okay? Confusing people who commit armed robbery on the high seas with people who make counterfeit items (whether safety-critical ones or DVDs) is unlikely to help us talk clearly about the problems.
This is often stated, but really the biological effects of non-ionizing EM radiation remain largely unknown - which is why we still have argument about whether cell phones will give you cancer or not.
The Book of Daniel is a fiction, written hundreds of years after the events it claims to portray. It's easy to make prophecies come out correctly in fiction.
Uh, no. For starters, remember the whole captivity in Egypt thing? Big part of the Old Testiment? Archaeological evidence - none. Herod's slaughter of young boys around Bethlehem? No evidence outside the Gospels.
As literature and myth, some parts of the Bible have some merit. As history or as a sensible guide to ethics or philosophy, it's badly wanting.
Because for good or for ill, rationally or irrationally, our estimate of the worth of an object is affected by knowledge of how others value it.
Uh, right. And what auction site can they find? Yahoo! Auctions was probably the closest competitor, they shut down. There are a few niche players - uBid does inventory liquidation via auction, Bidtopia was started by one large eBay seller as a private auction site and has allowed others to play too. But Ebay is auctions on the web. See the graph of their dominance here.
Under corporate capitalism, large firms don't achieve victory by competing well in the market - they win by achieving the size and power to control the market
The only way eBay will be displaced is if some other large player with the resources to grab mindshare and bleed a loss for the first year or two - Google, maybe - decides to get into the game.
Apparently the study covered only household electricity use. Since offices, shops, etcetera use plenty of power, that would seem to leave a huge data in the data.
It's about time. The very first hybrid I ever heard about was a VW diesel prototype. IIRC that was back in the 90s, and it was basically an electric car with a diesel generator built in.