Well, I stand corrected. I've always considered Quebec to be more Eastern, and Ontario to be more divided between Eastern and Central. That could be swayed by the terms used in my own geo-political locale.
That's not exactly Central Canada. You can't go much farther east without being in the Atlantic. Granted, it probably impacted more Canadians than an earthquake anywhere else in the country would have.
An excellent premise, and correct, so long as one assumes that all people will act rationally. We have thousands of years of evidence to show that isn't always the case. Sometimes people just have to stand up and say "No!", no matter what the consequences. If that means war, so be it.
What miscarriage of justice? She was in fact guilty--this is not seriously in dispute.
A miscarriage in justice can happen on a number of fronts.
The law can be unjust. Remember, Rosie Parks broke the law. Any punishment for refusing to move to the back of the bus would have been unjust.
The penalty for breaking the law can be unjust. Most in North America, and many in Europe (I imagine) would consider caning as a punishment for littering to be an unjust punishment.
The enforcement and prosecution of the law can be considered unjust. There's a reason the US has a constitutional right to a speedy trial (I think primarily for criminal cases), and why warrants are required to gather most kinds of evidence.
I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones that first come to mind for me. Guilty or not, I'd say the punishment doesn't fit the crime in this instance.
Sci-fi authors, such as Robert Forward, have discussed the theories about this for a while. If you're in a gravity well, you are in a similar position to a sailing vessel. Gravity gives one constant acceleration vector, and the sail is the other. By tuning your sail (rotating in one direction or the other), you can get lateral motion (the angular momentum is based on the relative energies of the photon impacting and the photon leaving, and the difference in direction of those two photons). To 'furl' your sail, and leave the only force acting on your vessel being gravity, you just turn your sail perpendicular to the sun.
Of course, if you aren't in a gravity well, you probably aren't getting much light, either, and the next step is to wait til you get to a new gravity well (which will probably also have light for braking).
Also, if you're going to disparage the work of sci-fi authors such as Robert Forward, check their bios first. Forward has a doctorate in physics, and consulted for NASA. Knowledgeable sci-fi- authors are some of the best people to explain leading-edge science.
And this is what makes me chuckle at free-market economists. The invisible hand only works when people have an informed choice, and give a damn. What tends to work better for managing the market is a big fucking stick and the warning, "You can make as much profit as you want, but when you start treating humanity as a source of profits and nothing else, we're going to start spanking." That's what any reasonable government would do, but governments are made of people, and people tend to be greedy...
In response: 1. 300 books gets heavy to carry/store, and means you have to decide beforehand exactly what you want to bring (if you can even bring all you want). 2. I'm sure the tree-huggers are equally upset at eBook readers as they are at paper. 3. Many of the better heavy-use eBook readers use E-Ink displays, and have a time between charges measured in weeks. 4. DRM'd electronic media is all about "me me me". My non-DRM'd electronic media is easier to lend than the physical books. In fact, some is even distributed freely as a promotion (Baen Free Library and Baen CDs hosted by The Fifth Imperium). If I can't get it non-DRM, I'll get it in hardcopy. 5. Well, technically, non-DRM eBooks could be too, but I'll agree on this point.
if they can figure out a way to keep it pretty sturdy when rolled out. That'll be a challenge IMHO.
Not much of a challenge at all. I can think of three ways, with varying costs, weights, and effectiveness. I'm sure the engineers involved will do better.
Ah, but there's the other side of the coin. Would they be suing if they'd made fabulous amounts of cash from their wildly popular movie? I've can't say much about the movie, I haven't watched it. But if it's anything like The Wrestler (which I only saw the preview for, and also had Oscar nominations), $0 sounds like about the right price for the product being produced.
As I alluded to in my second paragraph. And none of that supports his case that it was for personal consumption, when it clearly wasn't, either directly or indirectly. If you want to go to court with a bad argument, prepare to lose, whether or not your case is in the right.
The case you mention is a little disingenuous. He had no intention of consuming the wheat personally. He was feeding it to chickens. What I wonder is what he was doing with those chickens. If he was using them for personal consumption, I think he would have had an easier time, but I honestly don't know how many chicken can be fed on over 450 bushels of wheat per year (his quota and non-quota amount). It seems like a substantial amount to me.
That said, artificial scarcity, government manipulation of markets, etc., etc. One more repercussion from a dubious decision.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
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· Score: 1
I generally consider myself to lean libertarian - but what we have now in the US is too many cases of privatizing profits and socializing losses/screwups - and that to me is the worst of all worlds.
Don't worry, unbridled greed will help to come up with something worse soon enough.
Some things are mostly training. I had a friend who could go cross-eyed, revert to normal looking in one direction, and then go the opposite directions (horizontally or vertically). Very freaky, and just something he learned for kicks. I imagine with the right tools/incentives, it would be easier.
One of my first thoughts was the fantasy novel Demon Blade. Magic is fueled by life energy, and you can get it from yourself, or your surroundings. Hence, wizards spent a lot of their free time eating and getting fat. Gotta be prepared...
I'll grant that a gun is a more convenient means of killing people, but a car can kill people for HOURS if you do it right! And for the record, the lock on my front door isn't to keep out wildlife, it's my explicit acknowledgment that there are bad people out there. And I'm still curious why some people think only the bad people should be allowed to have guns (because they won't give them up just because you said it's against the law).
Sometimes it's just cheaper to send optimized screenscrapes (which is a known problem) than it is to write every data-intensive application out there to be responsive with just 36 kbps of bandwidth. Solve the problem once, and all the other applications, many of which aren't under your control, can piggyback off of that good work.
Yes, I know there are alternatives, and some are simply amazing, but it's difficult to tell the client "Sorry, you can't use Application X, even though it would revolutionize your business, because it requires too much bandwidth and terminal services doesn't fit into my idealized model of your network."
If you're selling dog chains, and every dog with a habit of biting has no problem mauling the neighbors, there are two problems. There are dogs that need to be removed from society, and you're selling crappy chains. Using the excuse of, "Well, these chains work fine for the good dogs!" doesn't make them any better. Given that this 'chain' also comes with various perks, it should be robust enough to restrain the mean dogs, not just the good ones.
I was also left speechless when you implied that lifetime plus 70 years, criminalizing DRM circumvention for any purpose (even in a different legal jurisdiction!), and outrageous fines for non-commercial copyright violations are not unjust laws.
This sounds very similar to the remix cases in the music industry. A musician creates a work, another does a (very popular) remix - a derivative work. Now, whether or not the original artist gave the second permission to use his work, he doesn't have distribution rights on the derived work (even if he can get an injunction to stop its distribution). So why would copyright law be any different for software?
I took CS almost 20 years ago - allow me a moment to recover from the shock of how long it's been - and the language they started with was Pascal. The reasons were valid then, and valid now. Strong typing, rigid syntax, and little if any implicit type conversions. You always need to know what you're doing, and why. Then, in the future, when you use something as loosely typed as VBScript, or with rather arcane syntax like C (I remember people having trouble remembering the difference between i and *i) you have the what and why already nailed down, and are ready to deal with the how.
First, allow me to chuckle when you talk about a limited-use computing device with thousands of applications. Second, we've been here already, and you've said nothing about any of the points I raised in my last comment.
P.S. I'm not impressed with the Kindle, either, but due to features I'm not interested in, and its price. As far as its capability as a reader is concerned, I have no complaints.
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Well, I stand corrected. I've always considered Quebec to be more Eastern, and Ontario to be more divided between Eastern and Central. That could be swayed by the terms used in my own geo-political locale.
And there's the fact that this is the centre of the historical region of Canada (pre-Confederation).
Given that premise, I propose an even more useless geo-political reference. "Magnitude 5.5 quake hits the heart of Cree territory."
That's not exactly Central Canada. You can't go much farther east without being in the Atlantic. Granted, it probably impacted more Canadians than an earthquake anywhere else in the country would have.
An excellent premise, and correct, so long as one assumes that all people will act rationally. We have thousands of years of evidence to show that isn't always the case. Sometimes people just have to stand up and say "No!", no matter what the consequences. If that means war, so be it.
I suppose the White House counts...
What miscarriage of justice? She was in fact guilty--this is not seriously in dispute.
A miscarriage in justice can happen on a number of fronts.
The law can be unjust. Remember, Rosie Parks broke the law. Any punishment for refusing to move to the back of the bus would have been unjust.
The penalty for breaking the law can be unjust. Most in North America, and many in Europe (I imagine) would consider caning as a punishment for littering to be an unjust punishment.
The enforcement and prosecution of the law can be considered unjust. There's a reason the US has a constitutional right to a speedy trial (I think primarily for criminal cases), and why warrants are required to gather most kinds of evidence.
I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones that first come to mind for me. Guilty or not, I'd say the punishment doesn't fit the crime in this instance.
Sci-fi authors, such as Robert Forward, have discussed the theories about this for a while. If you're in a gravity well, you are in a similar position to a sailing vessel. Gravity gives one constant acceleration vector, and the sail is the other. By tuning your sail (rotating in one direction or the other), you can get lateral motion (the angular momentum is based on the relative energies of the photon impacting and the photon leaving, and the difference in direction of those two photons). To 'furl' your sail, and leave the only force acting on your vessel being gravity, you just turn your sail perpendicular to the sun.
Of course, if you aren't in a gravity well, you probably aren't getting much light, either, and the next step is to wait til you get to a new gravity well (which will probably also have light for braking).
Also, if you're going to disparage the work of sci-fi authors such as Robert Forward, check their bios first. Forward has a doctorate in physics, and consulted for NASA. Knowledgeable sci-fi- authors are some of the best people to explain leading-edge science.
And this is what makes me chuckle at free-market economists. The invisible hand only works when people have an informed choice, and give a damn. What tends to work better for managing the market is a big fucking stick and the warning, "You can make as much profit as you want, but when you start treating humanity as a source of profits and nothing else, we're going to start spanking." That's what any reasonable government would do, but governments are made of people, and people tend to be greedy...
In response:
1. 300 books gets heavy to carry/store, and means you have to decide beforehand exactly what you want to bring (if you can even bring all you want).
2. I'm sure the tree-huggers are equally upset at eBook readers as they are at paper.
3. Many of the better heavy-use eBook readers use E-Ink displays, and have a time between charges measured in weeks.
4. DRM'd electronic media is all about "me me me". My non-DRM'd electronic media is easier to lend than the physical books. In fact, some is even distributed freely as a promotion (Baen Free Library and Baen CDs hosted by The Fifth Imperium). If I can't get it non-DRM, I'll get it in hardcopy.
5. Well, technically, non-DRM eBooks could be too, but I'll agree on this point.
I can't imagine HTML 1.0 was the greatest thing in the world.
Perhaps what ePub 2.0 needs are:
if they can figure out a way to keep it pretty sturdy when rolled out. That'll be a challenge IMHO.
Not much of a challenge at all. I can think of three ways, with varying costs, weights, and effectiveness. I'm sure the engineers involved will do better.
Ah, but there's the other side of the coin. Would they be suing if they'd made fabulous amounts of cash from their wildly popular movie? I've can't say much about the movie, I haven't watched it. But if it's anything like The Wrestler (which I only saw the preview for, and also had Oscar nominations), $0 sounds like about the right price for the product being produced.
As I alluded to in my second paragraph. And none of that supports his case that it was for personal consumption, when it clearly wasn't, either directly or indirectly.
If you want to go to court with a bad argument, prepare to lose, whether or not your case is in the right.
The case you mention is a little disingenuous. He had no intention of consuming the wheat personally. He was feeding it to chickens. What I wonder is what he was doing with those chickens. If he was using them for personal consumption, I think he would have had an easier time, but I honestly don't know how many chicken can be fed on over 450 bushels of wheat per year (his quota and non-quota amount). It seems like a substantial amount to me.
That said, artificial scarcity, government manipulation of markets, etc., etc. One more repercussion from a dubious decision.
I generally consider myself to lean libertarian - but what we have now in the US is too many cases of privatizing profits and socializing losses/screwups - and that to me is the worst of all worlds.
Don't worry, unbridled greed will help to come up with something worse soon enough.
Some things are mostly training. I had a friend who could go cross-eyed, revert to normal looking in one direction, and then go the opposite directions (horizontally or vertically). Very freaky, and just something he learned for kicks. I imagine with the right tools/incentives, it would be easier.
Agreed. To quote Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
One of my first thoughts was the fantasy novel Demon Blade. Magic is fueled by life energy, and you can get it from yourself, or your surroundings. Hence, wizards spent a lot of their free time eating and getting fat. Gotta be prepared...
I'll grant that a gun is a more convenient means of killing people, but a car can kill people for HOURS if you do it right!
And for the record, the lock on my front door isn't to keep out wildlife, it's my explicit acknowledgment that there are bad people out there. And I'm still curious why some people think only the bad people should be allowed to have guns (because they won't give them up just because you said it's against the law).
Sometimes it's just cheaper to send optimized screenscrapes (which is a known problem) than it is to write every data-intensive application out there to be responsive with just 36 kbps of bandwidth. Solve the problem once, and all the other applications, many of which aren't under your control, can piggyback off of that good work.
Yes, I know there are alternatives, and some are simply amazing, but it's difficult to tell the client "Sorry, you can't use Application X, even though it would revolutionize your business, because it requires too much bandwidth and terminal services doesn't fit into my idealized model of your network."
Yeah, I was thinking this was not dissimilar to fining a homeowner after a thief escaped through your yard because you didn't put up a fence.
If you're selling dog chains, and every dog with a habit of biting has no problem mauling the neighbors, there are two problems. There are dogs that need to be removed from society, and you're selling crappy chains. Using the excuse of, "Well, these chains work fine for the good dogs!" doesn't make them any better. Given that this 'chain' also comes with various perks, it should be robust enough to restrain the mean dogs, not just the good ones.
I was also left speechless when you implied that lifetime plus 70 years, criminalizing DRM circumvention for any purpose (even in a different legal jurisdiction!), and outrageous fines for non-commercial copyright violations are not unjust laws.
This sounds very similar to the remix cases in the music industry.
A musician creates a work, another does a (very popular) remix - a derivative work. Now, whether or not the original artist gave the second permission to use his work, he doesn't have distribution rights on the derived work (even if he can get an injunction to stop its distribution).
So why would copyright law be any different for software?
I took CS almost 20 years ago - allow me a moment to recover from the shock of how long it's been - and the language they started with was Pascal. The reasons were valid then, and valid now. Strong typing, rigid syntax, and little if any implicit type conversions. You always need to know what you're doing, and why. Then, in the future, when you use something as loosely typed as VBScript, or with rather arcane syntax like C (I remember people having trouble remembering the difference between i and *i) you have the what and why already nailed down, and are ready to deal with the how.
First, allow me to chuckle when you talk about a limited-use computing device with thousands of applications. Second, we've been here already, and you've said nothing about any of the points I raised in my last comment.
P.S. I'm not impressed with the Kindle, either, but due to features I'm not interested in, and its price. As far as its capability as a reader is concerned, I have no complaints.