The entertainment industry brings in far more capital than a powerstation does. This is just an example of proportionate fines.
Howard Stern != the entertainment industry.
Howard Stern got fined $495,000, and the Three Mile Island plant was fined $155,000, according to this post. Howard Stern doesn't make as much as a powerstation, I'm pretty sure. The whole entertainment industry wasn't fined, just him.
Needless to say (I thought), while the entertainment industry may make more than one power plant, the energy industry makes an order of magnitude or two more than the entertainment industry, if you want to compare apples to apples...
Geez, that's like appointing Gale "mining & timber" Norton Secretary of the Interior, John "no nickname needed" Ashcroft as Attorney General followed by Albert "what Geneva Conventions?" Gonzales, Condoleeza "lies to Congress" Rice as Secretary of State, a bunch of oilmen in charge of energy policy, topped off by someone as smart as George W. Bush as the President.
Wow, that would be one crazy, mixed-up dreamworld!
That's too bad because what I quoted above is quite true. Science is not about consensus, it's about fact. Politics is about consensus.
No, sorry, we use a consensus of scientists as informative because we are not scientists ourselves. I, and 99.99% of other people, want and need to know about of issues like climate change, but have no way of analyzing the data and knowing ourselves because we are not climatologists spending their whole lives doing this sort of thing. But we can look at polls of scientists to learn for ourselves. This is imperfect, I agree, but it's the only way to do things short of all us quitting our jobs and becoming climatologists.
Second, you could use this argument to justify absolutely anything. If all you have to do to disprove a scientific finding was to simply say "all these scientists might be wrong" then you could disprove absolutely any scientific finding. So, how can you use it against one particular scientific finding and not (literally) all of the others? Logically, it applies with equal force. If you want to believe this, logically the only thing you can do is live in some world of Cartesian doubt where the only thing you can know is that you exist because you have thought. Everything you see even with your own eyes could, maybe, conceivably be an illusion somehow... so that means, if motivated, you can conclude that everything you see is an illusion, right?
While it is true that it is conceivably possible in some way that the consensus of scientists is totally wrong, how likely is that this is going to happen? Possibility != likelihood. In the past, in modern science, when virtually all of the given scientists studying the same hard science subject believed something, how often were they wrong? (And, by comparison, how often were the people with vested interests opposing them wrong?) It's, you know, possible that there's going to be some great Galilean revolution awaiting this field, but if you find that compelling enough to withhold any conclusions, then you can't conclude anything about anything scientific.
While it is true that "many important scientific discoveries have been in direct conflict with the consensus" what is the relative likelihood that this is true for any given scientific finding? Let's be scientific. You can't conclude anything by looking at only one corner of a 2x2 contingency table. Let's call the consensus of modern scientists on a topic of their expertise A and let's call the opinion of a few motivated non-experts B. If A or B is wrong, we'll call it !A and !B, respectively. All you're saying is that !A & B is possible, or non-zero, which is certainly true. So, what are the relative probabilities of (!A & B), (!B & A), (!B & !A) and (A & B)? Note that every cell is possible. !A and !B is possible -- it's possible that scientists and nonexperts are both wrong. (A & B may equal zero when A and B are contraries.) So, we just might as well conclude them true, right? But these four possibilities cannot be true at the same time, so you have to pick one, and I suggest you do so not by looking at only one cell and deciding whether it's non-zero, but based on the relative likelihood of all four cells comparatively.
Why should AT&T lose its archives because it's merging with SBC? Before "SBC" became a referent-less corporate initialism, it used to stand for "Southwestern Bell Corporation", a company formed by carving it out of AT&T due to anti-trust litigation. They had always been the same company, just taking a 22-year trial separation.
(Oh, and how much public time and money was spent splitting up AT&T only to let the pieces gradually merge back together, like the re-heated T1000?)
No, just watch a swarm of Microsoft lobbyists descend upon the city, donating enough to local politicians to equal the amount they would save in the city budget by switching to Open Office. This solves the real problem for both parties, which for the politicos is not the city budget but the campaign budget, and for Microsoft is not profits but control.
Plenty more people would do so if there were an official mirroring system for Wikipedia, which there is not. All kinds of people would be tripping over themselves to lend bandwidth and servers to them if there were such as process, and IIRC they've gotten offers before from universities and such.
If Google wants to help out, I don't see why they should be get any kind of special access. The ball is not in Google's court, but in Wikipedia's.
(No disrespect to Vibber and the guys keeping the servers at Wikipedia HQ online; they're doing god's work. But the site would probably be a lot more stable with an army of official mirrors than with a single, monolithic server farm.)
Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories." That is not surprising as they in thier school newspaper do not have the ability to pubilsh without teacher approval
So, how can you explain this:
* 49% thought newspapers should not be able to publish without government approval
* 58% thought that school newspapers should be able to report without approval from school authorities
How could they think that it was more important that their school newspaper was unfettered by school authorities than a "real" newspaper by the government?
Stricter? Being any less strict than here in the US is a logical possibility that I can't wrap my head around. I CANNOT REMEMBER the last time any register clerk has looked at either the signature on my card or on the signed receipt.
Even better are the do-it-yourself card swipe terminals they seem to have everywhere now. Swipe the card yourself, and record a grossly unintelligible electronic signature. Sometimes it'll throw up a little alert that says "hand card to clerk" so they can check the back. This is the part where you laugh to yourself and do nothing, and wait for the guy to hit his "OK" button and not have checked it. Maybe he's laughing to himself, too. I don't know.
Yeah, so "more strict than here" basically reads as "not here" since to be as strict as here it would have to be here and to be any stricter than here it would have to be anywhere else but here. You couldn't get any less strict, except for the little in-crowd humor. I'm not sure why they even bother with the signature brouhaha at all, the only thing I can think of is that it's a joke.
Yea, I think it would be a lot more productive to try to figure out how to stop blowing up the relatively small patch of the universe which we are currently limited to. That seems to be the more frugal endeavor being it likely to affect us within our actual current lifetimes.
Last time I flew to England I was asked where I was going to be staying. This obviously isn't an American thing.
In case you're wondering, the conversation went something like this: Where are you staying while you're in the UK? A hotel. Do you know the name? I give her the name. Do you know the address of the hotel? No, I didn't.
That was it. Hardly a serious invasion of privacy. Moving along...
This sounds a lot like one of those cases where it's strictly true but totally (and maybe intentionally) misleading. Like, if they were arrested while they were throwing rocks at lawyers' cars and making lawyer jokes, they could say they were "arrested while making lawyer jokes" and not technically be lying.
For instance, we've all heard of the case where the woman was burned by coffee that was "too hot" (so that she got third degree burns and needed extensive skin grafts) and won $XX million dollars in the subsequent suit (which was greatly reduced in later phases because it was much too high). So, you see, it's too easy to sue people, because you can win a big suit just because your coffee was "too hot"...
Another recent example was that a teacher in California was barred from distributing (Christian proselytization material along with) the Declaration of Independence (with references to God and religion underlined). So, you can say that "the school banned the Declaration of Independence." Those awful liberals are attacking our way of life!
Not that I really know if this is the case, but it would be pretty ironic if these guys were using lawyer-like word trickery to bash lawyers for their disingenuousness...
Ah, but you can use fossil fuels much more efficiently if they are ultimately used to product hydrogen. Because, you can switch between different sources of fuel easily; in other words, oil producers will have to compete with other sources of energy. Currently oil has a monopoly on that which depends on internal combustion engines, and if oil producers crank up the price a few notches we can't all go, "Oh, I'll just use 26% less oil for energy for my car this week" you'll still have to use 100% like you do every week. With hydrogen engines that is not the case.
You forgot the one aspect of Cocoa that will instantly bring any linux user to tears -- emacs key bindings anywhere you can write text. Go ahead, try it now. Open Textedit, tap out a line of gibberish, then hit ^A. The cursor will go to the beginning of the line. ^E and it returns to the far end. If you're reading this in Safari, you can try it even in the location bar. It works in every Cocoa app.
Of course, emacs is only for unwashed, unfrozen cavemen but that's another discussion...
At the moment there are more than 200 Finns and over 2000 Swedes missing and most likely all of them are dead. To see things in perspective: Finland has a population of 5.2 million, Sweden around 9 million. Everyone with basic math skills can calculate what that would mean if it had happened for tourists from US.
FYI, the US State Department is still looking for "several thousand" missing Americans. link.
Maybe they could return the items without a receipt for store credit (for the original price), then use the credit to buy back more of the same items (at their "special" discount). Keep this going and you could get all of the store's inventory for just the investment of the "discounted" first few items.
Reminds me of that old David Letterman joke about Dan Quayle: Letterman suggested that one of the things a person should remember to do if ever to meet Mr. Quayle was to ask him for change of two tens for a five; Repeat until rich. I suppose that this was what this couple was trying to do, just using Walmart instead of Dan Quayle.
If everyone who sincerely believes that it is their right to ignore copyright law stood up and proudly shouted "look at me, I'm going to share whatever I damn well please" then no one could be imprisoned because it would be impossible to afford to do so.
It should be obvious that this is flawed logic. You're assuming that you can either enforce the law on everyone or enforce the law on no one. It can be shown from experience that this assumption is false.
Look at the war on drugs: if they were to enforce the law on everyone who had broken it... it would be impossible. Something like 40% of the population would have to be arrested (stats). Yet, huge numbers of people are still sent to jail for doing so every year. It's selective enforcement: Only a very, very small portion of the offenders are ever caught, and the whole thing ends up being a farcical waste of everyone's time.
So, just because a large portion of the population does something it doesn't mean that people won't be imprisoned for it.
Last I checked, car theft is illegal. Yet cars are stolen all the time! We have too many laws already. Why should we make auto theft illegal, when it's not going to stop auto theft?
Some laws work better than others. Because some laws don't work particularly well, that doesn't mean that any other given law won't work.
Call me when you've got some more single examples you'd like to trot out.
Slashdot Mirror
The entertainment industry brings in far more capital than a powerstation does. This is just an example of proportionate fines.
Howard Stern != the entertainment industry.
Howard Stern got fined $495,000, and the Three Mile Island plant was fined $155,000, according to this post. Howard Stern doesn't make as much as a powerstation, I'm pretty sure. The whole entertainment industry wasn't fined, just him.
Needless to say (I thought), while the entertainment industry may make more than one power plant, the energy industry makes an order of magnitude or two more than the entertainment industry, if you want to compare apples to apples...
Geez, that's like appointing Gale "mining & timber" Norton Secretary of the Interior, John "no nickname needed" Ashcroft as Attorney General followed by Albert "what Geneva Conventions?" Gonzales, Condoleeza "lies to Congress" Rice as Secretary of State, a bunch of oilmen in charge of energy policy, topped off by someone as smart as George W. Bush as the President.
Wow, that would be one crazy, mixed-up dreamworld!
You put the comma in the wrong place. So sayeth Google!
+ per+light+year
http://www.google.com/search?q=astronomical+units
1 light year = 63 239.6717 Astronomical Units
That's too bad because what I quoted above is quite true. Science is not about consensus, it's about fact. Politics is about consensus.
No, sorry, we use a consensus of scientists as informative because we are not scientists ourselves. I, and 99.99% of other people, want and need to know about of issues like climate change, but have no way of analyzing the data and knowing ourselves because we are not climatologists spending their whole lives doing this sort of thing. But we can look at polls of scientists to learn for ourselves. This is imperfect, I agree, but it's the only way to do things short of all us quitting our jobs and becoming climatologists.
Second, you could use this argument to justify absolutely anything. If all you have to do to disprove a scientific finding was to simply say "all these scientists might be wrong" then you could disprove absolutely any scientific finding. So, how can you use it against one particular scientific finding and not (literally) all of the others? Logically, it applies with equal force. If you want to believe this, logically the only thing you can do is live in some world of Cartesian doubt where the only thing you can know is that you exist because you have thought. Everything you see even with your own eyes could, maybe, conceivably be an illusion somehow... so that means, if motivated, you can conclude that everything you see is an illusion, right?
While it is true that it is conceivably possible in some way that the consensus of scientists is totally wrong, how likely is that this is going to happen? Possibility != likelihood. In the past, in modern science, when virtually all of the given scientists studying the same hard science subject believed something, how often were they wrong? (And, by comparison, how often were the people with vested interests opposing them wrong?) It's, you know, possible that there's going to be some great Galilean revolution awaiting this field, but if you find that compelling enough to withhold any conclusions, then you can't conclude anything about anything scientific.
While it is true that "many important scientific discoveries have been in direct conflict with the consensus" what is the relative likelihood that this is true for any given scientific finding? Let's be scientific. You can't conclude anything by looking at only one corner of a 2x2 contingency table. Let's call the consensus of modern scientists on a topic of their expertise A and let's call the opinion of a few motivated non-experts B. If A or B is wrong, we'll call it !A and !B, respectively. All you're saying is that !A & B is possible, or non-zero, which is certainly true. So, what are the relative probabilities of (!A & B), (!B & A), (!B & !A) and (A & B)? Note that every cell is possible. !A and !B is possible -- it's possible that scientists and nonexperts are both wrong. (A & B may equal zero when A and B are contraries.) So, we just might as well conclude them true, right? But these four possibilities cannot be true at the same time, so you have to pick one, and I suggest you do so not by looking at only one cell and deciding whether it's non-zero, but based on the relative likelihood of all four cells comparatively.
Why should AT&T lose its archives because it's merging with SBC? Before "SBC" became a referent-less corporate initialism, it used to stand for "Southwestern Bell Corporation", a company formed by carving it out of AT&T due to anti-trust litigation. They had always been the same company, just taking a 22-year trial separation.
(Oh, and how much public time and money was spent splitting up AT&T only to let the pieces gradually merge back together, like the re-heated T1000?)
No, just watch a swarm of Microsoft lobbyists descend upon the city, donating enough to local politicians to equal the amount they would save in the city budget by switching to Open Office. This solves the real problem for both parties, which for the politicos is not the city budget but the campaign budget, and for Microsoft is not profits but control.
Plenty more people would do so if there were an official mirroring system for Wikipedia, which there is not. All kinds of people would be tripping over themselves to lend bandwidth and servers to them if there were such as process, and IIRC they've gotten offers before from universities and such.
If Google wants to help out, I don't see why they should be get any kind of special access. The ball is not in Google's court, but in Wikipedia's.
(No disrespect to Vibber and the guys keeping the servers at Wikipedia HQ online; they're doing god's work. But the site would probably be a lot more stable with an army of official mirrors than with a single, monolithic server farm.)
Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories." That is not surprising as they in thier school newspaper do not have the ability to pubilsh without teacher approval
So, how can you explain this:
* 49% thought newspapers should not be able to publish without government approval
* 58% thought that school newspapers should be able to report without approval from school authorities
How could they think that it was more important that their school newspaper was unfettered by school authorities than a "real" newspaper by the government?
Stricter? Being any less strict than here in the US is a logical possibility that I can't wrap my head around. I CANNOT REMEMBER the last time any register clerk has looked at either the signature on my card or on the signed receipt.
Even better are the do-it-yourself card swipe terminals they seem to have everywhere now. Swipe the card yourself, and record a grossly unintelligible electronic signature. Sometimes it'll throw up a little alert that says "hand card to clerk" so they can check the back. This is the part where you laugh to yourself and do nothing, and wait for the guy to hit his "OK" button and not have checked it. Maybe he's laughing to himself, too. I don't know.
Yeah, so "more strict than here" basically reads as "not here" since to be as strict as here it would have to be here and to be any stricter than here it would have to be anywhere else but here. You couldn't get any less strict, except for the little in-crowd humor. I'm not sure why they even bother with the signature brouhaha at all, the only thing I can think of is that it's a joke.
Yea, I think it would be a lot more productive to try to figure out how to stop blowing up the relatively small patch of the universe which we are currently limited to. That seems to be the more frugal endeavor being it likely to affect us within our actual current lifetimes.
Last time I flew to England I was asked where I was going to be staying. This obviously isn't an American thing.
In case you're wondering, the conversation went something like this: Where are you staying while you're in the UK? A hotel. Do you know the name? I give her the name. Do you know the address of the hotel? No, I didn't.
That was it. Hardly a serious invasion of privacy. Moving along...
This sounds a lot like one of those cases where it's strictly true but totally (and maybe intentionally) misleading. Like, if they were arrested while they were throwing rocks at lawyers' cars and making lawyer jokes, they could say they were "arrested while making lawyer jokes" and not technically be lying.
For instance, we've all heard of the case where the woman was burned by coffee that was "too hot" (so that she got third degree burns and needed extensive skin grafts) and won $XX million dollars in the subsequent suit (which was greatly reduced in later phases because it was much too high). So, you see, it's too easy to sue people, because you can win a big suit just because your coffee was "too hot"...
Another recent example was that a teacher in California was barred from distributing (Christian proselytization material along with) the Declaration of Independence (with references to God and religion underlined). So, you can say that "the school banned the Declaration of Independence." Those awful liberals are attacking our way of life!
Not that I really know if this is the case, but it would be pretty ironic if these guys were using lawyer-like word trickery to bash lawyers for their disingenuousness...
Bzzzt... Error! Slashdot user failed to use Google
According to the NEI:(The Three Mile Island meltdown occurred in 1979).
And don't forget Daily Show viewers are the best informed on television.
So, can we get a Daily Show topic now?
The article is pointing out -- quite rightly -- that general consumers have associated "thin" with "high tech and good picture."
In the same way, they think that electronic voting machines must be better than other methods.
Ah, but you can use fossil fuels much more efficiently if they are ultimately used to product hydrogen. Because, you can switch between different sources of fuel easily; in other words, oil producers will have to compete with other sources of energy. Currently oil has a monopoly on that which depends on internal combustion engines, and if oil producers crank up the price a few notches we can't all go, "Oh, I'll just use 26% less oil for energy for my car this week" you'll still have to use 100% like you do every week. With hydrogen engines that is not the case.
You forgot the one aspect of Cocoa that will instantly bring any linux user to tears -- emacs key bindings anywhere you can write text. Go ahead, try it now. Open Textedit, tap out a line of gibberish, then hit ^A. The cursor will go to the beginning of the line. ^E and it returns to the far end. If you're reading this in Safari, you can try it even in the location bar. It works in every Cocoa app.
Of course, emacs is only for unwashed, unfrozen cavemen but that's another discussion...
I'm sure Flock of Seagulls doesn't have any more pressing engagements...
At the moment there are more than 200 Finns and over 2000 Swedes missing and most likely all of them are dead. To see things in perspective: Finland has a population of 5.2 million, Sweden around 9 million. Everyone with basic math skills can calculate what that would mean if it had happened for tourists from US.
FYI, the US State Department is still looking for "several thousand" missing Americans. link.
Maybe they could return the items without a receipt for store credit (for the original price), then use the credit to buy back more of the same items (at their "special" discount). Keep this going and you could get all of the store's inventory for just the investment of the "discounted" first few items.
Reminds me of that old David Letterman joke about Dan Quayle: Letterman suggested that one of the things a person should remember to do if ever to meet Mr. Quayle was to ask him for change of two tens for a five; Repeat until rich. I suppose that this was what this couple was trying to do, just using Walmart instead of Dan Quayle.
Mod me flamebait if you like, but I am of the opinion that entertainment news is almost never "stuff that matters."
This follows up on the Mir experiments studying the effects of mortal terror on astronauts.
If everyone who sincerely believes that it is their right to ignore copyright law stood up and proudly shouted "look at me, I'm going to share whatever I damn well please" then no one could be imprisoned because it would be impossible to afford to do so.
It should be obvious that this is flawed logic. You're assuming that you can either enforce the law on everyone or enforce the law on no one. It can be shown from experience that this assumption is false.
Look at the war on drugs: if they were to enforce the law on everyone who had broken it... it would be impossible. Something like 40% of the population would have to be arrested (stats). Yet, huge numbers of people are still sent to jail for doing so every year. It's selective enforcement: Only a very, very small portion of the offenders are ever caught, and the whole thing ends up being a farcical waste of everyone's time.
So, just because a large portion of the population does something it doesn't mean that people won't be imprisoned for it.
I propose Manumitted Software
Last I checked, car theft is illegal. Yet cars are stolen all the time! We have too many laws already. Why should we make auto theft illegal, when it's not going to stop auto theft?
Some laws work better than others. Because some laws don't work particularly well, that doesn't mean that any other given law won't work.
Call me when you've got some more single examples you'd like to trot out.