Most natural disasters affect the poor more than any others. The more wealthy usually have either better living conditions that can survive the event, or the means to leave the area. Or both.
You're right. I was replying to the parent (who's now been modded down into oblivion). I should have said "Flooding kills poor peopletoo." The original assertion made by the parent about "the poor" is actually what made me want to respond to him in the first place. And I agree that it didn't have any relevance to his original point.
Another couple of counter points that I forgot to make to the original parent:
First, a nuclear plant has to be near the area it serves (since it transmission lines lose too much power over long distances) and it would have to be near water (since it's essentially a steam engine where water is turned into steam to propel its turbines), and so if you build a nuclear power plant near where the dam is (or near where the Min river is and where the population centers are), you may end up building it right on top of that major fault line where the 9.0+ earthquake occurred (which isn't too recommended by the Japanese who have just abandoned their largest nuclear power plant after they recently discovered out there was a fault line right under it)
And last but not least, building a desalination plant in the mountains away from the sea and away from the salt water doesn't make sense. You need salt water in order to desalinate it. In the mountain, you'll probably need to mine it in order to extract the salt. And also, making water flow up a mountain over a very long distance is much harder than making it flow down that same mountain. And never mind that desalination is already prohibitively expensive for even most people without fresh water -- living near actual sea-water.
This earthquake killed a lot of people and ruined the lives of countless others. That effect was disproportionate on the poor.
This earthquake killed less than 100,000 people.
In 1931, the flooding of a different river (the Yellow river) killed 3.7 millions. And thirty years before that, another flood in China killed 1 million people.
And you're off on another issue: much of that cheap foreign talent comes here to get educated, often at the expense of qualified American students.
Are you really talking of H1B workers here? Because international students often pay a very high tuition at American Universities.
It's the American High Schools and the American Community Colleges that are subsidized heavily for foreign students, and those certainly don't turn anyone away, "qualified" or otherwise.
I'm kind of torn on this. On one hand, it's Microsoft, but on the other hand they seem to be competing directly with Amazon's one-click button technology.
This is basically turning into just another useless TV Licence entitlement. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, the TV Licence idea started out in many European countries as a way to support their first national television/radio broadcasting network.
What happened over time however is that as the technology improved and became cheaper, the original 100% marketshare that the original organization enjoyed -- dwindled down to 2 or 3% of their respective market. And yet, that original subsidy -- that original TV Licence, which only increased over time and which can go as high as $200 per year in some countries, is *still* only used to subsidize that 2 or 3% of the current content producers (and some would argue, that even that estimate is too high).
Basically, this is also what's going to happen with that blank media tax. Right now, it's going to the RIAA. Some would argue that independents are not going to receive a penny of that (and I would sort of agree with that), but saying this is actually completely missing the point. Five to twenty years from now, some of us are going to become parents/grandparents, we'll be using those blank medias for music (may be), but we'll also be using those blank media disks for recording thousands of hours of baby videos, closed-circuit security footage of our home, and other miscellaneous home videos. And any amount of professionally produced content will actually be dwarfed by the sheer amount of user-generated personal crap that we'll be recording on those. At least, that's the trend I'm starting to see developing right now. So if we keep on subsidizing the RIAA with proceeds from blank media sales (or any other type of storage medium), we're creating an entitlement monster that we'll probably never be able to get rid of.
So smart producers will make sure that paying for it is the easiest way to get the content. That means paid downloads without crippling DRM. That means your HD DVD or BluRay should simply work at full resolution no matter what. That means CD you buy should be rippable so you can put them on your mp3-player.
Yes and no. An easy way to get the content, yes. At the click of the button, yes. Without a mandatory FBI/preview/commercial that I must watch through, yes. That being said, forget the resolution. I have a huge HD TV, but I can handle the shitty resolution streaming Netflix gives me (a couple of movies excepted).
I love my streaming Netflix. Unlimited streaming movies at a reasonable price, that's all I really need.
It's funny you should mention that. They just recently revamped and modernized their security system. Now if you don't show your receipt because the line is too long, now everyone, not just their security guards, are allowed to tackle you against your car and detain you on their behalf.
So... did they say "This is where he lives, let's get him" ?
No, but those four did get convicted, because part of their harassment campaign included also making false claims of Pedophilia to any neighbor of their target, and to anyone else who might know (or might have known) their targets. So after he convicted them, the judge probably thought he was going to be next.
Michael Critchon has been published in both a peer-reviewed Medical Journal and a peer-reviewed Computer Science Journal. What about you? In what field of Science(s) have you been published in?
To me, being a geek doesn't mean being immune from saying (or even creating) stupid things, so in my book, Michael Critchon definitely qualifies as a geek, you might qualify as a geek, and I believe I also qualify as a geek.
And the Semites are just Arabs too, but I don't get what you're implying? That the Semites that came back from Europe are somehow more civilized or something? and that the brown Semites that have have remained on that land for many generations are somehow not?
(and in fact had done much to destroy the land through deforestation, salting the land, etc.
And so have done the Israeli settlers, or don't you find it unsettling that you guys are just dumping your unprocessed sewage right outside of your settlements walls?
The correct name is neither Israel nor Palestine. The correct name is Yudah.
Do you actually believe there is one single "correct name" for a region that has been occupied by so many different people over so many years?
...there is also a strong leftist bias to the site.
Same here. Everyone on my left in Wikipedia is a leftist liberal wacko and everyone to my right is a right-wing wacko. I just can't win these days. I must be the only last neutral person left on this planet.
This is called theft, there is no other word for it.
Don't call it theft. Call it piracy. Focus on the Intellectual Property aspect of it. It's your notes, your copyright. And it's not the tangible notebook that was valuable, it was its unique content and custom mental hooks that helped you break down, organize, review, and later recall that information. Now don't get me wrong, I don't mean to imply that all students go back to the Economics notes they've taken from High School, or even from College, but what about the most motivated students? What about those future Economics teachers? or that future Economics Nobel Laureate?
Now imagine if this attitude was more prevalent among teachers/publishers, at the end of each class, every student would be required to turn in for destruction -- the school books he paid for, the notes he'd taken, and any essays/projects he had created. And just for good measure, the student would get his bag searched and strip searched every time he went home. Now can you even imagine living in such a World?
Right now Google has a VERY good opportunity to hire and release a Google Earth-based flight simulator.
Why write a Google Earth-based flight-simulator when your users are already writing flight simulators on top of your platform? I think they should just let their users create the cool content and the cool apps, and just stick to the monetization of all that good stuff.
(E) "Don't file a police report", my ass. If somebody steals my property, I am going to report it. Again, this is not a matter of rules, it is a matter of the law. The more illegal activities you allow someone to get away with, the more they begin to feel they have the right to do it.
I totally agree. Even if the cop doesn't want to bother, insist on it, and insist that he takes your notes back from the teacher to give you back (or to enter as evidence). And even if the DA doesn't want to pursue the case, having some kind of police report for civil action should be helpful as well (at the very least, you should try to sue in small claims court).
Also, all the people with some kind of learning disability, listen up. If a teacher/professor wants to prevent you from taking notes, having someone else take notes for you, and/or even prevent you from recording the lectures, pursue that case. In my school, this was a major sticking point, and basically since the Professors couldn't prevent the students with learning disabilities from recording their lectures, and since they couldn't prevent those same students from disseminating those recordings (since it's a lecture recording, it's the actual student doing the recording who owns the copyright, not the lecturer), then that basically opened the floodgates for everyone else to record the lecture as well (not that this was a big issue, only a couple of Professors were being real assholes about not allowing openly visible tape-recorders on their lecterns/podiums).
Someone explain to me exactly how the riaa and their like are not the exact same thing as the mafia?
The mafia label is just too cool for them. I say we give them back the pirate label, and we call ourselves the mafia. After all, pirates kill, rape, steal, and completely destroy people and goods. And the mafia, the real mafia at least, does very little violence and enables the international distribution of gray market goods.
Tell us more about your situation. Did you refuse to give her your notes? Did you tell her not to rummage through your bag? How many students did she do this too?
What she did was probably illegal, but you've got to be really assertive about protecting your rights. And please note the word "assertive", not aggressive, meaning that you tell her you're not giving her the permission to go through your bag, or that you do not want her to go through your bag. For further reading on assertiveness and setting boundaries, I'd suggest you read When I Say No, I Feel Guilty by Manuel J. Smith
Also, one last question. How old are you? Personally, I know that age shouldn't matter, but age does matter. Adults are much more likely to bully young people, people they have authority over, or very old people, just because they know that those types of people are less likely to fight back -- or call the cops on them.
I'm not even saying that I believe the current administration will abuse these google accounts. I don't, but I found it a little repellent that the current administration doing something eerily similar to something that gave the last administration a black eye is considered "funny" here on slashdot, instead of mildly unsettling at the very least.
No, what gave the last administration a black eye was not the fact that they used those private accounts for government work. And it wasn't even the fact that those accounts were insecure (unless, you happen to be one of those pedantic security expert who equates a breach of email security with the end of the world). What gave the last administration a black eye, at least in the public's eye, was that once they had been using those private accounts pretty regularly for official business, they simply refused to give up their passwords to those same accounts when a judge asked them to.
And since in this case, Obama went to the White House Counsel for advice on this, I wouldn't be surprised if the White House Counsel required that they all sign a piece of paper waiving privacy, that they surrender all their passwords in advance, and that they all place an ominous legal disclaimer in the signature advertising the fact that this is an official email address -- that could end up becoming part of the freely available public records -- before they would even be allowed to use those email accounts -- in any way shape or form.
Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if the White House Counsel didn't contact Google beforehand to take some additional measures. After all, Google owns Postini now, and Postini allows you to keep all your emails, deleted, sent, or otherwise, on their server, but they even allow you to set your own physical server up on your *own* premises to be the sole go between between all the incoming and *outgoing* email to make sure it gets archived and complies with email retention and archival policies.
DRM is not designed to stop pirates forever. It is designed to stop it for the first few weeks when a game makes a large portion of its money. In that respect DRM has been successful in some cases (but not all).
Name one single well-known DRM example where this has actually been the case, that the game wasn't pirated within the first week. Your assertion is actually quite reasonable, after all DRM may not be winning the war but surely it must be having one or two victories -- it's just that I don't know of one single popular example myself where this was the case.
DRM makes as much sense to me as those nefarious FBI warnings that you can't forward through at the beginning of those DVDs. Only the non-pirating consumers are being penalized by that functionality, the consumers that are pirating on the other hand do not even see those.
That's pretty much what happened in Berkeley. A prepubescent little girl gave a blow-job to a prepubescent little boy in front of other boys. The little boy, and all the other boys, ended up being almost lynched by most of the parents afterward (they wanted all the boys who even saw what happened expelled and brought up on charges). A couple of weeks later, in a completely different school, the same little girl does the exact same thing, she's caught sucking off a classmate in front of other boys.
And while I think we can all agree that the little girl was probably the victim of some adult molesting her (perhaps her parents, or some other adult). I think this incident illustrates how people were so quick to blame and punish the little boys involved in the first incident.
explaining that their client had be under a large amount of stress after being homebound for a year due to a snowboarding accident with nothing to do but watch television and play video games.
Homebound? What does that mean? That he had a bad back? Or was this some kind of lame excuse for cutting a full year of school? I wonder to what extent his snowboarding injuries were?
The United States is still one of the most convenient countries on earth. Many of its restaurants, grocery stores, subways, and gas pumps, do not shut down during Christmas (unlike in the UK). And if you accidentally arrive on a late Friday or Saturday night, chances are you will still find something to eat without having to wait for Monday morning to roll around (unlike in France). And don't even get me started on your banks and their schedules.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. I was replying to the parent (who's now been modded down into oblivion). I should have said "Flooding kills poor people too." The original assertion made by the parent about "the poor" is actually what made me want to respond to him in the first place. And I agree that it didn't have any relevance to his original point.
Another couple of counter points that I forgot to make to the original parent:
First, a nuclear plant has to be near the area it serves (since it transmission lines lose too much power over long distances) and it would have to be near water (since it's essentially a steam engine where water is turned into steam to propel its turbines), and so if you build a nuclear power plant near where the dam is (or near where the Min river is and where the population centers are), you may end up building it right on top of that major fault line where the 9.0+ earthquake occurred (which isn't too recommended by the Japanese who have just abandoned their largest nuclear power plant after they recently discovered out there was a fault line right under it)
And last but not least, building a desalination plant in the mountains away from the sea and away from the salt water doesn't make sense. You need salt water in order to desalinate it. In the mountain, you'll probably need to mine it in order to extract the salt. And also, making water flow up a mountain over a very long distance is much harder than making it flow down that same mountain. And never mind that desalination is already prohibitively expensive for even most people without fresh water -- living near actual sea-water.
This earthquake killed less than 100,000 people.
In 1931, the flooding of a different river (the Yellow river) killed 3.7 millions. And thirty years before that, another flood in China killed 1 million people.
Flooding kills poor people. Dams prevent flooding.
Thanks a lot man! because of your comment, I won't be able to read slashdot the next time I'm over there.
I thought Utah was the largest exporter of religion. Ten percent of your followers income, that's a pretty nice cash flow.
Are you really talking of H1B workers here? Because international students often pay a very high tuition at American Universities. It's the American High Schools and the American Community Colleges that are subsidized heavily for foreign students, and those certainly don't turn anyone away, "qualified" or otherwise.
I'm kind of torn on this. On one hand, it's Microsoft, but on the other hand they seem to be competing directly with Amazon's one-click button technology.
This is basically turning into just another useless TV Licence entitlement. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, the TV Licence idea started out in many European countries as a way to support their first national television/radio broadcasting network.
What happened over time however is that as the technology improved and became cheaper, the original 100% marketshare that the original organization enjoyed -- dwindled down to 2 or 3% of their respective market. And yet, that original subsidy -- that original TV Licence, which only increased over time and which can go as high as $200 per year in some countries, is *still* only used to subsidize that 2 or 3% of the current content producers (and some would argue, that even that estimate is too high).
Basically, this is also what's going to happen with that blank media tax. Right now, it's going to the RIAA. Some would argue that independents are not going to receive a penny of that (and I would sort of agree with that), but saying this is actually completely missing the point. Five to twenty years from now, some of us are going to become parents/grandparents, we'll be using those blank medias for music (may be), but we'll also be using those blank media disks for recording thousands of hours of baby videos, closed-circuit security footage of our home, and other miscellaneous home videos. And any amount of professionally produced content will actually be dwarfed by the sheer amount of user-generated personal crap that we'll be recording on those. At least, that's the trend I'm starting to see developing right now. So if we keep on subsidizing the RIAA with proceeds from blank media sales (or any other type of storage medium), we're creating an entitlement monster that we'll probably never be able to get rid of.
Yes and no. An easy way to get the content, yes. At the click of the button, yes. Without a mandatory FBI/preview/commercial that I must watch through, yes. That being said, forget the resolution. I have a huge HD TV, but I can handle the shitty resolution streaming Netflix gives me (a couple of movies excepted).
I love my streaming Netflix. Unlimited streaming movies at a reasonable price, that's all I really need.
It's funny you should mention that. They just recently revamped and modernized their security system. Now if you don't show your receipt because the line is too long, now everyone, not just their security guards, are allowed to tackle you against your car and detain you on their behalf.
No, but those four did get convicted, because part of their harassment campaign included also making false claims of Pedophilia to any neighbor of their target, and to anyone else who might know (or might have known) their targets. So after he convicted them, the judge probably thought he was going to be next.
Michael Critchon has been published in both a peer-reviewed Medical Journal and a peer-reviewed Computer Science Journal. What about you? In what field of Science(s) have you been published in? To me, being a geek doesn't mean being immune from saying (or even creating) stupid things, so in my book, Michael Critchon definitely qualifies as a geek, you might qualify as a geek, and I believe I also qualify as a geek.
And the Semites are just Arabs too, but I don't get what you're implying? That the Semites that came back from Europe are somehow more civilized or something? and that the brown Semites that have have remained on that land for many generations are somehow not?
And so have done the Israeli settlers, or don't you find it unsettling that you guys are just dumping your unprocessed sewage right outside of your settlements walls?
Do you actually believe there is one single "correct name" for a region that has been occupied by so many different people over so many years?
Same here. Everyone on my left in Wikipedia is a leftist liberal wacko and everyone to my right is a right-wing wacko. I just can't win these days. I must be the only last neutral person left on this planet.
Don't call it theft. Call it piracy. Focus on the Intellectual Property aspect of it. It's your notes, your copyright. And it's not the tangible notebook that was valuable, it was its unique content and custom mental hooks that helped you break down, organize, review, and later recall that information. Now don't get me wrong, I don't mean to imply that all students go back to the Economics notes they've taken from High School, or even from College, but what about the most motivated students? What about those future Economics teachers? or that future Economics Nobel Laureate?
Now imagine if this attitude was more prevalent among teachers/publishers, at the end of each class, every student would be required to turn in for destruction -- the school books he paid for, the notes he'd taken, and any essays/projects he had created. And just for good measure, the student would get his bag searched and strip searched every time he went home. Now can you even imagine living in such a World?
Why write a Google Earth-based flight-simulator when your users are already writing flight simulators on top of your platform? I think they should just let their users create the cool content and the cool apps, and just stick to the monetization of all that good stuff.
I totally agree. Even if the cop doesn't want to bother, insist on it, and insist that he takes your notes back from the teacher to give you back (or to enter as evidence). And even if the DA doesn't want to pursue the case, having some kind of police report for civil action should be helpful as well (at the very least, you should try to sue in small claims court).
Also, all the people with some kind of learning disability, listen up. If a teacher/professor wants to prevent you from taking notes, having someone else take notes for you, and/or even prevent you from recording the lectures, pursue that case. In my school, this was a major sticking point, and basically since the Professors couldn't prevent the students with learning disabilities from recording their lectures, and since they couldn't prevent those same students from disseminating those recordings (since it's a lecture recording, it's the actual student doing the recording who owns the copyright, not the lecturer), then that basically opened the floodgates for everyone else to record the lecture as well (not that this was a big issue, only a couple of Professors were being real assholes about not allowing openly visible tape-recorders on their lecterns/podiums).
The mafia label is just too cool for them. I say we give them back the pirate label, and we call ourselves the mafia. After all, pirates kill, rape, steal, and completely destroy people and goods. And the mafia, the real mafia at least, does very little violence and enables the international distribution of gray market goods.
Tell us more about your situation. Did you refuse to give her your notes? Did you tell her not to rummage through your bag? How many students did she do this too?
What she did was probably illegal, but you've got to be really assertive about protecting your rights. And please note the word "assertive", not aggressive, meaning that you tell her you're not giving her the permission to go through your bag, or that you do not want her to go through your bag. For further reading on assertiveness and setting boundaries, I'd suggest you read When I Say No, I Feel Guilty by Manuel J. Smith
Also, one last question. How old are you? Personally, I know that age shouldn't matter, but age does matter. Adults are much more likely to bully young people, people they have authority over, or very old people, just because they know that those types of people are less likely to fight back -- or call the cops on them.
No, what gave the last administration a black eye was not the fact that they used those private accounts for government work. And it wasn't even the fact that those accounts were insecure (unless, you happen to be one of those pedantic security expert who equates a breach of email security with the end of the world). What gave the last administration a black eye, at least in the public's eye, was that once they had been using those private accounts pretty regularly for official business, they simply refused to give up their passwords to those same accounts when a judge asked them to.
And since in this case, Obama went to the White House Counsel for advice on this, I wouldn't be surprised if the White House Counsel required that they all sign a piece of paper waiving privacy, that they surrender all their passwords in advance, and that they all place an ominous legal disclaimer in the signature advertising the fact that this is an official email address -- that could end up becoming part of the freely available public records -- before they would even be allowed to use those email accounts -- in any way shape or form.
Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if the White House Counsel didn't contact Google beforehand to take some additional measures. After all, Google owns Postini now, and Postini allows you to keep all your emails, deleted, sent, or otherwise, on their server, but they even allow you to set your own physical server up on your *own* premises to be the sole go between between all the incoming and *outgoing* email to make sure it gets archived and complies with email retention and archival policies.
Name one single well-known DRM example where this has actually been the case, that the game wasn't pirated within the first week. Your assertion is actually quite reasonable, after all DRM may not be winning the war but surely it must be having one or two victories -- it's just that I don't know of one single popular example myself where this was the case.
DRM makes as much sense to me as those nefarious FBI warnings that you can't forward through at the beginning of those DVDs. Only the non-pirating consumers are being penalized by that functionality, the consumers that are pirating on the other hand do not even see those.
That's pretty much what happened in Berkeley. A prepubescent little girl gave a blow-job to a prepubescent little boy in front of other boys. The little boy, and all the other boys, ended up being almost lynched by most of the parents afterward (they wanted all the boys who even saw what happened expelled and brought up on charges). A couple of weeks later, in a completely different school, the same little girl does the exact same thing, she's caught sucking off a classmate in front of other boys.
And while I think we can all agree that the little girl was probably the victim of some adult molesting her (perhaps her parents, or some other adult). I think this incident illustrates how people were so quick to blame and punish the little boys involved in the first incident.
It can be difficult to be rational when a significant portion of your brain has been shot off.
Homebound? What does that mean? That he had a bad back? Or was this some kind of lame excuse for cutting a full year of school? I wonder to what extent his snowboarding injuries were?
The United States is still one of the most convenient countries on earth. Many of its restaurants, grocery stores, subways, and gas pumps, do not shut down during Christmas (unlike in the UK). And if you accidentally arrive on a late Friday or Saturday night, chances are you will still find something to eat without having to wait for Monday morning to roll around (unlike in France). And don't even get me started on your banks and their schedules.
Also, learn to use google sms (they probably have an email address you can use, or you could find one that translates email into sms)
http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/default/sms.html