SO when you take a copyrighted work and distributed it without the copyright owners consent, the legal right to exclusively control the copying and distribution of that work is still in tact and functioning?
Yes, unless the copyright owner decides not to enforce their copyright by taking legal action against the infringing party. The law (in this case) assigns rights and provides a way to enforce them, it does not alter reality to make those rights inviolable. If your right is infringed, it doesn't suddenly disappear. It is still there and fully functioning, allowing you to collect damages from the infringer for violating your right. No one in this thread (or at least this chain of the thread you are replying to) has suggested that no harm was done, only that nothing was stolen. If I'm a model and someone punches me in the face and I can't work due to the unsightly bruising, harm has been done, but I can't sue them for theft of my lost income. I can sue them for assault and for other damages related to the loss of my income, but I can't call it theft (if I want to be taken seriously in court).
This ruling by the DoJ is a travesty, to be sure. The RIAA is already suing people in civil court (as it is a civil matter) where the burden of proof is on the defendant rather than the plaintiff, making it significantly easier for them to win. There are already provisions for punitive damages in order to deter the public from breaking civil law, but these are only awarded in cases where the defendant's actions showed a flagrant and insidious disregard for the law. If this were a behavior that needed such an extreme example made in order to deter others, it should have been assigned as punitive damages, not statutory damages. Statutory damages are intended to be a way to ease the burden of proving something inherently difficult to prove, not to punish or make an example. However, in this case it should be quite easy to set an upper bound for distribution (outbound bandwidth, size of files, length of time since release, time online), and the award still greatly exceeds that. The DoJ is allowing the RIAA to have its cake and eat it too.
"Klingons is spelled with a 'k', not a 'c'. Clingons, with a 'c', are simply something that should never leave the restroom, but unfortunately sometimes do. Popular humor posits that they do orbit your anus, pronounced similarly to Uranus, so I can see how you might have made that mistake. However, you still must turn in your geek card at the door.
Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me?
That is admittedly a better source than Wikipedia, which is largely what I drew from. It states "In public, Hitler often praised Christian heritage, German Christian culture, and professed a belief in an Aryan Jesus Christ, a Jesus who fought against the Jews."
In all, Hitler was rather wishy-washy where religion was concerned, except where he hated the Jews. He was raised Catholic, but seemed rather pleased with Protestant practices where they suited his goals better. He never attended Church (once he left home), but publicly praised various aspects of Christian heritage, specifically the German Christian heritage. Then, by 1940, 'Hitler maintained that the "terrorism in religion is, to put it briefly, of a Jewish dogma, which Christianity has universalized and whose effect is to sow trouble and confusion in men's minds."' So, when he died, I suppose you could call him atheist, but I, like the ID folks, was refusing to let facts get in the way of a point. I just had to find the one supporting evidence somewhere, no matter how shaky, that said what I wanted, and I could use it to call Hitler a staunch and devout Christian (or, rather, hint at it misleadingly). You will notice that I never said that Hitler was a Christian, just that he professed to be one, which is technically true. I could also have said he was a devout churchgoer, which would also be true if you only considered his life prior to leaving home.
The entire last paragraph of my post (the GPP) was pointing out how ludicrous such comparisons of Darwinists to Hitler were, and so I constructed an argument to mirror the similarly disingenuous ID argument that Darwinists were akin to Nazis. And even then, I daresay that my argument was more convincing and more factually supported.
I'm guessing that the question is in regards to the deterrence feature, which is likely some loud noise or pre-recorded cat-hiss, that the program emits when it detects a cat on your keyboard. From the linked page: If a cat gets on the keyboard, PawSense makes a sound that annoys cats. This teaches your cat that getting on the keyboard is bad even if humans aren't watching.
So if I am a scientist looking into methods for eliminating/reducing congenital birth defects, then I'm an evil eugenicist? And quite frankly putting Margaret Sanger in with the same class of eugenic extremists as Hitler is disingenuous at best - Sanger actively argued against euthanasia, and argued for putting control of procreation into the hands of women by educating them about their reproductive functions (with the exception of the "undeniably feeble-minded" - essentially those considered mentally retarded or clinically insane and thus legally not capable of making their own decisions). Eugenics isn't all bad, and beginning any argument from that stand point as the IDers do points to the larger flaws in it's foundations. ID is composed of too much assumption and too little critical thought, and deteriorates from there.
I also think that population controls should be put in place - we are outgrowing our planet too quickly. But the devil is in the details - how we enforce such controls. I think that initially the incentives and encouragement for procreating should be eliminated. Nations archaically see population growth as a measure of success and so encourage it, even though it is demonstrable that the most successful (in terms of wealth, power, and standard of living) nations are the same ones that have the smallest population growth via birth rate.
In short, other than infanticide, each of those categories of endeavor has a benefit that outweighs the (moral) cost when applied properly. Eugenics as discussed above, abortion as a medical solution to save a mother if the pregnancy is in trouble, and euthanasia to give terminal patients the dignity and end to suffering they desire and deserve. The benefit of abortion hinges on philosophical and scientific determination of when a fetus becomes a sentient human, and as such is the only case (and even then with tight constraints) where I feel that these activities should be directed at unwilling recipients. It is not right to force eugenics or euthanasia on unwilling participants, and abortion should only be performed at the earliest stages of pregnancy and/or when it comes down to a decision between the mother's life and the fetus's. Infanticide is indefensible in my mind, but I won't rule out the possibility that there may be some ridiculously rare circumstance where it is warranted. I just haven't the stomach to give it that much thought.
In short, lumping the Darwinist's in with Hitler is akin to lumping the Christians in with Hitler and his campaign of Genocide, since the Good Book says "So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded. And Joshua smote them from Kadesh-barnea even unto Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, even unto Gibeon." The Bible is full of genocide and infanticide ordered by God, so all followers of the Bible must be as bad as Hitler. After all, Hitler was a professed Christian.
Bah, I forgot to write a conclusion to the statements made in my introductory paragraph. I expect that the plan for government run healthcare will fail. We've seen examples of it all over the world where nations that have had socialized medicine are realizing the mistake they made. Why our government thinks it is smarter than them when it failed to even see the economic meltdown coming, I can only imagine (I knew before the height of the housing market that it was going to burst, and I am not a professional - of course, I suspect they did too and are merely playing CYA). It will fail, and it will fail big. But out of its ashes I hope that something better than our current system will rise. It will take 10 - 15 years, I suspect, but eventually it will improve in a way that business as usual would not likely produce. So, I'm taking the long view - it's the only hope left to me.
Very good points. I'm not too keen on government taking over healthcare, but my one consolation is that it has to get worse before it gets better. The private industry has failed, and though much of that failure is due to unmitigated greed, much of it is also due to problematic regulation and entrenched practice.
The system is broken from top to bottom. There are a limited number of slots available for new medical students even though there is a shortage of doctors, and many good candidates get turned away (conversely, many bad candidates are accepted in years when there are more spots than good candidates). Once accepted, school is exorbitantly expensive, incurring massive debt to the students (this is a serious problem with the educational system, which is a whole other argument). Once students begin practicing (first as interns, then as residents) they work ridiculous hours, forcing sub-optimal performance in life or death situations, which leads to excessive mistakes. Mix with a sue happy populace and medical insurance costs force prices for healthcare to skyrocket. Now, very few people can afford proper medical care without insurance, and the insurance companies cheat the doctors and the patients as well as the businesses that pay a significant portion of the insurance costs. From what I have seen, it costs more per person to be covered under a business healthcare plan than it costs to buy an individual plan, but because the employer shares the burden, it costs the EMPLOYEE less, while the insurance company enjoys a larger margin.
So, much of the change needs to start with the educational system and the AMA, which no private industry can seriously expect to force. Then, changes I can't even begin to fathom need to take place in the legal system in regards to malpractice and also in terms of acceptable hours for medical professionals.
But, I digress, this is a discussion about the botched bailout of the auto industry where our elected leaders ignored the screaming of their constituents (except in Detroit) and spent over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to line the pockets of the fat cats that paid for their elections. I don't know about you, but I am voting every single one of those fuckers out next election. Any one of them who didn't vote "no" gets a "no" vote from me to make up for their missing one - abstaining is equivalent to a "yes" vote as far as I'm concerned. And the same goes for the bank bailouts. There is no such thing as "too big to fail" - governments do it all the time, and life goes on. If a government can fail without it being the end of the world, a business certainly can.
sending robots (and researching more advanced robots) is way more cost-effective for now. So why not stick to that for the time being and forget about sending creatures that are so obviously unsuited for life on other planets into space?
Because if we follow your logic, we will NEVER develop the technology for sending people to other planets. Saying "we don't currently have the technology, so let's focus on doing other stuff and revisit this in a few centuries when we magically have the technology without ever having worked to achieve it" is ludicrous. We have to start somewhere, and somewhen, and take the baby steps necessary to get to that magical future of human exploration. I think that this plan and now are as good a starting point as any - there are almost certainly better but this likely has the best chance of gaining critical support. It certainly beats shelving manned exploration indefinitely.
If I had my druthers, there'd be more emphasis on sustainable environmental systems (waste recycling, food production, etc) to allow long term human habitation in the void of space or on the moon with minimal shipments of resources. With such technologies sufficiently advanced, we can build a large moon base that could then be used to cheaply build and launch robotic probes. With this base, it could bring into reach a space base at L1 (or anywhere else in Earth orbit) to take advantage of various gravity strengths, etc. From these two bases, harvesting asteroids and comets for raw materials becomes feasible, as does longer term human space travel (trips to Mars and the outer planets) by utilizing the environmental systems developed for the bases and the low gravity construction and launch facilities. Where we go from there depends on our needs at the time, but the foundation I believe should be built now and I believe that it relies heavily on such environmental sustainability systems.
I also think that dozens of small, mostly stationary, probes scattered throughout the solar system that can be used in concert would be an excellent use of resources. They would provide views of our solar system that are typically obstructed here on Earth and in Earth's orbit, and they could be combined using technology similar to radio telescope arrays here on Earth (http://www.vla.nrao.edu/) to provide a truly LARGE virtual telescope for viewing extra-solar objects. They could also later serve as repeaters for intra-solar communications. Of course, launch costs might be high, relegating this to a "post-moonbase" timeline.
If their phone is off/out of range, you won't show up in the missed calls log because the phone never got the call.
Of course, at least with Sprint, it tells you who called (by name if they are a Sprint customer, by number otherwise) when you retrieve the message, no need to even have your cell phone record the caller ID in your call log. Of course, if your friend isn't a Sprint customer and you don't have their phone number committed to memory, this could be less than convenient, but one would hope that you might possibly recognize their voice.
That is, it does not occur to them to even think at all of how their decisions are affecting other people, which sums up nearly all society's problems.
There, fixt that fer ya.
But seriously, that is absolutely correct. Just like the people in the grocery that park their carts in the middle of an aisle rather than to one side so people can get around them. It's a trend I've noticed increasingly over the last decade or so where people either don't care or are simply oblivious to what goes on in their immediate vicinity and it increases the general stress level of those around them to retributive levels.
I drive like an asshole, but I drive defensively. Whether I'm in the car or not, I am constantly aware of what is happening around me (what the military calls "situational awareness"), which is a trend I was hoping would have caught on after 9/11 and the call by the community to be aware of potentially suspicious behavior.
One comment on the article regarding assholes - does this apply to freeway traffic? Because one thing I do know is that the assholes changing lanes all the time to gain half a car length are causing more traffic than they are solving because everyone behind them in the lane they enter has to slow down to let them in. Repeat this 10 or 20 times for each of these jerks (and there are typically half a dozen or so that I experience during any stretch of traffic, and that's just what _I_ can see) and these propagating waves have a tremendously negative impact on traffic. That's great that you got home 30 seconds sooner (at a cost of 5% more gas), but hundreds of other people were delayed by minutes at least as a result. You'd have to be clinically egotistical to consider that acceptable.
Because you are the only one (or member of a minority group) that apparently lacks the predominant knowledge of the statement's truth. If I state a fact that is common knowledge, I do not need to cite it. If you dispute that fact, it is your job to find corroborating evidence in defense of your stance, not mine.
Very true. Police officers, the military, fire rescue workers, even the loathed clerks at the DMV all OWN THEIR OWN LABOR, and expect to be paid for it. They don't just offer you their services out of the goodness of their heart, they do it so that they can pay their bills so that the recipients of those bills can be paid for THEIR labor, which they also OWN. Are you starting to understand how this all works now? Let me spell it out for you - where does the money to pay for these public benefits come from? The word "public" might afford a clue. That's right, it comes from your taxes. And as a citizen, you also have the right not to agree with everywhere your taxes are going, but you change that by voting, not by withdrawing funds. This is the "blade cuts both ways" part of living in a democracy - sometimes you find yourself in the minority and you just have to suck it up or change public opinion (or your own) so that you are back in the majority.
I suspect you'll reply with all sorts of propaganda about how we're not really a democracy or taxes are an unfair burden or whatnot, but they are irrelevant to the basic fact that fair taxation is not tantamount to someone else owning your labor. The only relevant subject to debate is what exactly is "fair" (and it is certainly a value much in excess of "zero") and how that burden is determined. However, this isn't the forum for such a debate.
It doesn't say anywhere I can find, but does the device just "paint" a lane with you always in the center, or does it try to detect a curb and give you a steady guide so you don't drift out into traffic? I'm guessing the former, which makes me wonder how exactly this is better than a head and tail light.
Any hourly system would be proud to be 99% accurate. I couldn't tell you how many odd minutes I have worked uncompensated because the system rounds down to the nearest tenth of an hour. Sure, it works in both directions (I've collected pay for minutes in which I was merely present but provided no meaningful value to the company), but I'm guessing that the tax rate will likely be adjusted to compensate for the expected percentage of inaccuracy if it is predominantly in one direction, making it more or less a wash. And, like most (likely all) taxes, it errs on the side of the collector, so that's no different here.
So, yes, 99% is good enough, even for my paycheck, especially when you consider that most hourly systems don't cover commute, looking for parking, the walk from your car to the building (or time clock), etc, which results in well over 1% of the time you provide to your employer for which you are thus unpaid and don't seem to complain too much about.
Orbo is based upon time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.
Heh. This is likely true, though they ignore the (likely - nay, guaranteed) possibility of interactions whose efficiency is less than 1. However, once you select those out you are left with the free energy they are claiming. They are implying that the variances are from a little bit of energy gain to a little bit more energy gain, where in truth it is certainly between a small energy gain and a sightly larger energy loss.
Certainly. I will need a sample of at least 4 grams, shipped in ice and hermetically sealed. Please also ship the variety and flavor of taffy that you believe that your "male organ" tastes most like. I shall provide a team of 8 scientists from around the world who will each need a sample as described previously. I will provide shipping information upon your agreement to the terms.
Slashdot Mirror
SO when you take a copyrighted work and distributed it without the copyright owners consent, the legal right to exclusively control the copying and distribution of that work is still in tact and functioning?
Yes, unless the copyright owner decides not to enforce their copyright by taking legal action against the infringing party. The law (in this case) assigns rights and provides a way to enforce them, it does not alter reality to make those rights inviolable. If your right is infringed, it doesn't suddenly disappear. It is still there and fully functioning, allowing you to collect damages from the infringer for violating your right. No one in this thread (or at least this chain of the thread you are replying to) has suggested that no harm was done, only that nothing was stolen. If I'm a model and someone punches me in the face and I can't work due to the unsightly bruising, harm has been done, but I can't sue them for theft of my lost income. I can sue them for assault and for other damages related to the loss of my income, but I can't call it theft (if I want to be taken seriously in court).
This ruling by the DoJ is a travesty, to be sure. The RIAA is already suing people in civil court (as it is a civil matter) where the burden of proof is on the defendant rather than the plaintiff, making it significantly easier for them to win. There are already provisions for punitive damages in order to deter the public from breaking civil law, but these are only awarded in cases where the defendant's actions showed a flagrant and insidious disregard for the law. If this were a behavior that needed such an extreme example made in order to deter others, it should have been assigned as punitive damages, not statutory damages. Statutory damages are intended to be a way to ease the burden of proving something inherently difficult to prove, not to punish or make an example. However, in this case it should be quite easy to set an upper bound for distribution (outbound bandwidth, size of files, length of time since release, time online), and the award still greatly exceeds that. The DoJ is allowing the RIAA to have its cake and eat it too.
"Klingons is spelled with a 'k', not a 'c'. Clingons, with a 'c', are simply something that should never leave the restroom, but unfortunately sometimes do. Popular humor posits that they do orbit your anus, pronounced similarly to Uranus, so I can see how you might have made that mistake. However, you still must turn in your geek card at the door.
Oblig movie quote:
Dr. Evil: You know Goldmember, I don't speak freaky-deaky Dutch. Okay, perv boy?
Yeah, I'm sure you've NEVER heard that one before and all, but, you know, it never gets old. :p
By the way, how do you pronounce "vrij" - is it like "fridge", but with a vee, or what? I'm gonna start using that just to throw people off.
Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me?
That is admittedly a better source than Wikipedia, which is largely what I drew from. It states "In public, Hitler often praised Christian heritage, German Christian culture, and professed a belief in an Aryan Jesus Christ, a Jesus who fought against the Jews."
In all, Hitler was rather wishy-washy where religion was concerned, except where he hated the Jews. He was raised Catholic, but seemed rather pleased with Protestant practices where they suited his goals better. He never attended Church (once he left home), but publicly praised various aspects of Christian heritage, specifically the German Christian heritage. Then, by 1940, 'Hitler maintained that the "terrorism in religion is, to put it briefly, of a Jewish dogma, which Christianity has universalized and whose effect is to sow trouble and confusion in men's minds."' So, when he died, I suppose you could call him atheist, but I, like the ID folks, was refusing to let facts get in the way of a point. I just had to find the one supporting evidence somewhere, no matter how shaky, that said what I wanted, and I could use it to call Hitler a staunch and devout Christian (or, rather, hint at it misleadingly). You will notice that I never said that Hitler was a Christian, just that he professed to be one, which is technically true. I could also have said he was a devout churchgoer, which would also be true if you only considered his life prior to leaving home.
The entire last paragraph of my post (the GPP) was pointing out how ludicrous such comparisons of Darwinists to Hitler were, and so I constructed an argument to mirror the similarly disingenuous ID argument that Darwinists were akin to Nazis. And even then, I daresay that my argument was more convincing and more factually supported.
I'm guessing that the question is in regards to the deterrence feature, which is likely some loud noise or pre-recorded cat-hiss, that the program emits when it detects a cat on your keyboard. From the linked page: If a cat gets on the keyboard, PawSense makes a sound that annoys cats. This teaches your cat that getting on the keyboard is bad even if humans aren't watching.
So if I am a scientist looking into methods for eliminating/reducing congenital birth defects, then I'm an evil eugenicist? And quite frankly putting Margaret Sanger in with the same class of eugenic extremists as Hitler is disingenuous at best - Sanger actively argued against euthanasia, and argued for putting control of procreation into the hands of women by educating them about their reproductive functions (with the exception of the "undeniably feeble-minded" - essentially those considered mentally retarded or clinically insane and thus legally not capable of making their own decisions). Eugenics isn't all bad, and beginning any argument from that stand point as the IDers do points to the larger flaws in it's foundations. ID is composed of too much assumption and too little critical thought, and deteriorates from there.
I also think that population controls should be put in place - we are outgrowing our planet too quickly. But the devil is in the details - how we enforce such controls. I think that initially the incentives and encouragement for procreating should be eliminated. Nations archaically see population growth as a measure of success and so encourage it, even though it is demonstrable that the most successful (in terms of wealth, power, and standard of living) nations are the same ones that have the smallest population growth via birth rate.
In short, other than infanticide, each of those categories of endeavor has a benefit that outweighs the (moral) cost when applied properly. Eugenics as discussed above, abortion as a medical solution to save a mother if the pregnancy is in trouble, and euthanasia to give terminal patients the dignity and end to suffering they desire and deserve. The benefit of abortion hinges on philosophical and scientific determination of when a fetus becomes a sentient human, and as such is the only case (and even then with tight constraints) where I feel that these activities should be directed at unwilling recipients. It is not right to force eugenics or euthanasia on unwilling participants, and abortion should only be performed at the earliest stages of pregnancy and/or when it comes down to a decision between the mother's life and the fetus's. Infanticide is indefensible in my mind, but I won't rule out the possibility that there may be some ridiculously rare circumstance where it is warranted. I just haven't the stomach to give it that much thought.
In short, lumping the Darwinist's in with Hitler is akin to lumping the Christians in with Hitler and his campaign of Genocide, since the Good Book says "So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded. And Joshua smote them from Kadesh-barnea even unto Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, even unto Gibeon." The Bible is full of genocide and infanticide ordered by God, so all followers of the Bible must be as bad as Hitler. After all, Hitler was a professed Christian.
Bah, I forgot to write a conclusion to the statements made in my introductory paragraph. I expect that the plan for government run healthcare will fail. We've seen examples of it all over the world where nations that have had socialized medicine are realizing the mistake they made. Why our government thinks it is smarter than them when it failed to even see the economic meltdown coming, I can only imagine (I knew before the height of the housing market that it was going to burst, and I am not a professional - of course, I suspect they did too and are merely playing CYA). It will fail, and it will fail big. But out of its ashes I hope that something better than our current system will rise. It will take 10 - 15 years, I suspect, but eventually it will improve in a way that business as usual would not likely produce. So, I'm taking the long view - it's the only hope left to me.
Very good points. I'm not too keen on government taking over healthcare, but my one consolation is that it has to get worse before it gets better. The private industry has failed, and though much of that failure is due to unmitigated greed, much of it is also due to problematic regulation and entrenched practice.
The system is broken from top to bottom. There are a limited number of slots available for new medical students even though there is a shortage of doctors, and many good candidates get turned away (conversely, many bad candidates are accepted in years when there are more spots than good candidates). Once accepted, school is exorbitantly expensive, incurring massive debt to the students (this is a serious problem with the educational system, which is a whole other argument). Once students begin practicing (first as interns, then as residents) they work ridiculous hours, forcing sub-optimal performance in life or death situations, which leads to excessive mistakes. Mix with a sue happy populace and medical insurance costs force prices for healthcare to skyrocket. Now, very few people can afford proper medical care without insurance, and the insurance companies cheat the doctors and the patients as well as the businesses that pay a significant portion of the insurance costs. From what I have seen, it costs more per person to be covered under a business healthcare plan than it costs to buy an individual plan, but because the employer shares the burden, it costs the EMPLOYEE less, while the insurance company enjoys a larger margin.
So, much of the change needs to start with the educational system and the AMA, which no private industry can seriously expect to force. Then, changes I can't even begin to fathom need to take place in the legal system in regards to malpractice and also in terms of acceptable hours for medical professionals.
But, I digress, this is a discussion about the botched bailout of the auto industry where our elected leaders ignored the screaming of their constituents (except in Detroit) and spent over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to line the pockets of the fat cats that paid for their elections. I don't know about you, but I am voting every single one of those fuckers out next election. Any one of them who didn't vote "no" gets a "no" vote from me to make up for their missing one - abstaining is equivalent to a "yes" vote as far as I'm concerned. And the same goes for the bank bailouts. There is no such thing as "too big to fail" - governments do it all the time, and life goes on. If a government can fail without it being the end of the world, a business certainly can.
Or find a way to profit by having puppies get kicked. Outside the box thinking is what it's all about.
sending robots (and researching more advanced robots) is way more cost-effective for now. So why not stick to that for the time being and forget about sending creatures that are so obviously unsuited for life on other planets into space?
Because if we follow your logic, we will NEVER develop the technology for sending people to other planets. Saying "we don't currently have the technology, so let's focus on doing other stuff and revisit this in a few centuries when we magically have the technology without ever having worked to achieve it" is ludicrous. We have to start somewhere, and somewhen, and take the baby steps necessary to get to that magical future of human exploration. I think that this plan and now are as good a starting point as any - there are almost certainly better but this likely has the best chance of gaining critical support. It certainly beats shelving manned exploration indefinitely.
If I had my druthers, there'd be more emphasis on sustainable environmental systems (waste recycling, food production, etc) to allow long term human habitation in the void of space or on the moon with minimal shipments of resources. With such technologies sufficiently advanced, we can build a large moon base that could then be used to cheaply build and launch robotic probes. With this base, it could bring into reach a space base at L1 (or anywhere else in Earth orbit) to take advantage of various gravity strengths, etc. From these two bases, harvesting asteroids and comets for raw materials becomes feasible, as does longer term human space travel (trips to Mars and the outer planets) by utilizing the environmental systems developed for the bases and the low gravity construction and launch facilities. Where we go from there depends on our needs at the time, but the foundation I believe should be built now and I believe that it relies heavily on such environmental sustainability systems.
I also think that dozens of small, mostly stationary, probes scattered throughout the solar system that can be used in concert would be an excellent use of resources. They would provide views of our solar system that are typically obstructed here on Earth and in Earth's orbit, and they could be combined using technology similar to radio telescope arrays here on Earth (http://www.vla.nrao.edu/) to provide a truly LARGE virtual telescope for viewing extra-solar objects. They could also later serve as repeaters for intra-solar communications. Of course, launch costs might be high, relegating this to a "post-moonbase" timeline.
If their phone is off/out of range, you won't show up in the missed calls log because the phone never got the call.
Of course, at least with Sprint, it tells you who called (by name if they are a Sprint customer, by number otherwise) when you retrieve the message, no need to even have your cell phone record the caller ID in your call log. Of course, if your friend isn't a Sprint customer and you don't have their phone number committed to memory, this could be less than convenient, but one would hope that you might possibly recognize their voice.
That is, it does not occur to them to even think at all of how their decisions are affecting other people, which sums up nearly all society's problems.
There, fixt that fer ya.
But seriously, that is absolutely correct. Just like the people in the grocery that park their carts in the middle of an aisle rather than to one side so people can get around them. It's a trend I've noticed increasingly over the last decade or so where people either don't care or are simply oblivious to what goes on in their immediate vicinity and it increases the general stress level of those around them to retributive levels.
I drive like an asshole, but I drive defensively. Whether I'm in the car or not, I am constantly aware of what is happening around me (what the military calls "situational awareness"), which is a trend I was hoping would have caught on after 9/11 and the call by the community to be aware of potentially suspicious behavior.
One comment on the article regarding assholes - does this apply to freeway traffic? Because one thing I do know is that the assholes changing lanes all the time to gain half a car length are causing more traffic than they are solving because everyone behind them in the lane they enter has to slow down to let them in. Repeat this 10 or 20 times for each of these jerks (and there are typically half a dozen or so that I experience during any stretch of traffic, and that's just what _I_ can see) and these propagating waves have a tremendously negative impact on traffic. That's great that you got home 30 seconds sooner (at a cost of 5% more gas), but hundreds of other people were delayed by minutes at least as a result. You'd have to be clinically egotistical to consider that acceptable.
Because you are the only one (or member of a minority group) that apparently lacks the predominant knowledge of the statement's truth. If I state a fact that is common knowledge, I do not need to cite it. If you dispute that fact, it is your job to find corroborating evidence in defense of your stance, not mine.
The turtles merged into 'Turtle Saint' and displayed his biggest power.
There is way too much wrong with that.
Very true. Police officers, the military, fire rescue workers, even the loathed clerks at the DMV all OWN THEIR OWN LABOR, and expect to be paid for it. They don't just offer you their services out of the goodness of their heart, they do it so that they can pay their bills so that the recipients of those bills can be paid for THEIR labor, which they also OWN. Are you starting to understand how this all works now? Let me spell it out for you - where does the money to pay for these public benefits come from? The word "public" might afford a clue. That's right, it comes from your taxes. And as a citizen, you also have the right not to agree with everywhere your taxes are going, but you change that by voting, not by withdrawing funds. This is the "blade cuts both ways" part of living in a democracy - sometimes you find yourself in the minority and you just have to suck it up or change public opinion (or your own) so that you are back in the majority.
I suspect you'll reply with all sorts of propaganda about how we're not really a democracy or taxes are an unfair burden or whatnot, but they are irrelevant to the basic fact that fair taxation is not tantamount to someone else owning your labor. The only relevant subject to debate is what exactly is "fair" (and it is certainly a value much in excess of "zero") and how that burden is determined. However, this isn't the forum for such a debate.
[citation needed]
Translation: I'm too lazy to do a Google search, or remember any one of a bazillion Slashdot articles that support this.
Alternate translation: I'm a Microsoft shill.
I see that's worked out well for him, or are fangrrrls acceptable?
It doesn't say anywhere I can find, but does the device just "paint" a lane with you always in the center, or does it try to detect a curb and give you a steady guide so you don't drift out into traffic? I'm guessing the former, which makes me wonder how exactly this is better than a head and tail light.
EewTube.
Any hourly system would be proud to be 99% accurate. I couldn't tell you how many odd minutes I have worked uncompensated because the system rounds down to the nearest tenth of an hour. Sure, it works in both directions (I've collected pay for minutes in which I was merely present but provided no meaningful value to the company), but I'm guessing that the tax rate will likely be adjusted to compensate for the expected percentage of inaccuracy if it is predominantly in one direction, making it more or less a wash. And, like most (likely all) taxes, it errs on the side of the collector, so that's no different here.
So, yes, 99% is good enough, even for my paycheck, especially when you consider that most hourly systems don't cover commute, looking for parking, the walk from your car to the building (or time clock), etc, which results in well over 1% of the time you provide to your employer for which you are thus unpaid and don't seem to complain too much about.
You could have just deflated her a little when you were done. It would have provided a softer sleep surface without the additional expense.
I'll be Beethoven. We'll jam. It'll be classic.
Orbo is based upon time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.
Heh. This is likely true, though they ignore the (likely - nay, guaranteed) possibility of interactions whose efficiency is less than 1. However, once you select those out you are left with the free energy they are claiming. They are implying that the variances are from a little bit of energy gain to a little bit more energy gain, where in truth it is certainly between a small energy gain and a sightly larger energy loss.
Certainly. I will need a sample of at least 4 grams, shipped in ice and hermetically sealed. Please also ship the variety and flavor of taffy that you believe that your "male organ" tastes most like. I shall provide a team of 8 scientists from around the world who will each need a sample as described previously. I will provide shipping information upon your agreement to the terms.