Or was it scheduled for delivery in November and got pushed out two months?
Delays in coupons... Delays in transmitter deliveries...
Sounds like a friend's ex-husband. He is ALWAYS late bringing the kids home, and he always as a good excuse as to why it isn't his fault. Fine, well perhaps now the station owner will have a good excuse as to why his income disappeared for a few weeks.
When a switchover is planned a decade in advance there are NO execused when people aren't ready in time. And it isn't like we're talking about hospitals here - nobody is going to starve or drop dead because their TV is out for a week or HEAVEN FORBID they have to buy a $40 converter without a government subsidy. In the UK they'd need to pay more than that annually to legally watch TV at all.
Actually, transactional file support would be a big plus. I'm not sure how well it works on windows, but it would be really nice if somebody came out with that for linux.
Being able to do a hot backup of your drive and get a fully consistent set of files would be very useful. Right now the best you can do is apply a snapshot at a lower device layer (raid or lvm2). That works, except the filesystem might not be clean when you snapshot it unless you remount it first (not trivial on a running system), and the snapshot is very wasteful of space because it doesn't understand the structure of the filesystem and it will preserve empty sectors as readily as those with data.
With a transactional filesystem you could perform "instant" software installations/etc. There would be lots benefits.
Yup. It annoys me at work that I was evaluating one of our software release candidates and found some functionality missing. The lead developer informed me that this functionality was planned to be incorporated into the next release candidate (not inadvertently). I tried to explain the meaning of "release candidate" (something that could actually be released if it has no serious defects) and I got the impression I was speaking heresy.
Yeah, but most likely this table will just end up in the office of the super-big-wigs and nobody actually doing any real work will get near it.
Traffic management? They're going to be looking at 500 camera images and listening to reports on the radio from the helicopters. Sure, maybe all that data will end up on the big screen that the mayor and director of security are staring at as well. So, the guys running the traffic show will probably get the occassional micromanagement directive like "make sure you get that red zone on the beltway taken care of - maybe we should send some squad cars over there to direct traffic" when chances are the guys actually dealing with the mess already know about it and have identified a different and more effective solution. You might also have the occasional individual $20/hr guard getting paged directly by the mayor or FBI director or whatever and given an order to check the 3rd door on the left.
I see it all the time in businesses with the marketing of "dashboard technology" - giving realtime displays of information to management. Typically it is deployed so high up in the company that the manager can only use it to scream at his subordinates, and the subordinates who actually have the power to control what happens on the dashboard aren't allowed anywhere near it. Ditto with financial reporting - some low-level manager is clubbed on the head for constantly missing his budget figures, but the reporting is only available to somebody three levels higher and only after the month has closed. If the bottom-rung supervisor actually could run the reports themselves maybe twice a week they could see the trends and maybe actually do something abou ti.
No, what this surface implementation is all about is some bigwig was watching CSI Miami and yelled at his IT group that they were clearly behind the times and that he needed some big clear glass displays all over the place. Not able to convince him that it was really all just special effects and not particularly useful they went ahead and bought the closest thing that actually exists. They all got bonsues, and while lots of money got spent the reality will probably be that this superbowl will be run in the same way as every prior one in the ways that actually matter (how the guys on the bottom rung actually get the direction to do their jobs).
You mention the iphone, but my headache is that half of the web-based apps won't work on my desktop. I browse using konqueror (which is pretty standards-compliant as far as I'm aware). And somehow I doubt that half of the ajax-based websites out there would run on a smartphone (maybe the iphone - not because it is the iphone but because it is popular enough that web designers might just tweak the living daylights out of their sites to get it to work).
The problem really is that html wasn't really designed to run major applications - it was designed as a simple presentation language, and some very simple scripting (mainly for presentation purposes) was bolted on. The fact that this stuff could be hacked into gmail is nice, but the lack of polish shows how much the original design is being stretched.
I really don't want to have a list of browsers that I switch between based on the sites I visit. I'd like to use a browser of my choice that meets some stated standards-based specification and have everything just work.
These kinds of lights generally aren't dimmable. Color temperature varies by the bulb you buy - generally tube lighting tends to be pretty white in terms of color temperature. You can get them with more of a tungsten temperature, or ones for good color reproduction.
I spent all of probably $80 on shop light fixtures for my basement. They are DIRT CHEAP. What used to be a fairly dark dungeon with all 400w of incandescents burning is now about as bright as a Walmart with slightly less power usage.
Those tube lights not only are far more efficient than incandescents, they're also cheaper to replace than CFLs and their shape tends to evenly spread light over a wider area. There is a big difference in 50W of light coming from a CFL and 50W of light spread over a 3-4 foot tube. Everything is just much more even.
With the rise of fluorescents I'm surprised that better fixtures haven't become more popular. The CFL is really a non-ideal design. Separating the balast greatly lowers replacement costs, and it also tends to increase balast life since it stays cooler. You could have enclosed fixtures with this kind of design. Making the bulb bigger also casts more even light.
I think the issue is that collections agencies try any and every possible way of reaching whoever they're after. We still get calls from collection agencies for people who sold our house to the people who sold it to us. They could care less if you tell them that you have no idea who they're after or where they can be found - they just assume you're lying. You can't even tell them to put all correspondence in writing because you actually need to be the person they're after to do that legally.
Virgin Mobile customers are probably more vulnerable than most because I suspect that these prepaid phones tend to get used for nefarious purposes more often than most, and so when the numbers get recycled into the pool they're more likely to have been used by somebody who bought something with a stolen credit card, or somebody who had bad credit and couldn't get a monthly plan.
Collection agencies really need to be more tightly regulated. They should not be legally allowed to harass the living daylights out of anybody who has even the most tenuous association with somebody they're after. When informed that their information is out of date they should be required to cease all contact. Ideally there should be a do-not-call central registry as well to record incorrect collections information.
The mere existance of the private banks wouldn't be a scam (it is just providing a service). If somebody offered to freeze your toes for posterity after you die that wouldn't be a scam either even if they had no useful purpose. However, the marketing might very well be for all the reasons you state. If I were to advertise that it is likely that you could be resurrected from a frozen toe then that would be a scam.
I don't think that you could consider it immoral (except to the degree that the marketing is based on fraud). It sounds like you consider it immoral to set aside cord blood only for your own private use. I don't see how one has a moral obligation to set aside cord blood at all - so how could it be immoral to set it aside for personal use?
This is like suggesting that saving up for personal retirement is immoral because there are senior citizens who could use the money today. Well, sure - and you could give money to them and hope somebody does the same for you. However, that doesn't make it immoral to set aside reasonable savings for one's own retirement. Is it immoral to own a TV when a child anywhere on the planet is starving?
And China would retaliate by selling all their US dollar bonds. You think the economic crisis is bad _NOW_?
Doubtful - at least as more than a symbolic gesture.
Those bonds have substantial value to the Chinese. If they have 100 billion dollars worth of US bonds they're almost certain to get 100 billion dollars in cash over the next few decades as they mature. If they sell the whole thing for a million dollars then they get a million dollars worth of various currencies now. As an added bonus they REALLY tick off the US government. It would make it harder for the US government to issue new debt for a while, but I doubt it would cause the sky to fall. If the US actually tightened its belt and stopped running a deficit then it wouldn't have any impact at all (granted, that kind of spending discipline would make economic recovery more difficult).
What it might do is trigger a small war of some kind, which the Chinese are not equipped to fight (they have no deep water navy as yet - so all the fighting will be in their own territory). China has a huge army, but unless it plans to swim the bearing strait it doesn't really have any way to leave the country unless they plan on invading the Ukraine (and the former soviet states do NOT mess around). They might be able to invade Taiwan but even that would be iffy (a few subs could take out a lot of troop transports, and there isn't that much land to defend with hidden anti-air defenses). The US wouldn't be interested in actually siezing the country or anything (which would be crazy with the size of their army), but they could just drop lots of bombs on bridges or anything else with a military application and watch their economy grind to a halt. Simply blockading their ports would pretty much cripple their export-driven economy, and cut off their oil supplies as an added bonus (you could bomb the few overland pipelines very easily).
This would never actually happen in real life - since everybody knows it isn't worth anybody's time to get into this kind of a mess. The US and China will continue to trade words while the rich guys making the money make sure the borders stay open.
Unfortunately, the open source model doesn't scale well to capital-intensive industries like drug development. How many people are willing to beta-test a drug put together by an open source consortium? And making pure drugs costs quite a bit of money - so it is hard to even get started. Those big molecules are very expensive to manufacture on kilogram scales until you get the process chemistry worked out.
And, if EVERYTHING were free then nobody would be working on open source software, either - since we'd all be starving.
Free can only work on a wide scale in a fairly communistic model - which doesn't work well in real life. Free software is actually fairly communistic in nature - and it doesn't always work out well in all applications. Many open source initiatives have some kind of commercial model behind them that often works off of some less-than-open aspect of the software. Firefox makes a ton of ad revenue from google - and can only do so because nobody else can change the default home page and redistribute it with the Firefox brand (which is less than completely open). MySQL's model depended on the fact that nobody is allowed to contribute a line of code without assigning copyright, which is less than completely open. RedHat depends on the fact that they have solid control over their distro meaning that it is hard for others to support it like they can.
Eventually I think we're going to have to face some changes in how everything works - simply because automation will get to a point where few people will have jobs. Once computers are doing creative work even that industry will be closed to humans. At that point we'll have to own up to the work->money system not working so well...
Actually, with an appropriate filesystem they might - sort-of. I believe that newer filesystems can record the presence of zero-filled blocks without allocating the blocks. So, you could have a 1TB file full of zeros that takes just one inode or something along those lines.
Dude. Would it kill you to just let the guy pass you? Sure, he's an idiot for riding your bumper, but are you getting where you want to go any slower if you just let him pass?
I have all the patience in the world for people who want to drive slow in the right lane. When people drive in formation in the left lane with a line of 20 cars behind them, they're slowing up progress. I guess it makes them feel better about teaching the unrighteous masses a lesson about the speed limit.
My philosophy - as long as I'm passing cars I'll drive at a safe speed in the left lane. When I'm not passing cars I'll move over to the right. I could care less how fast the guy behind me wants to drive - I'll get out of his way when I can, and I won't be intimidated before then. On the other hand, I won't go playing games on the highway to "teach him a lesson" either - that's his mother's job...
The incentive is on the consumer to buy products that cost less. That's why I buy CFL bulbs.
The price of electricity should reflect the environmental cost of providing it. Perhaps a tax on coal plants to be used for air cleanup efforts would be appropriate.
Once you make the cost of energy reflect the true environmental cost of producing it, then consumers can choose the most appropriate products to use.
Drug patents have the same effective duration as in other industries. The difference is the lead development time.
It typically takes 5-10 years to get a patented drug onto the market. So only about 10 years of market exclusivity remain. Also - the only thing a drug patent applies to is a specific molecule - not a concept of treatment. So, if the drug works by inhibiting some enzyme, other companies can target the same enzyme with other inhibitors.
On the other hand, this patent for the iPhone was granted AFTER the device was already on the market. That is unheard of in the drug industry.
I think that patents do make sense in industries where the up-front costs are extremely high and the marginal costs are very low. The same applies to copyright. Yes, there does need to be balance as well (something lacking generally in both the drug and music industries). However, balance doesn't mean that something that cost hundreds of millions to produce should be copyable by anybody without any license at all.
In the end, society gets what it pays for. If everybody wants free everything, then nobody will work on anything. Perhaps we can afford to invest less in medicine and entertainment, but we probably don't want to cut that down to zero either...
The parking lot isn't visible from the street, and there is a gatehouse to gain entry. Nobody can just cruise the lot capturing hundreds of plates. Granted, you could tail people going home and all that - but the potential for massive capture of private details is reduced. In a free society this sort of thing is never possible to eliminate.
Oh, it is even easier than cash. Just find somebody else who wants your current home and swap with them. That couldn't be hard to arrange, right?
Seriously, all this money just makes us lazy consumers. The economy would work so much better if it were so painful to buy anything that we all just grew our own crops...
Perhaps. But I'll take a camera that actually has half-decent exposure and non-fixed focus.
The typical cell-phone camera is comparable to the $10 film camera of the 1990s. Sure, it takes photos (in one sense with the same resolution as a $2000 SLR), but it leaves a lot to be desired.
I've got the android G1 now with its 5MP camera with true automatic focus, and even that I'm finding wanting. It must be ISO 5 or something like that, and its exposure algorithm is quite wanting. It also seems to have a very slow exposure time as I can blur shots easily in bright daylight. Better than any camera phone I've used, but it pales in comparison to quality point-and-shoots from years ago let alone a typical modern crop-frame DSLR.
It depends very much on the individual. I NEVER use a debit card unless in a situation where a credit card won't be accepted. I don't pay a dime in interest as long as the bill is paid off every month.
The danger of using a debit card is that if somebody manages to run up a ton of charges you may be stuck with them. Credit cards are much more heavily regulated and if you didn't personally authorize the charge you're generally not liable for it (after a token $25 or something like that, which almost all companies waive anyway).
Now, carrying debt on a credit card is a whole different matter, and credit card terms are horrible as far as loans go.
So, perhaps the expression should be the "greatest thing since the electric toaster", or perhaps "the greatest thing since the gas/electric oven"? Or, perhaps "the greatest thing since not having to have a fire pit in your kitchen"?:)
I know somebody who works at a research facility in the UK (as far as I know it has no direct involvement in animal testing, although it is owned by a company that probably does). The parking lots are designed to prevent survailence of cars, and employees are instructed not to answer the phone using their names (which are also not given on voicemail greetings). Apparently activists like to call random phone numbers trolling for names so that they can harass secretaries and janitors for their role in trying to improve medicine.
Frankly, I don't care if the folks they go after are directly involved or not. If you have a problem with animal testing the legislature is open for business. There are things funded by my tax dollars that I'd rather not see funded, but I don't go around harassing people who work for . Protest outside their offices if you must, but unless you're talking about stopping human genocide let's draw the line somewhere reasonable?
My main complaint with seizures is that they can often turn into a form of punishment without a charge even being filed. Simply siezing somebody's bank account for a few years and returning it can cause financial ruin. Siezing a critical server in a start-up that can't afford to replace it can have similar results.
Perhaps siezure should require immediate compensation?
You bust a suspected robbery ring and want to sieze $500k in cash as evidence. Fine, but go ahead and hand them $500k in newly minted bills. The purpose of the siezure wasn't punishment, but to use the money as evidence - so there is no need to deprive the person of property. If you're concerned about them using it to flee the country and have probable cause, then arrest them and make the argument to the judge at arraignment regarding bail.
In this case the server could be siezed, and compensation suitable to pay for the server, its installation/deployment, and a day's lost income could be provided. After all, the company hosting the server is a victim of the crime.
Expenses related to investigations should be recoverable from the accused (provided they fit the crime - if the government spends $47M busting somebody from shoplifting the criminal should pay the maximum statutory fine and that's it).
In this case as far as I can see the siezure was perfectly fine (provided a warrant was issued). The server could legitimately be considered to contain evidence useful in a criminal investigation (a serious one at that).
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A ten year delay?
Or was it scheduled for delivery in November and got pushed out two months?
Delays in coupons... Delays in transmitter deliveries...
Sounds like a friend's ex-husband. He is ALWAYS late bringing the kids home, and he always as a good excuse as to why it isn't his fault. Fine, well perhaps now the station owner will have a good excuse as to why his income disappeared for a few weeks.
When a switchover is planned a decade in advance there are NO execused when people aren't ready in time. And it isn't like we're talking about hospitals here - nobody is going to starve or drop dead because their TV is out for a week or HEAVEN FORBID they have to buy a $40 converter without a government subsidy. In the UK they'd need to pay more than that annually to legally watch TV at all.
Actually, transactional file support would be a big plus. I'm not sure how well it works on windows, but it would be really nice if somebody came out with that for linux.
Being able to do a hot backup of your drive and get a fully consistent set of files would be very useful. Right now the best you can do is apply a snapshot at a lower device layer (raid or lvm2). That works, except the filesystem might not be clean when you snapshot it unless you remount it first (not trivial on a running system), and the snapshot is very wasteful of space because it doesn't understand the structure of the filesystem and it will preserve empty sectors as readily as those with data.
With a transactional filesystem you could perform "instant" software installations/etc. There would be lots benefits.
Yup. It annoys me at work that I was evaluating one of our software release candidates and found some functionality missing. The lead developer informed me that this functionality was planned to be incorporated into the next release candidate (not inadvertently). I tried to explain the meaning of "release candidate" (something that could actually be released if it has no serious defects) and I got the impression I was speaking heresy.
WHAT!!! And make people choose between TV and food!???
To arms! Pitchforks and torches!!!!
Yeah, but most likely this table will just end up in the office of the super-big-wigs and nobody actually doing any real work will get near it.
Traffic management? They're going to be looking at 500 camera images and listening to reports on the radio from the helicopters. Sure, maybe all that data will end up on the big screen that the mayor and director of security are staring at as well. So, the guys running the traffic show will probably get the occassional micromanagement directive like "make sure you get that red zone on the beltway taken care of - maybe we should send some squad cars over there to direct traffic" when chances are the guys actually dealing with the mess already know about it and have identified a different and more effective solution. You might also have the occasional individual $20/hr guard getting paged directly by the mayor or FBI director or whatever and given an order to check the 3rd door on the left.
I see it all the time in businesses with the marketing of "dashboard technology" - giving realtime displays of information to management. Typically it is deployed so high up in the company that the manager can only use it to scream at his subordinates, and the subordinates who actually have the power to control what happens on the dashboard aren't allowed anywhere near it. Ditto with financial reporting - some low-level manager is clubbed on the head for constantly missing his budget figures, but the reporting is only available to somebody three levels higher and only after the month has closed. If the bottom-rung supervisor actually could run the reports themselves maybe twice a week they could see the trends and maybe actually do something abou ti.
No, what this surface implementation is all about is some bigwig was watching CSI Miami and yelled at his IT group that they were clearly behind the times and that he needed some big clear glass displays all over the place. Not able to convince him that it was really all just special effects and not particularly useful they went ahead and bought the closest thing that actually exists. They all got bonsues, and while lots of money got spent the reality will probably be that this superbowl will be run in the same way as every prior one in the ways that actually matter (how the guys on the bottom rung actually get the direction to do their jobs).
You mention the iphone, but my headache is that half of the web-based apps won't work on my desktop. I browse using konqueror (which is pretty standards-compliant as far as I'm aware). And somehow I doubt that half of the ajax-based websites out there would run on a smartphone (maybe the iphone - not because it is the iphone but because it is popular enough that web designers might just tweak the living daylights out of their sites to get it to work).
The problem really is that html wasn't really designed to run major applications - it was designed as a simple presentation language, and some very simple scripting (mainly for presentation purposes) was bolted on. The fact that this stuff could be hacked into gmail is nice, but the lack of polish shows how much the original design is being stretched.
I really don't want to have a list of browsers that I switch between based on the sites I visit. I'd like to use a browser of my choice that meets some stated standards-based specification and have everything just work.
These kinds of lights generally aren't dimmable. Color temperature varies by the bulb you buy - generally tube lighting tends to be pretty white in terms of color temperature. You can get them with more of a tungsten temperature, or ones for good color reproduction.
I spent all of probably $80 on shop light fixtures for my basement. They are DIRT CHEAP. What used to be a fairly dark dungeon with all 400w of incandescents burning is now about as bright as a Walmart with slightly less power usage.
Those tube lights not only are far more efficient than incandescents, they're also cheaper to replace than CFLs and their shape tends to evenly spread light over a wider area. There is a big difference in 50W of light coming from a CFL and 50W of light spread over a 3-4 foot tube. Everything is just much more even.
With the rise of fluorescents I'm surprised that better fixtures haven't become more popular. The CFL is really a non-ideal design. Separating the balast greatly lowers replacement costs, and it also tends to increase balast life since it stays cooler. You could have enclosed fixtures with this kind of design. Making the bulb bigger also casts more even light.
By that logic - why not just go full win32 client-server and cater to a single OS and drop the browser entirely?
The argument was that web standards are not well-implemented. The fact that I can't reliably use google maps over webkit is a legitimate example.
Yeah, but then where would we work once all the other jobs are outsourced to India and China? :)
I think the issue is that collections agencies try any and every possible way of reaching whoever they're after. We still get calls from collection agencies for people who sold our house to the people who sold it to us. They could care less if you tell them that you have no idea who they're after or where they can be found - they just assume you're lying. You can't even tell them to put all correspondence in writing because you actually need to be the person they're after to do that legally.
Virgin Mobile customers are probably more vulnerable than most because I suspect that these prepaid phones tend to get used for nefarious purposes more often than most, and so when the numbers get recycled into the pool they're more likely to have been used by somebody who bought something with a stolen credit card, or somebody who had bad credit and couldn't get a monthly plan.
Collection agencies really need to be more tightly regulated. They should not be legally allowed to harass the living daylights out of anybody who has even the most tenuous association with somebody they're after. When informed that their information is out of date they should be required to cease all contact. Ideally there should be a do-not-call central registry as well to record incorrect collections information.
The mere existance of the private banks wouldn't be a scam (it is just providing a service). If somebody offered to freeze your toes for posterity after you die that wouldn't be a scam either even if they had no useful purpose. However, the marketing might very well be for all the reasons you state. If I were to advertise that it is likely that you could be resurrected from a frozen toe then that would be a scam.
I don't think that you could consider it immoral (except to the degree that the marketing is based on fraud). It sounds like you consider it immoral to set aside cord blood only for your own private use. I don't see how one has a moral obligation to set aside cord blood at all - so how could it be immoral to set it aside for personal use?
This is like suggesting that saving up for personal retirement is immoral because there are senior citizens who could use the money today. Well, sure - and you could give money to them and hope somebody does the same for you. However, that doesn't make it immoral to set aside reasonable savings for one's own retirement. Is it immoral to own a TV when a child anywhere on the planet is starving?
And China would retaliate by selling all their US dollar bonds. You think the economic crisis is bad _NOW_?
Doubtful - at least as more than a symbolic gesture.
Those bonds have substantial value to the Chinese. If they have 100 billion dollars worth of US bonds they're almost certain to get 100 billion dollars in cash over the next few decades as they mature. If they sell the whole thing for a million dollars then they get a million dollars worth of various currencies now. As an added bonus they REALLY tick off the US government. It would make it harder for the US government to issue new debt for a while, but I doubt it would cause the sky to fall. If the US actually tightened its belt and stopped running a deficit then it wouldn't have any impact at all (granted, that kind of spending discipline would make economic recovery more difficult).
What it might do is trigger a small war of some kind, which the Chinese are not equipped to fight (they have no deep water navy as yet - so all the fighting will be in their own territory). China has a huge army, but unless it plans to swim the bearing strait it doesn't really have any way to leave the country unless they plan on invading the Ukraine (and the former soviet states do NOT mess around). They might be able to invade Taiwan but even that would be iffy (a few subs could take out a lot of troop transports, and there isn't that much land to defend with hidden anti-air defenses). The US wouldn't be interested in actually siezing the country or anything (which would be crazy with the size of their army), but they could just drop lots of bombs on bridges or anything else with a military application and watch their economy grind to a halt. Simply blockading their ports would pretty much cripple their export-driven economy, and cut off their oil supplies as an added bonus (you could bomb the few overland pipelines very easily).
This would never actually happen in real life - since everybody knows it isn't worth anybody's time to get into this kind of a mess. The US and China will continue to trade words while the rich guys making the money make sure the borders stay open.
Unfortunately, the open source model doesn't scale well to capital-intensive industries like drug development. How many people are willing to beta-test a drug put together by an open source consortium? And making pure drugs costs quite a bit of money - so it is hard to even get started. Those big molecules are very expensive to manufacture on kilogram scales until you get the process chemistry worked out.
And, if EVERYTHING were free then nobody would be working on open source software, either - since we'd all be starving.
Free can only work on a wide scale in a fairly communistic model - which doesn't work well in real life. Free software is actually fairly communistic in nature - and it doesn't always work out well in all applications. Many open source initiatives have some kind of commercial model behind them that often works off of some less-than-open aspect of the software. Firefox makes a ton of ad revenue from google - and can only do so because nobody else can change the default home page and redistribute it with the Firefox brand (which is less than completely open). MySQL's model depended on the fact that nobody is allowed to contribute a line of code without assigning copyright, which is less than completely open. RedHat depends on the fact that they have solid control over their distro meaning that it is hard for others to support it like they can.
Eventually I think we're going to have to face some changes in how everything works - simply because automation will get to a point where few people will have jobs. Once computers are doing creative work even that industry will be closed to humans. At that point we'll have to own up to the work->money system not working so well...
Actually, with an appropriate filesystem they might - sort-of. I believe that newer filesystems can record the presence of zero-filled blocks without allocating the blocks. So, you could have a 1TB file full of zeros that takes just one inode or something along those lines.
Dude. Would it kill you to just let the guy pass you? Sure, he's an idiot for riding your bumper, but are you getting where you want to go any slower if you just let him pass?
I have all the patience in the world for people who want to drive slow in the right lane. When people drive in formation in the left lane with a line of 20 cars behind them, they're slowing up progress. I guess it makes them feel better about teaching the unrighteous masses a lesson about the speed limit.
My philosophy - as long as I'm passing cars I'll drive at a safe speed in the left lane. When I'm not passing cars I'll move over to the right. I could care less how fast the guy behind me wants to drive - I'll get out of his way when I can, and I won't be intimidated before then. On the other hand, I won't go playing games on the highway to "teach him a lesson" either - that's his mother's job...
The incentive is on the consumer to buy products that cost less. That's why I buy CFL bulbs.
The price of electricity should reflect the environmental cost of providing it. Perhaps a tax on coal plants to be used for air cleanup efforts would be appropriate.
Once you make the cost of energy reflect the true environmental cost of producing it, then consumers can choose the most appropriate products to use.
Uh, what is wrong with a radio? You can get those for $5 these days. You can probably build one for less even at Radio Shack part retail prices.
Drug patents have the same effective duration as in other industries. The difference is the lead development time.
It typically takes 5-10 years to get a patented drug onto the market. So only about 10 years of market exclusivity remain. Also - the only thing a drug patent applies to is a specific molecule - not a concept of treatment. So, if the drug works by inhibiting some enzyme, other companies can target the same enzyme with other inhibitors.
On the other hand, this patent for the iPhone was granted AFTER the device was already on the market. That is unheard of in the drug industry.
I think that patents do make sense in industries where the up-front costs are extremely high and the marginal costs are very low. The same applies to copyright. Yes, there does need to be balance as well (something lacking generally in both the drug and music industries). However, balance doesn't mean that something that cost hundreds of millions to produce should be copyable by anybody without any license at all.
In the end, society gets what it pays for. If everybody wants free everything, then nobody will work on anything. Perhaps we can afford to invest less in medicine and entertainment, but we probably don't want to cut that down to zero either...
The parking lot isn't visible from the street, and there is a gatehouse to gain entry. Nobody can just cruise the lot capturing hundreds of plates. Granted, you could tail people going home and all that - but the potential for massive capture of private details is reduced. In a free society this sort of thing is never possible to eliminate.
Oh, it is even easier than cash. Just find somebody else who wants your current home and swap with them. That couldn't be hard to arrange, right?
Seriously, all this money just makes us lazy consumers. The economy would work so much better if it were so painful to buy anything that we all just grew our own crops...
Perhaps. But I'll take a camera that actually has half-decent exposure and non-fixed focus.
The typical cell-phone camera is comparable to the $10 film camera of the 1990s. Sure, it takes photos (in one sense with the same resolution as a $2000 SLR), but it leaves a lot to be desired.
I've got the android G1 now with its 5MP camera with true automatic focus, and even that I'm finding wanting. It must be ISO 5 or something like that, and its exposure algorithm is quite wanting. It also seems to have a very slow exposure time as I can blur shots easily in bright daylight. Better than any camera phone I've used, but it pales in comparison to quality point-and-shoots from years ago let alone a typical modern crop-frame DSLR.
It depends very much on the individual. I NEVER use a debit card unless in a situation where a credit card won't be accepted. I don't pay a dime in interest as long as the bill is paid off every month.
The danger of using a debit card is that if somebody manages to run up a ton of charges you may be stuck with them. Credit cards are much more heavily regulated and if you didn't personally authorize the charge you're generally not liable for it (after a token $25 or something like that, which almost all companies waive anyway).
Now, carrying debt on a credit card is a whole different matter, and credit card terms are horrible as far as loans go.
So, perhaps the expression should be the "greatest thing since the electric toaster", or perhaps "the greatest thing since the gas/electric oven"? Or, perhaps "the greatest thing since not having to have a fire pit in your kitchen"? :)
I know somebody who works at a research facility in the UK (as far as I know it has no direct involvement in animal testing, although it is owned by a company that probably does). The parking lots are designed to prevent survailence of cars, and employees are instructed not to answer the phone using their names (which are also not given on voicemail greetings). Apparently activists like to call random phone numbers trolling for names so that they can harass secretaries and janitors for their role in trying to improve medicine.
Frankly, I don't care if the folks they go after are directly involved or not. If you have a problem with animal testing the legislature is open for business. There are things funded by my tax dollars that I'd rather not see funded, but I don't go around harassing people who work for . Protest outside their offices if you must, but unless you're talking about stopping human genocide let's draw the line somewhere reasonable?
My main complaint with seizures is that they can often turn into a form of punishment without a charge even being filed. Simply siezing somebody's bank account for a few years and returning it can cause financial ruin. Siezing a critical server in a start-up that can't afford to replace it can have similar results.
Perhaps siezure should require immediate compensation?
You bust a suspected robbery ring and want to sieze $500k in cash as evidence. Fine, but go ahead and hand them $500k in newly minted bills. The purpose of the siezure wasn't punishment, but to use the money as evidence - so there is no need to deprive the person of property. If you're concerned about them using it to flee the country and have probable cause, then arrest them and make the argument to the judge at arraignment regarding bail.
In this case the server could be siezed, and compensation suitable to pay for the server, its installation/deployment, and a day's lost income could be provided. After all, the company hosting the server is a victim of the crime.
Expenses related to investigations should be recoverable from the accused (provided they fit the crime - if the government spends $47M busting somebody from shoplifting the criminal should pay the maximum statutory fine and that's it).
In this case as far as I can see the siezure was perfectly fine (provided a warrant was issued). The server could legitimately be considered to contain evidence useful in a criminal investigation (a serious one at that).