You are free to charge $16 for it. But you may not use the firefox trademark in your ads/product page etc.
Does trademark law actually allow a trademark holder to do that?
If you weren't installing genuine Mozilla Firefox I could see how it would be illegal to use their trademark.
However, if I buy a can of Coke at Walmart, assuming I have the appropriate local government licenses I can put a sign up on my front lawn saying "Coca Cola" for sale. If I mix up my own soda, then I can't use their trademark to sell it.
That's why T-Mobile can say "We're better than AT&T" or whatever on their ads. They don't need permission to use AT&T's name, they just can't use their name to refer to anything but the real AT&T.
Mozilla may very well say that you're not allowed to use their name on advertising, but that doesn't mean that it is enforceable.
The reason Debian drops the name is because they patch it, which means it is no longer the genuine article (security flaws and all).
Sure, but bottom line is that you're still paying people to install software. You're paying the person who clicks on the SCCM setup, you're paying for the folks who keep the SCCM running, and so on.
It isn't like Dell is paying somebody to click buttons either.
It would be interesting if they could have done taste tests that were a bit more controlled, like having 10 varieties of plain donuts that varied only in fat:sugar ratio, or testing many types of food.
There is a reason the word "vanilla" has become synonymous with "plain." It doesn't have anything to do with its fat:sugar ratio in comparison with any other flavor of ice cream. It is popular for the same reason that people flipping houses paint the walls white.
I plan to watch it, but did they control for the fact that plain is, well, plain?
If I offered people a choice of a plain slice of pizza, a slice of pizza with anchovies, a slice with motor oil, and a slice doused in pure capsaicin, most would probably pick the plain pizza, and it would simply mean that it is the type of pizza that isn't going to turn off anybody's tastes.
I certainly don't find plain donuts to be the best-tasting. However, what I consider best-tasting and what somebody else considers best-tasting are likely to be different. In the aggregate, they probably sell a lot of plain donuts as a result.
You totally missed the point about "Trust", and your car analogy is so far off it is not even funny, The car companies in no way shape or form enjoy the protections or profits of the drug companies.
Agree, and until this changes you'll never see autonomous vehicles on the road. In the same way you won't see vaccines on the market if you regulate those like cars.
A few thousand dying when the drug companies could do more to test the safety of their drugs is unacceptable.
I've yet to see proof that more testing would result in less dying. In fact, more testing can result in more people dying while lifesaving drugs aren't available on the market.
The conflict of interest from drug kickbacks is unacceptable.
Agree completely - they should be illegal.
The drug companies getting tort protections not available to other industries is unacceptable.
This is only true of vaccines, and you've yet to cite a vaccine with a problem. Your example was Vioxx, which benefitted from no tort protections not available to every other industry.
1 in 66 with no answer for why many of these happen so soon after a trip to the doctors that involved vaccinations is unacceptable. There is also no answer from the Pro-vax crowd why so many recovery stories involve fixing things in our kids that where not broken when they were born, and the only questionable things that we can see they may have been exposed to involves doctors, dentists, hospitals and vaccines. Got a 1 in 66 statistic for amish kids? How about aborigines? Other aboriginal tribes around the globe?
So, your gripe is that vaccines cause harm? I've yet to see a reputable study that suggests that this is the case at all, at least not for any vaccine still on the market. Everything I've seen suggests that vaccines are the most beneficial pharmaceutical product in existence. Every argument I've seen from the anti-vax crowd has been debunked historically. Sure, you can keep coming up with new arguments, but you can't define public health policy on the basis of somebody has an argument.
I often wouldn't even bother ever doing homework assignments when I was in school, because they were just repetition exercises that didn't even make one come to understand anything, and they were for things I already understand (unlike 99% of my other classmates, who didn't bother trying to understand any of it).
Yup - I was a bit of a discipline problem until high school for the same reasons. Once the coursework actually picked up in intensity I suddenly found myself more interested. Plus, many of those classes made homework optional in the first place, and when it wasn't optional it tended to require higher level thinking skills (writing essays and such).
Is the goal to teach the kid how to do math, or how to teach them to submit to authority?
Growing up I was an average student in math until Algebra, at which point I changed into the top student in the class by a significant margin and began getting recognitions at the state level. The only thing that changed was that teachers started to teach something new and the pace picked up. I probably still underperformed my potential, and would have likely benefited from a more aggressive pace.
It is pretty common for intelligent students to underperform in school. They get bored, lose respect for authority, and so on. When I was in elementary school half my bad grades were from a failure to do my homework.
In the end I turned out just fine. I just hate kids being given repetitive work to do because work is considered a virtue for its own sake. If the kid is struggling with basic arithmetic by all means give them more practice and sit with them and work through it. If the kid can correctly answer 100 basic math problems in 10 minutes, then there really is no reason to drill them until they can do it in 2min. That just isn't a skill they'll need to be successful in life.
Once you understand the concepts then doing 100 problems is no more difficult than doing 10. It just takes 10x longer to finish them all.
I disagree completely. Repetition leads to boredom. Boredom leads to difficulty concentrating. Difficulty concentrating makes it hard.
Plus, it is pointless, teaches disrespect for authority, and all that. If I could show you a study that clearly demonstrates that dogs can still catch frisbees even if you beat them with a bat twice a day, does that make it OK to beat them?
In my middle school algebra class the teacher left the class with basic math busywork while he was absent for a day. I just went down the page and filled out random answers so that I could read a book. To my surprise the assignment actually got graded, but he spent as much time on the grading as I spent on the work and he never mentioned it (I was the top student in the class by far so he obviously knew what I did).
Bottom line is that there is little value in repetitive instruction when a subject is sufficiently mastered. It amounts to busywork, and in the real word nobody who is successful rewards busywork.
I believe he still actively maintains gpsd, has been doing work to try to measure latency across the internet backbone due to bufferbloat, and has helped a few big projects migrate to git.
That's a lot more than the average slashdotter, even though he hasn't written any landmark books in the last few years...
First, Vioxx wasn't a vaccine, and no laws exist which gave it any kind of special protection/treatment. It was a standard tort case, though I think there was the classic argument that FDA review should provide some kind of shield from liability (I don't believe the courts accepted that, though I'm sure the FDA's approval was taken into consideration).
Vaccines do have some challenges when it comes to standard tort law. They're taken by people who are healthy, and so it is easy to argue that they provide no benefit whatsoever on an individual basis. They are taken by just about everybody, which means that even with fairly low rates of complications there will be millions who suffer complications. Instead, they provide their benefit in the statistical aggregate - we trade off a few thousand dying from a vaccine against the likelihood of millions dying without it (at least for the most serious diseases).
This isn't unlike the situation that would be faced by any company that came out with a self-driving car. Imagine such a car came out and was inexpensive so it ended up achieving 95% market share. In a few months the death rate from car accidents plummets from the current US figure of 30k/yr to 500/yr. The problem is that those 30k/yr victims generally were the result of human error and the car manufacturers were not liable. However, the automated cars aren't subject to human error and thus the manufacturer is liable for the 500/yr killed by the car. Clearly having them be sued out of existence is not in the public interest - those 500/yr are unfortunate casualties who should be provided some kind of general benefit, but the reality is that the manufacturer has saved 60 people for every person they've killed. The problem is that you can't point your finger at 60 particular people who would have died - you know they would have died, but you can't say which ones they were.
So, I'm all for regulation to ensure that vaccines are safe. However, punishing companies for helping 98% of the population instead of 99% of the population just doesn't make sense unless they actually were negligent. And you can't count imperfection as negligence - there is always one more thing that you could do in the pursuit of safety but none of us would be able to leave our homes if we took things to that extreme.
Now, going back to Vioxx it does share one thing with vaccines - it was a painkiller and thus it doesn't really save the lives of those who take them (vaccines clearly do save lives, but you can't point to any particular life and say that it benefited). There really isn't much incentive to come out with better painkillers. People clearly need and want them, but when you're weighing side-effects it is hard to argue that making millions of people happier offsets killing a few of them from side-effects. With drugs that actually prevent death you can measure lives against lives. The problem with this kind of logic is that it suggests that we'd all be happier living 40 years in agony than 10 years in comfort. That is a trade-off that not everybody would accept. I think that were painkillers are concerned we need to help ensure that patients are aware of the pros/cons and let them apply their own values to the decision as to whether they are appropriate. There are also metrics like quality-adjusted years of life, but they're rarely given careful consideration by juries.
The point that I was making is that it's silly to cut out 150 calories when the rest your meal is still like 1500 calories.
From what I've read, most studies have found that people on low-carb diets tend to eat far fewer calories, even if they aren't aiming to do so.
If you give me a can full of cookies, I could probably eat them all in the course of a TV show.
If you give me a bowl full of bacon, I'm going to get tired after a few slices. People just don't go nuts for meat/fat the way they do for sugar/flour/etc.
When I switched to a low-carb diet I also found that eating didn't really provide the same sense of satisfaction. Initially that caused me to eat more in search of it, but I'd basically get tired of it and really not feel like eating, and I eventually learned not to eat for the sense of satisfaction in the first place. It felt like deconditioning. If you take somebody trained in a skinner box and then stop giving them rewards, pretty soon they no longer feel compelled to perform the trained behavior.
Ketosis and all that may have something to do with it, but I think that the low carb diet just makes it easier to eat a lot less.
But the children are minors, that is: not recognized as sovereign individuals --- instead, the parents are custodians of their health and well-being, and therefore --- the parents have the right to make the decisions that the child is not capable of responsibly making.
This is a responsibility necessarily shared with the state. When a parent decides that there is nothing wrong with a kid playing on the interstate, we forcibly remove the children from the parent's custody since they are nutcases. Refusal to participate in vaccination is no different - it places the kids at risk, and also those around them.
If only we exercised as much care in allowing people to breed as we do in allowing them to operate aircraft or cars we'd be a lot better off...
But just make vaccinations mandatory. Simple as that. No more BS opting out on religious grounds, no more opting out because Jenny said not to, no more trusting in herd immunity while actively undermining it. Get your kids vaccinated, period, end of story; don't like it, too bad.
There will always be valid exceptions. Some people (immune-compromised, usually) simply can't handle vaccination - it really would kill them. This is a recognized problem for which there is no solution.
Actually, there is a well-understood solution. Just make the vaccines mandatory, and provide exceptions based on the medical judgement of a doctor (who is liable if their error results in harm).
The kids who can't get vaccines are much better off if all the kids around them are vaccinated.
Instead today we let everybody opt-out, and the kid who can't get a vaccine for medical reasons ends up catching whooping cough from somebody who could have been vaccinated without incident.
Makes sense. If Russia really decides to push into non-Russian territory things could get really nasty - Afghanistan 2.0. The Soviet Union couldn't handle that, and Russia is only a shadow of the former superpower.
Obama just declared the Russian intervention to be illegal. So what? Who's going to challenge him? Is the US going to go to war over the Crimean peninsula, when a large part of the population welcomes the Russian intervention and the US population as no appetite for war? Is Europe going to put in place economic sanctions on Russia when Russia supplies nearly 1/3rd of European energy?
I tend to agree. Putin cares more about being feared than loved, and the message is clear. If you're on his side and something goes wrong the troops come in to put you back in power. If you're on the other side you can look forward to his tanks rolling across your territory while your allies offer their condolences.
That said, if this really gets nasty it could turn into another Afghanistan for them. The US could avoid deploying troops locally but start handing out missiles and guns like toys, and the Russians would have a heck of a time maintaining order. That's basically what the Russians did in Vietnam and the US did in Afghanistan, and both times the occupiers left empty-handed.
The fact alone that those soldiers are unidentified makes it a war crime (As stated in the Geneva Conventions). If this ever gets to trial (ha!) and is considered war, we already have a war crime before a single shot was fired.
Agreed. Unidentified soldiers are a flagrant violation of the conventions. In theory in any combat they would not be afforded the rights of the conventions either.
That said, at least they're in some kind of uniform. That beats having people in civilian clothes mounting guerrilla attacks.
I tried using an offline bitcoin client, it took 7-8 hours to sync to the network before being usable, and it took 7-8 gigabytes harddisk.
Most people probably downloaded the offline client, waited for it to be usable, and after 3-4 hours it was still "Syncing - 7 of transactions weeks left", at which point they gave up and created an online wallet.
I think that is a fundamental challenge with the design of Bitcoin. I don't think you can give or receive a single penny without having a record of every penny that was ever transferred from one person to another over the entire history of Bitcoin. It only sort-of works today because nobody uses it.
Imagine if the only way to give somebody a dollar was to have a record of everyplace every dollar in circulation since the 1700s has been?
Computers can store a lot of data, but I imagine at some point transaction fees are going to rise to cover the 20TB database storage costs.
Yeah, but you could probably sort it descending by unit price, and the most expensive item would be suitable for use in a space probe and probably still be cheaper than what Radio Shack would want. Or just hit page down once and find really nice stuff for a reasonable price. If the specs aren't demanding you don't need to worry about whether it is pulse-withstanding, flame-retardant, moisture-resistant, and kills zombies in a 5' radius.
Micro Center's main issue is that they don't have many stores, but yes, they're just what I'd want Radio Shack to be. They will price match with Amazon/Newegg/etc, and they sell a pretty decent selection of stuff. That is, the stuff most of us would be looking for.
No, they don't have 400 models of motherboards, but they probably have 30-40 of them. That should tell you a lot right there. They have all the usual stuff like monitors and so on.
Oh, and when you need a hard drive you can get any RPM, any grade, any capacity, any cache, and any manufacturer. It isn't best buy where they sell exactly one drive that isn't external USB 2.0. You can also buy online and do 5-min pickup.
That being said - stocking last minute items could provide a niche. Sometimes you need a new keyboard, battery, or PSU stat, and even next day shipping isn't an option. The question is - is that a frequent enough occurrence to sustain a store?
Absolutely not. Walmart stocks enough of that stuff to fill that need. Radio Shack simply straddling multiple strategies and not doing any of them well. They are simultaneously trying to supply batteries, electrical components, cell phones, toys, and a few other niche items from small and expensive stores where it is relatively expensive and inconvenient for their customers to visit them. I honestly cannot think of anything Radio Shack sells where they would be my preferred shopping destination.
Agree, and the more they try to do it all, the more they just turn into Walmart. You CANNOT complete against Walmart in the category of general merchandise. Only one or two retailers can manage it, and Radio Shack will never be one of them. Even Best Buy is on the verge of collapse, and they're far ahead of Radio Shack on that front.
Radio Shack has to offer something you can't get at Walmart. I'm sorry, but cell phones and accessories aren't one of those things, and neither are cheap toys.
Sure those of us that know how can install a posix userspace and get a Linux shell.
There is no such thing as a "linux shell." Linux is just an OS kernel, and any OS that uses it is running "linux."
What you're really talking about is a POSIX userspace with X11, etc. That isn't Android, and it isn't Tivo, and it isn't 80% of all the other devices running Linux.
Your typical Ubuntu distro / etc is really a small subset of the Linux world.
Slashdot Mirror
You are free to charge $16 for it. But you may not use the firefox trademark in your ads/product page etc.
Does trademark law actually allow a trademark holder to do that?
If you weren't installing genuine Mozilla Firefox I could see how it would be illegal to use their trademark.
However, if I buy a can of Coke at Walmart, assuming I have the appropriate local government licenses I can put a sign up on my front lawn saying "Coca Cola" for sale. If I mix up my own soda, then I can't use their trademark to sell it.
That's why T-Mobile can say "We're better than AT&T" or whatever on their ads. They don't need permission to use AT&T's name, they just can't use their name to refer to anything but the real AT&T.
Mozilla may very well say that you're not allowed to use their name on advertising, but that doesn't mean that it is enforceable.
The reason Debian drops the name is because they patch it, which means it is no longer the genuine article (security flaws and all).
Sure, but bottom line is that you're still paying people to install software. You're paying the person who clicks on the SCCM setup, you're paying for the folks who keep the SCCM running, and so on.
It isn't like Dell is paying somebody to click buttons either.
It would be interesting if they could have done taste tests that were a bit more controlled, like having 10 varieties of plain donuts that varied only in fat:sugar ratio, or testing many types of food.
There is a reason the word "vanilla" has become synonymous with "plain." It doesn't have anything to do with its fat:sugar ratio in comparison with any other flavor of ice cream. It is popular for the same reason that people flipping houses paint the walls white.
I plan to watch it, but did they control for the fact that plain is, well, plain?
If I offered people a choice of a plain slice of pizza, a slice of pizza with anchovies, a slice with motor oil, and a slice doused in pure capsaicin, most would probably pick the plain pizza, and it would simply mean that it is the type of pizza that isn't going to turn off anybody's tastes.
I certainly don't find plain donuts to be the best-tasting. However, what I consider best-tasting and what somebody else considers best-tasting are likely to be different. In the aggregate, they probably sell a lot of plain donuts as a result.
You totally missed the point about "Trust", and your car analogy is so far off it is not even funny, The car companies in no way shape or form enjoy the protections or profits of the drug companies.
Agree, and until this changes you'll never see autonomous vehicles on the road. In the same way you won't see vaccines on the market if you regulate those like cars.
A few thousand dying when the drug companies could do more to test the safety of their drugs is unacceptable.
I've yet to see proof that more testing would result in less dying. In fact, more testing can result in more people dying while lifesaving drugs aren't available on the market.
The conflict of interest from drug kickbacks is unacceptable.
Agree completely - they should be illegal.
The drug companies getting tort protections not available to other industries is unacceptable.
This is only true of vaccines, and you've yet to cite a vaccine with a problem. Your example was Vioxx, which benefitted from no tort protections not available to every other industry.
1 in 66 with no answer for why many of these happen so soon after a trip to the doctors that involved vaccinations is unacceptable. There is also no answer from the Pro-vax crowd why so many recovery stories involve fixing things in our kids that where not broken when they were born, and the only questionable things that we can see they may have been exposed to involves doctors, dentists, hospitals and vaccines. Got a 1 in 66 statistic for amish kids? How about aborigines? Other aboriginal tribes around the globe?
So, your gripe is that vaccines cause harm? I've yet to see a reputable study that suggests that this is the case at all, at least not for any vaccine still on the market. Everything I've seen suggests that vaccines are the most beneficial pharmaceutical product in existence. Every argument I've seen from the anti-vax crowd has been debunked historically. Sure, you can keep coming up with new arguments, but you can't define public health policy on the basis of somebody has an argument.
Thanks for the link. Interestingly enough that is a combination quite popular in desserts. Cheesecake, oreos, etc. Lots of fat combined with sugar.
I wonder how much of it is caused by blood sugar vs the taste of sugar (ie whether fat combined with non-caloric sweeteners has the same effect).
I often wouldn't even bother ever doing homework assignments when I was in school, because they were just repetition exercises that didn't even make one come to understand anything, and they were for things I already understand (unlike 99% of my other classmates, who didn't bother trying to understand any of it).
Yup - I was a bit of a discipline problem until high school for the same reasons. Once the coursework actually picked up in intensity I suddenly found myself more interested. Plus, many of those classes made homework optional in the first place, and when it wasn't optional it tended to require higher level thinking skills (writing essays and such).
Is the goal to teach the kid how to do math, or how to teach them to submit to authority?
Growing up I was an average student in math until Algebra, at which point I changed into the top student in the class by a significant margin and began getting recognitions at the state level. The only thing that changed was that teachers started to teach something new and the pace picked up. I probably still underperformed my potential, and would have likely benefited from a more aggressive pace.
It is pretty common for intelligent students to underperform in school. They get bored, lose respect for authority, and so on. When I was in elementary school half my bad grades were from a failure to do my homework.
In the end I turned out just fine. I just hate kids being given repetitive work to do because work is considered a virtue for its own sake. If the kid is struggling with basic arithmetic by all means give them more practice and sit with them and work through it. If the kid can correctly answer 100 basic math problems in 10 minutes, then there really is no reason to drill them until they can do it in 2min. That just isn't a skill they'll need to be successful in life.
Repetitive != Hard
Once you understand the concepts then doing 100 problems is no more difficult than doing 10. It just takes 10x longer to finish them all.
I disagree completely. Repetition leads to boredom. Boredom leads to difficulty concentrating. Difficulty concentrating makes it hard.
Plus, it is pointless, teaches disrespect for authority, and all that. If I could show you a study that clearly demonstrates that dogs can still catch frisbees even if you beat them with a bat twice a day, does that make it OK to beat them?
In my middle school algebra class the teacher left the class with basic math busywork while he was absent for a day. I just went down the page and filled out random answers so that I could read a book. To my surprise the assignment actually got graded, but he spent as much time on the grading as I spent on the work and he never mentioned it (I was the top student in the class by far so he obviously knew what I did).
Bottom line is that there is little value in repetitive instruction when a subject is sufficiently mastered. It amounts to busywork, and in the real word nobody who is successful rewards busywork.
I believe he still actively maintains gpsd, has been doing work to try to measure latency across the internet backbone due to bufferbloat, and has helped a few big projects migrate to git.
That's a lot more than the average slashdotter, even though he hasn't written any landmark books in the last few years...
First, Vioxx wasn't a vaccine, and no laws exist which gave it any kind of special protection/treatment. It was a standard tort case, though I think there was the classic argument that FDA review should provide some kind of shield from liability (I don't believe the courts accepted that, though I'm sure the FDA's approval was taken into consideration).
Vaccines do have some challenges when it comes to standard tort law. They're taken by people who are healthy, and so it is easy to argue that they provide no benefit whatsoever on an individual basis. They are taken by just about everybody, which means that even with fairly low rates of complications there will be millions who suffer complications. Instead, they provide their benefit in the statistical aggregate - we trade off a few thousand dying from a vaccine against the likelihood of millions dying without it (at least for the most serious diseases).
This isn't unlike the situation that would be faced by any company that came out with a self-driving car. Imagine such a car came out and was inexpensive so it ended up achieving 95% market share. In a few months the death rate from car accidents plummets from the current US figure of 30k/yr to 500/yr. The problem is that those 30k/yr victims generally were the result of human error and the car manufacturers were not liable. However, the automated cars aren't subject to human error and thus the manufacturer is liable for the 500/yr killed by the car. Clearly having them be sued out of existence is not in the public interest - those 500/yr are unfortunate casualties who should be provided some kind of general benefit, but the reality is that the manufacturer has saved 60 people for every person they've killed. The problem is that you can't point your finger at 60 particular people who would have died - you know they would have died, but you can't say which ones they were.
So, I'm all for regulation to ensure that vaccines are safe. However, punishing companies for helping 98% of the population instead of 99% of the population just doesn't make sense unless they actually were negligent. And you can't count imperfection as negligence - there is always one more thing that you could do in the pursuit of safety but none of us would be able to leave our homes if we took things to that extreme.
Now, going back to Vioxx it does share one thing with vaccines - it was a painkiller and thus it doesn't really save the lives of those who take them (vaccines clearly do save lives, but you can't point to any particular life and say that it benefited). There really isn't much incentive to come out with better painkillers. People clearly need and want them, but when you're weighing side-effects it is hard to argue that making millions of people happier offsets killing a few of them from side-effects. With drugs that actually prevent death you can measure lives against lives. The problem with this kind of logic is that it suggests that we'd all be happier living 40 years in agony than 10 years in comfort. That is a trade-off that not everybody would accept. I think that were painkillers are concerned we need to help ensure that patients are aware of the pros/cons and let them apply their own values to the decision as to whether they are appropriate. There are also metrics like quality-adjusted years of life, but they're rarely given careful consideration by juries.
The point that I was making is that it's silly to cut out 150 calories when the rest your meal is still like 1500 calories.
From what I've read, most studies have found that people on low-carb diets tend to eat far fewer calories, even if they aren't aiming to do so.
If you give me a can full of cookies, I could probably eat them all in the course of a TV show.
If you give me a bowl full of bacon, I'm going to get tired after a few slices. People just don't go nuts for meat/fat the way they do for sugar/flour/etc.
When I switched to a low-carb diet I also found that eating didn't really provide the same sense of satisfaction. Initially that caused me to eat more in search of it, but I'd basically get tired of it and really not feel like eating, and I eventually learned not to eat for the sense of satisfaction in the first place. It felt like deconditioning. If you take somebody trained in a skinner box and then stop giving them rewards, pretty soon they no longer feel compelled to perform the trained behavior.
Ketosis and all that may have something to do with it, but I think that the low carb diet just makes it easier to eat a lot less.
Ukraine is smooth open fields with some woodland. What is resistance going to use as cover or hiding places?
Houses, unless the Russians plan on bulldozing all of them.
But the children are minors, that is: not recognized as sovereign individuals --- instead, the parents are custodians of their health and well-being, and therefore --- the parents have the right to make the decisions that the child is not capable of responsibly making.
This is a responsibility necessarily shared with the state. When a parent decides that there is nothing wrong with a kid playing on the interstate, we forcibly remove the children from the parent's custody since they are nutcases. Refusal to participate in vaccination is no different - it places the kids at risk, and also those around them.
If only we exercised as much care in allowing people to breed as we do in allowing them to operate aircraft or cars we'd be a lot better off...
But just make vaccinations mandatory. Simple as that. No more BS opting out on religious grounds, no more opting out because Jenny said not to, no more trusting in herd immunity while actively undermining it. Get your kids vaccinated, period, end of story; don't like it, too bad.
There will always be valid exceptions. Some people (immune-compromised, usually) simply can't handle vaccination - it really would kill them. This is a recognized problem for which there is no solution.
Actually, there is a well-understood solution. Just make the vaccines mandatory, and provide exceptions based on the medical judgement of a doctor (who is liable if their error results in harm).
The kids who can't get vaccines are much better off if all the kids around them are vaccinated.
Instead today we let everybody opt-out, and the kid who can't get a vaccine for medical reasons ends up catching whooping cough from somebody who could have been vaccinated without incident.
they also had classes and corporate training ad stuff, but I guess there was too much overlap with Fry's, BestBuy and online
Well, around here I think they manage because there are no Fry's. The closest one I could find is an 11 hour drive away.
Flip through this RS catalog from 1975 to see what I'm talking about
Well, now I know where I got all those Christmas presents from. I counted at least a half-dozen things I had as a kid.
Makes sense. If Russia really decides to push into non-Russian territory things could get really nasty - Afghanistan 2.0. The Soviet Union couldn't handle that, and Russia is only a shadow of the former superpower.
Obama just declared the Russian intervention to be illegal. So what? Who's going to challenge him? Is the US going to go to war over the Crimean peninsula, when a large part of the population welcomes the Russian intervention and the US population as no appetite for war? Is Europe going to put in place economic sanctions on Russia when Russia supplies nearly 1/3rd of European energy?
I tend to agree. Putin cares more about being feared than loved, and the message is clear. If you're on his side and something goes wrong the troops come in to put you back in power. If you're on the other side you can look forward to his tanks rolling across your territory while your allies offer their condolences.
That said, if this really gets nasty it could turn into another Afghanistan for them. The US could avoid deploying troops locally but start handing out missiles and guns like toys, and the Russians would have a heck of a time maintaining order. That's basically what the Russians did in Vietnam and the US did in Afghanistan, and both times the occupiers left empty-handed.
The fact alone that those soldiers are unidentified makes it a war crime (As stated in the Geneva Conventions). If this ever gets to trial (ha!) and is considered war, we already have a war crime before a single shot was fired.
Agreed. Unidentified soldiers are a flagrant violation of the conventions. In theory in any combat they would not be afforded the rights of the conventions either.
That said, at least they're in some kind of uniform. That beats having people in civilian clothes mounting guerrilla attacks.
I tried using an offline bitcoin client, it took 7-8 hours to sync to the network before being usable, and it took 7-8 gigabytes harddisk.
Most people probably downloaded the offline client, waited for it to be usable, and after 3-4 hours it was still "Syncing - 7 of transactions weeks left", at which point they gave up and created an online wallet.
I think that is a fundamental challenge with the design of Bitcoin. I don't think you can give or receive a single penny without having a record of every penny that was ever transferred from one person to another over the entire history of Bitcoin. It only sort-of works today because nobody uses it.
Imagine if the only way to give somebody a dollar was to have a record of everyplace every dollar in circulation since the 1700s has been?
Computers can store a lot of data, but I imagine at some point transaction fees are going to rise to cover the 20TB database storage costs.
Yeah, but you could probably sort it descending by unit price, and the most expensive item would be suitable for use in a space probe and probably still be cheaper than what Radio Shack would want. Or just hit page down once and find really nice stuff for a reasonable price. If the specs aren't demanding you don't need to worry about whether it is pulse-withstanding, flame-retardant, moisture-resistant, and kills zombies in a 5' radius.
Micro Center's main issue is that they don't have many stores, but yes, they're just what I'd want Radio Shack to be. They will price match with Amazon/Newegg/etc, and they sell a pretty decent selection of stuff. That is, the stuff most of us would be looking for.
No, they don't have 400 models of motherboards, but they probably have 30-40 of them. That should tell you a lot right there. They have all the usual stuff like monitors and so on.
Oh, and when you need a hard drive you can get any RPM, any grade, any capacity, any cache, and any manufacturer. It isn't best buy where they sell exactly one drive that isn't external USB 2.0. You can also buy online and do 5-min pickup.
Just don't go near them on black friday.
That being said - stocking last minute items could provide a niche. Sometimes you need a new keyboard, battery, or PSU stat, and even next day shipping isn't an option. The question is - is that a frequent enough occurrence to sustain a store?
Absolutely not. Walmart stocks enough of that stuff to fill that need. Radio Shack simply straddling multiple strategies and not doing any of them well. They are simultaneously trying to supply batteries, electrical components, cell phones, toys, and a few other niche items from small and expensive stores where it is relatively expensive and inconvenient for their customers to visit them. I honestly cannot think of anything Radio Shack sells where they would be my preferred shopping destination.
Agree, and the more they try to do it all, the more they just turn into Walmart. You CANNOT complete against Walmart in the category of general merchandise. Only one or two retailers can manage it, and Radio Shack will never be one of them. Even Best Buy is on the verge of collapse, and they're far ahead of Radio Shack on that front.
Radio Shack has to offer something you can't get at Walmart. I'm sorry, but cell phones and accessories aren't one of those things, and neither are cheap toys.
Sure those of us that know how can install a posix userspace and get a Linux shell.
There is no such thing as a "linux shell." Linux is just an OS kernel, and any OS that uses it is running "linux."
What you're really talking about is a POSIX userspace with X11, etc. That isn't Android, and it isn't Tivo, and it isn't 80% of all the other devices running Linux.
Your typical Ubuntu distro / etc is really a small subset of the Linux world.