That's where the First Sale Doctrine comes from: book publishers tried to slap EULAs on books around the turn of the 20th century that, among other things, prohibited resale. The courts found that these EULAs are non-binding.
We've already been through this bullshit once before, or at least our ancestors have.
Maybe I'm feeling particularly crabby this morning, but when will people just start taking responsibility for their actions?
Never, at least not in the way you want. As people, we don't work like that. It's not our nature.
Now, we have two choices: we can either discuss the rules we would make it people acted in the rational, self-interested way you want, or we can talk about ways to make the real world, with real, flawed people a better place. Me, I'd opt for the latter. Complaining that people just don't take responsibility for their actions is just wishing you were living in a dream world.
GNU Calc (runs inside Emacs) is also an RPN calculator, and it's actually damn good:
Choice of algebraic or RPN (stack-based) entry of calculations.
Arbitrary precision integers and floating-point numbers.
Arithmetic on rational numbers, complex numbers (rectangular and polar), error forms with standard deviations, open and closed intervals, vectors and matrices, dates and times, infinities, sets, quantities with units, and algebraic formulas.
Mathematical operations such as logarithms and trigonometric functions.
Programmer's features (bitwise operations, non-decimal numbers).
Financial functions such as future value and internal rate of return.
Number theoretical features such as prime factorization and arithmetic modulo M for any M.
Algebraic manipulation features, including symbolic calculus.
Moving data to and from regular editing buffers.
"Embedded mode" for manipulating Calc formulas and data directly inside any editing buffer.
Graphics using GNUPLOT, a versatile (and free) plotting program.
Easy programming using keyboard macros, algebraic formulas, algebraic rewrite rules, or extended Emacs Lisp.
Jobless, middle-aged PG&E workers can't become DSP programmers overnight
Why shouldn't middle-aged workers be able to enroll in a college, university, or vocational program just like a younger person? Yes, they might have family to support, but the government ought to provide an income replacement program for people out of work due to the kind of structural unemployment you describe. This subsidy would support them while they retrain. (I imagine it'd be based on the number of years of previous work experience and on previous income, like a pension, but with a limited duration.)
This program would be good for the economy, and good for the conscience.
The bankers plan to buy "life settlements," life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash -- $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to "securitize" these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.
The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return -- though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.
Keep in mind that these things will be securitized, tranched, and then the pieces will be securitized and tranched, greatly magnifying the risk. On top of that, there will be a new, brisk trade in various hedges on these instruments, including the infamous credit default swaps. In this way, a tiny diseases market can metastasize throughout the economy.
Between these revived, yet still pernicious models and Wall Street's darling new death bonds, we look poised to blow another bubble, destroy another decade of growth, and funnel more money into the hands of the obscenely wealthy when the system flies apart.
We cannot allow that to happen. Finance needs to be returned to a staid utility that forms a relatively minor part of our economy. We need to be deeply skeptical of innovation in the financial sector: it's been around for a long time, and we've already explored most of the beneficial ideas. What remains is deception and fraud.
Oh, of course. Plus, you need the server-side infrastructure to keep the hashes current and to ensure that everyone that refers to a given resource refers to the latest version. That doesn't come for free. Still, when the system works, it's elegant and quite efficient.
By the way: you don't necessarily need a content-length header. You can use chunked encoding instead. If the script encounters an error, can you close the connection without sending the terminating chunk, which will (or at least should) cause browsers to act just like they'd received a bogus content-length header.
Just use the classic mode for everything --- discussions, comments, and so on --- and spare yourself the worst of it. Just change your settings. (And while you're at it, nuke Idle from orbit, just to be sure.)
Or better yet, set resources to never expire, and instead incorporate a hash of the resource into the name of the resource. That way, clients can cache each resource forever, but will automatically get the new version when the resource changes.
Little-to-no caching is just crazy on eBay's part.
The problem with caching is cache coherency. For some applications, like a search engine or a classifieds listing site, that doesn't matter much. But because eBay's auctioning needs shared state for each product offered, and because that sharing needs to be immediate and precise (it's an auction, after all), there's not much that caching buys you.
Of course, the solution is to use partitioning to increase performance, since different products listed on eBay don't need to know about each other. But that's orthogonal to caching.
The amount of snake oil and outright fraud in web site services (including development) is truly phenomenal. We haven't seen these levels of sleaze since the era of patent medicines and dubious sausages at the end of the 19th century. Not even the financial industry is this filthy. At least in that case, people died, which spurred government to regulate the hell out of industry. Will we finally see some professional accreditation in the software (including web!) development world?
Remember the Sokal Affair, where a physicist submitted a nonsense article to a humanities journal to see whether there was any substance to the field? His paper was accepted, and there wasn't. I wonder how susceptible Slashdot would be to the same kind of made-up nonsense.
The problem is that there is a huge disparity in power between employers and employees. You, as an employee, are expendable in the vast majority of circumstances. Some person more desperate than you will take your job. All your boss loses is the time he's put into training you. You, on the other hand, lose your shirt.
Or, you know, you could live in France, work seven hours a day, and actually have time to enjoy life. I don't want my tombstone to read "He died at his desk".
True, you do need water. But coincidentally, most places with human habitation, thus a need for power, already have water. Besides: the reactor uses and returns the water (except in the Palo Verde model), so it's not as if a "metric stonkload" is actually lost or consumed.
We're supposed to take you seriously when you Randomly capitalize words and can't even figure out how to form plurals in the English language?
Predictably, you tried to deflect the Nuclear Industries responsibilities.
There is no power generation system that's good. There are only ones that are less bad. Your thinking is mired deep in the environmental's fallacy. You fail to consider relative badness.
How predicable you are, don't let the science or facts get in the way of good propaganda. spin spin spin shill shill shill
Still projecting, huh? My science is perfectly valid. We've already demonstrated that you are willing to lie and exaggerate your unsourced figures. (A "million" pounds --- right.)
The FACT is CFC114 is used.
In amounts small enough to be negligible, in one obsolete plant that's due for retirement. It's not an intrinsic part of enrichment. You can slathering a wind turbine with turpentine: that doesn't mean wind turbines in general requires dangerous solvents.
As for ozone depletion --- you realize the situation has much improved over the past decade, right? Controls on most uses of CFCs have worked.
UNDERGROUND, as in under the ground, as in below ground level, get it?
That won't satisfy people like you. You'll complain about possible contamination of the water table or somesuch. After all, if storing waste underground isn't good enough for you, a full-fledged reactor certainly won't be. Besides: building underground would make the reactor prohibitively expensive for very little additional safety. It's on par with building concrete walls a mile thing, and you irrational mind won't accept that there's an inherent tradeoff.
Again, statements without any substance. Clearly your predictable, mundane, recycled rhetoric illustrates that your mind is mired by 50's thinking. If you decide to respond, please, do bring an *actual* argument.
At least we were forward-looking in the 1950. You, by contrast, are mired in 1812.
You said: It produces zero emissions when in reality it produces isotope emissions.
What isotope emissions? We've already established that the noble gas products are retained, and not released into the atmosphere. Of course, there might be minor coolant leaks or somesuch, but the total volume won't make a dent in the background radiation. There's not enough to matter, so for all intents and purposes, a reactor does produce zero emissions.
What you're doing is equivalent to claiming that an electric car produces emissions because some owners might have flatulence while driving. It's ridiculous, and only a hack like you would try to steer the argument in that direction.
I know it's ad hominem, but it's so delicious that I can't resist: the verb you're looking for is "to lose". I somehow doubt that "to loose" is what you intended.
Anyway, back to the substance of your hit piece:
You're bringing out the terrorism card? You're not even trying to fear-monger subtly. Nuclear reactor resistance to terrorism has been analyzed to death. Some particular designs might be vulnerability to some specific attacks, sure. That's a good reason to reinforce those particular designs. It's not an attack on nuclear power in general. Or are we supposed to abstain from any technology that might conceivably be used to hurt someone via terrorism? If so, we're back to the wheel and fire --- actually, scratch fire.
As for your criticism of the Westinghouse reactor: you might have a point about that reactor. Fine. But you're committing an error of faulty generalization here in supposing that your arguments apply to nuclear power in general.
Or are you claiming that because there are issues to resolve with this particular design, it's impossible to to design a safe reactor? That's clearly nonsensical, though since you're not arguing in good faith but rather trying to intimidate lay people, that's precisely the fear you want to create.
Also, your focus on "cutting costs" is also disingenuous. Sometimes additional expenditures aren't justified by the increase in safety. Cutting features that don't improve safety much in order to cut costs isn't evil: it's engineering. Do you propose surrounding all power plants in one mile of concrete and putting them in Antarctica for safety, cost be damned? You have a neat trick there: no matter how safe a design is, the designers can make it safer. Because they obviously stop adding safety features for reasons of fiscal and physical practicality, you can claim they're cutting corners to reduce costs no matter how safe the design.
As for Mox: see terrorism, above.
Lastly, you statement about the risk is entirely fallacious and is designed, again, purely to elicit an emotional response. From the point of view of risk analysis, the distinction between natural and artificial events is irrelevant. Their distribution can be analyzed the same way. And as for the juvenile "well, they said it was safe and LOOK WHAT HAPPENED" argument: you ignore the very real technological progress that's been made in the last 50 years, our much-improved mathematical modeling tools, our computer models, and that we are not an ostensibly-communist authoritarian empire with no regard for safety or human life.
Besides: if you want experience, simply observe that the French do not, in fact, glow in the dark.
Slashdot Mirror
That's where the First Sale Doctrine comes from: book publishers tried to slap EULAs on books around the turn of the 20th century that, among other things, prohibited resale. The courts found that these EULAs are non-binding.
We've already been through this bullshit once before, or at least our ancestors have.
That crap should be illegal. We, like the Europeans, ought to have a single charger standard for everyone.
Never, at least not in the way you want. As people, we don't work like that. It's not our nature.
Now, we have two choices: we can either discuss the rules we would make it people acted in the rational, self-interested way you want, or we can talk about ways to make the real world, with real, flawed people a better place. Me, I'd opt for the latter. Complaining that people just don't take responsibility for their actions is just wishing you were living in a dream world.
Clearly, the problem isn't with the idea, but with the label: it should say which thing contains carcinogens so that you can avoid the problem.
Why? Has math changed, or merely your expectations?
Your point being what, exactly? Newer isn't necessarily better. The TI89 is exactly powerful enough for what it needs to do.
GNU Calc (runs inside Emacs) is also an RPN calculator, and it's actually damn good:
polar), error forms with standard deviations, open and closed
intervals, vectors and matrices, dates and times, infinities,
sets, quantities with units, and algebraic formulas.
arithmetic modulo M for any M.
inside any editing buffer.
algebraic rewrite rules, or extended Emacs Lisp.
Why shouldn't middle-aged workers be able to enroll in a college, university, or vocational program just like a younger person? Yes, they might have family to support, but the government ought to provide an income replacement program for people out of work due to the kind of structural unemployment you describe. This subsidy would support them while they retrain. (I imagine it'd be based on the number of years of previous work experience and on previous income, like a pension, but with a limited duration.)
This program would be good for the economy, and good for the conscience.
Really?
Send me a GPG-encrypted bill.
Corret one.
Keep in mind that these things will be securitized, tranched, and then the pieces will be securitized and tranched, greatly magnifying the risk. On top of that, there will be a new, brisk trade in various hedges on these instruments, including the infamous credit default swaps. In this way, a tiny diseases market can metastasize throughout the economy.
Between these revived, yet still pernicious models and Wall Street's darling new death bonds, we look poised to blow another bubble, destroy another decade of growth, and funnel more money into the hands of the obscenely wealthy when the system flies apart.
We cannot allow that to happen. Finance needs to be returned to a staid utility that forms a relatively minor part of our economy. We need to be deeply skeptical of innovation in the financial sector: it's been around for a long time, and we've already explored most of the beneficial ideas. What remains is deception and fraud.
Oh, of course. Plus, you need the server-side infrastructure to keep the hashes current and to ensure that everyone that refers to a given resource refers to the latest version. That doesn't come for free. Still, when the system works, it's elegant and quite efficient.
By the way: you don't necessarily need a content-length header. You can use chunked encoding instead. If the script encounters an error, can you close the connection without sending the terminating chunk, which will (or at least should) cause browsers to act just like they'd received a bogus content-length header.
Jokes about standards, however, seem to be rigidly standardized.
Just use the classic mode for everything --- discussions, comments, and so on --- and spare yourself the worst of it. Just change your settings. (And while you're at it, nuke Idle from orbit, just to be sure.)
Or better yet, set resources to never expire, and instead incorporate a hash of the resource into the name of the resource. That way, clients can cache each resource forever, but will automatically get the new version when the resource changes.
The problem with caching is cache coherency. For some applications, like a search engine or a classifieds listing site, that doesn't matter much. But because eBay's auctioning needs shared state for each product offered, and because that sharing needs to be immediate and precise (it's an auction, after all), there's not much that caching buys you.
Of course, the solution is to use partitioning to increase performance, since different products listed on eBay don't need to know about each other. But that's orthogonal to caching.
The amount of snake oil and outright fraud in web site services (including development) is truly phenomenal. We haven't seen these levels of sleaze since the era of patent medicines and dubious sausages at the end of the 19th century. Not even the financial industry is this filthy. At least in that case, people died, which spurred government to regulate the hell out of industry. Will we finally see some professional accreditation in the software (including web!) development world?
Remember the Sokal Affair, where a physicist submitted a nonsense article to a humanities journal to see whether there was any substance to the field? His paper was accepted, and there wasn't. I wonder how susceptible Slashdot would be to the same kind of made-up nonsense.
The problem is that there is a huge disparity in power between employers and employees. You, as an employee, are expendable in the vast majority of circumstances. Some person more desperate than you will take your job. All your boss loses is the time he's put into training you. You, on the other hand, lose your shirt.
Or, you know, you could live in France, work seven hours a day, and actually have time to enjoy life. I don't want my tombstone to read "He died at his desk".
Tasers cause brain damage.
True, you do need water. But coincidentally, most places with human habitation, thus a need for power, already have water. Besides: the reactor uses and returns the water (except in the Palo Verde model), so it's not as if a "metric stonkload" is actually lost or consumed.
We're supposed to take you seriously when you Randomly capitalize words and can't even figure out how to form plurals in the English language?
There is no power generation system that's good. There are only ones that are less bad. Your thinking is mired deep in the environmental's fallacy. You fail to consider relative badness.
Still projecting, huh? My science is perfectly valid. We've already demonstrated that you are willing to lie and exaggerate your unsourced figures. (A "million" pounds --- right.)
In amounts small enough to be negligible, in one obsolete plant that's due for retirement. It's not an intrinsic part of enrichment. You can slathering a wind turbine with turpentine: that doesn't mean wind turbines in general requires dangerous solvents.
As for ozone depletion --- you realize the situation has much improved over the past decade, right? Controls on most uses of CFCs have worked.
That won't satisfy people like you. You'll complain about possible contamination of the water table or somesuch. After all, if storing waste underground isn't good enough for you, a full-fledged reactor certainly won't be. Besides: building underground would make the reactor prohibitively expensive for very little additional safety. It's on par with building concrete walls a mile thing, and you irrational mind won't accept that there's an inherent tradeoff.
At least we were forward-looking in the 1950. You, by contrast, are mired in 1812.
What isotope emissions? We've already established that the noble gas products are retained, and not released into the atmosphere. Of course, there might be minor coolant leaks or somesuch, but the total volume won't make a dent in the background radiation. There's not enough to matter, so for all intents and purposes, a reactor does produce zero emissions.
What you're doing is equivalent to claiming that an electric car produces emissions because some owners might have flatulence while driving. It's ridiculous, and only a hack like you would try to steer the argument in that direction.
I know it's ad hominem, but it's so delicious that I can't resist: the verb you're looking for is "to lose". I somehow doubt that "to loose" is what you intended.
Anyway, back to the substance of your hit piece:
You're bringing out the terrorism card? You're not even trying to fear-monger subtly. Nuclear reactor resistance to terrorism has been analyzed to death. Some particular designs might be vulnerability to some specific attacks, sure. That's a good reason to reinforce those particular designs. It's not an attack on nuclear power in general. Or are we supposed to abstain from any technology that might conceivably be used to hurt someone via terrorism? If so, we're back to the wheel and fire --- actually, scratch fire.
As for your criticism of the Westinghouse reactor: you might have a point about that reactor. Fine. But you're committing an error of faulty generalization here in supposing that your arguments apply to nuclear power in general.
Or are you claiming that because there are issues to resolve with this particular design, it's impossible to to design a safe reactor? That's clearly nonsensical, though since you're not arguing in good faith but rather trying to intimidate lay people, that's precisely the fear you want to create.
Also, your focus on "cutting costs" is also disingenuous. Sometimes additional expenditures aren't justified by the increase in safety. Cutting features that don't improve safety much in order to cut costs isn't evil: it's engineering. Do you propose surrounding all power plants in one mile of concrete and putting them in Antarctica for safety, cost be damned? You have a neat trick there: no matter how safe a design is, the designers can make it safer. Because they obviously stop adding safety features for reasons of fiscal and physical practicality, you can claim they're cutting corners to reduce costs no matter how safe the design.
As for Mox: see terrorism, above.
Lastly, you statement about the risk is entirely fallacious and is designed, again, purely to elicit an emotional response. From the point of view of risk analysis, the distinction between natural and artificial events is irrelevant. Their distribution can be analyzed the same way. And as for the juvenile "well, they said it was safe and LOOK WHAT HAPPENED" argument: you ignore the very real technological progress that's been made in the last 50 years, our much-improved mathematical modeling tools, our computer models, and that we are not an ostensibly-communist authoritarian empire with no regard for safety or human life.
Besides: if you want experience, simply observe that the French do not, in fact, glow in the dark.