Before, though, there wasn't even any definitive proof anyone had died. I thought that was kind of a prerequisite for charging someone with murder.
Not in any state that I know of. Otherwise, the only thing you'd need to do to get away with murder is dispose of the body.
Poison someone, dump them in the ocean with a rock tied to their ankle, and poof. No murder, right?
That's not the way our legal system works. A missing person, another person who was their known last contact, poison residue on their hands, a poison bottle in their possession, a car that's got sand from a particular beach on its tires, clothing fibers from clothing the victim was known to own in the car, receipts for rope, a blindfold and other tools in the murderer's possession, existence of a motive... that's enough circumstantial evidence to arrest and probably convict somebody in any state in this country.
But things change over time... is AVG still a good free AVG prog?
No. Though I'm still searching for an alternative myself.
AVG used to be fast and simple, that's why people used it. The last version used 14MB worth of memory with everything turned on. The current version used close to 100MB on my machine - that is absolutely ludicrous. *That* is why I uninstalled it, not even because of LinkScanner.
It also had a ridiculous habit of trying to download updates before my machine was connected to the internet whenever I woke it from hibernation, resulting in a "download failed" message and forcing me to manually download the update. Every single day. AVG 7 never had this problem.
I'm now using avast but I'm not particularly happy with it either. Memory footprint of about 60MB and with the "standard" scanner on, it causes annoying lags and hitches even as I'm typing this. If I turn this off, though, Windows complains that I'm unprotected (as it did when turning off LinkScanner in AVG).
What I want is a free virus scanner that takes up 15MB of RAM or less, and that doesn't kill my performance. I really just want AVG 7 back. (And before you tell me to just install it again, you can't - they don't provide virus definitions for it anymore.)
One could always just turn the link scanner off. It requires the clicking of a button, if thats not to hard?
The real problem with this is that Windows then complains that you're not protected. To any average user, that's going to look scary.
The only way to not use linkscanner with AVG 8 and not have Windows complain was to use a command line installer with the option to install it turned off. Obviously, not something most average users are going to do.
Repairing a computer is much more likely to produce evidence against someone.
I would argue that firing a gun is much more likely to produce evidence against someone than repairing a computer will, but you don't need any kind of license for that in Texas.
We should get rid of cigarette taxes altogether, IMHO. It's a great idea in theory but why the hell should the Government be regulating what I do with my body?
Because what you do with your body ends up costing the government a lot of money in the long run... and by extension all the rest of us who choose *not* to engage in such risky behavior.
Why should I be forced to pay higher health insurance premiums and taxes because you get lung cancer, diabetes or emphysema that's directly related to your smoking? With 48 million Americans having no insurance, in many cases the government ends up having to pay 100% of your health care costs (public hospitals cannot refuse urgent care based on insurance).
What Japan is doing is their attempt at keeping the system fair. It's *not* fair for a few idiots who choose to smoke and get fat to screw it up for everybody else who lives a healthy life. Japan's got rising obesity rates just like everywhere else, though they're still relatively thin so they're trying to nip it in the bud before it gets out of control.
Also, Japan's system of universal health care is a little different than most countries' and I find it odd that nobody in the United States ever refers to it when we talk of instituting universal health care here. It is a hybrid government/private system. All citizens are *required* to have insurance, but how they get that insurance can vary. Most people have it through their employer, who get it from private agencies that are regulated by the government. Those who don't have insurance through work can sign up for government-provided insurance at very low rates. But it's mandatory that you have it, whether employed or not. This has helped keep costs down.
(I can hear the gasps now - it's the *law* that they have to have insurance, but they still have to get it and pay for it themselves?? Yeah... do you own a car? Then you know the system.)
These waistline regulations are akin to what many private insurance agencies do in this country. The difference in Japan is it's a centralized regulation and there's no secret about it - there's no hidden list of thousands of conditions that will get you kicked off your health insurance policy if your insurance company finds out.
I do agree with those that say the regulation is too tight (literally and figuratively). 33.5" is pretty thin even in Japan, if that's the number you're expecting *everybody* to stay below.
Seriously... if Obama were as amazing as we were supposed to believe he is, it would be more than enough to promote his virtues rather than trying to smear the opponent. Guess Obama isn't all that great stuff.
So your argument is that one misguided follower serves as an indictment of Obama himself?
I'm sure you could dredge up plenty of assholes on McCain's side too. Here's one now.
So I'm guessing your vote in November will be "none of the above"? Or possibly Montgomery Brewster? (Bonus points if you get the reference.)
Everybody's got idiot followers with misguided ideas about how to promote them.
And carbon based energy sources are financially sustainable when you factor in the costs of global warming, food shortages, sea-level rise and increased disease?
No form of energy production is financially sustainable on its own. That's partly the point. You're just substituting one set of problems for another, and in the end you're back in the same boat. Only you realize it *after* having spent $40 billion or whatever on building all these reactors. (And I suspect the costs would be much higher, because nobody wants to live within 20 miles of a nuclear plant... and that drives property values down, which in turn affects property tax revenues. These hidden costs are ongoing, and over the life of a reactor probably add up to an enormous amount that's far greater than the initial outlay to build the reactor.)
Nobody would argue that the solution to our energy problems is to do nothing. But nuclear power is no cheaper than coal or oil when all of its costs are factored in, and it has a lot of other problems that sources like solar and wind don't. (Of course, they have problems that nuclear doesn't too, but I'd still rather have a bunch of ugly windmills on a hill nearby than a nuclear power plant or a nuclear waste site.)
And it's funny to see people say things like "oh, Chernobyl wasn't that bad... it's only been 20 years and it's almost inhabitable again!" Great. Tell that to New York City when Indian Point blows a proverbial gasket and spews radioactivity all over the area. What do you think would happen to our economy in the case of a single accident that affects a large metropolitan area? Indian Point is notorious for safety lapses and poor maintenance (including radiation leaks) and I see no reason to expect that any new nuclear reactors would fare any better.
I'm no expert and I don't know if this helps any, but there definitely is more info out there on how this supposedly works. It's not some big mystery. Maybe some of you guys can deconstruct whether or not this is possible from the info at this link: http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080613/153276/
It is basically a water-based fuel cell, and it's supposedly using technology that already exists - it's just able to produce energy for a longer time than current fuel cells.
It doesn't seem like "free energy" - there are obviously costs involved with a fuel cell system - but it would be a major improvement in all areas over a standard combustion engine. Whether it would compete with plug-in electric cars, I don't know. Whether it's even possible, I don't know either, but the point is there are a lot more details out there to look at than just what's in the "non-critical" Reuters summary that we're all being pointed to here.
The only explanation is that all countries get a lot of money from drug dealers. Either that or the people governing us are complete retards.
Or maybe governments just don't think it's a very good idea for people to be homebrewing dangerous narcotics. Yes, it *is* possible to overdose on morphine, which is derived from the poppy plant. Continuous use even of smaller doses can cause all sorts of problems, some of which are not particularly pleasant to even talk about, much less experience (as I know first-hand). A doctor still needs to prescribe the correct dosage and manage its use and *somebody* needs to actually ensure that the correct dose is being dispensed.
You could say "well, then let doctors grow the plants and refine the medicine, at least cut out the middle man" - but I doubt most doctors would be all that interested. For one thing, it puts liability for any drug-related problems onto them. Right now, if somebody dispenses the wrong dosage - if a pill that's labeled 60mg actually contains 600mg, for example - that's not the doctor's fault. Do you think doctors would be interested in *making* it their fault?
No matter how you think about it, if you don't want a whole bunch of dead people lying around along with a whole bunch of corresponding new lawsuits against doctors who are just trying to care for their patients winding their way through the courts, then some outside entity needs to actually be refining and dispensing these drugs. In our system, that's the pharmaceutical company and the pharmacist. These are specialized jobs; they're not something just anyone can or should do.
If I take the wrong dosage of my medication (Inderal LA), my brain doesn't get enough blood, my heart eventually stops and I die. Do you think I want to be refining my own Inderal? Hell no. And honestly, nobody else should be doing so either, however libertarian your views are. If such a practice became widespread, the result would be absolute chaos in the health care system and a whole lot of unnecessary and fully preventable deaths.
This is not to say there aren't serious problems with our system for dispensing prescription drugs to those who need them. But the existence of specialists who actually know what they're doing and highly precise machines designed for the specific purpose of refining drugs are not among those problems.
If each person in a large demographic group spent $15,000 on some ridiculous and unnecessary item - say some rare Cabbage Patch Kids - and all of the the sudden the market for that ridiculous and unnecessary thing fell through the floor, could you never possibly laugh at the situation or remark on how stupid they were in the first place?
And why do you automatically think SUV's are "ridiculous" or "unnecessary"?
As the post itself points out, there will always be a market for SUV's, because SUV's are necessary. SUV's have existed at least since the days of the first commercial Jeep, and probably before that.
In my area during winter, we've regularly got a foot of snow on the ground. We get hurricanes, we get all sorts of extreme weather. Our roads even in the best of times can't take the strain. An SUV is really the only practical vehicle to own in these sorts of situations. No, not as your *only* vehicle, but as one of them. And that's not even counting the carrying and/or towing capacity.
Yes, there are *some* ridiculous SUV's (Escalade, anyone?) and it's probably good that they no longer lead the sales chart. But to assume that all SUV's are unnecessary and that everyone who bought one is "stupid" is no different than thinking anyone who bought a house 3 years ago was stupid - some people buy things because they need them.
While his quote is different than what people boil it down to (nobody will ever need more than 640k, or whatever), it meant the same thing.
It hardly meant the same thing.
First of all, it's a guy looking back in hindsight to talk about how he felt at an earlier point in time. It is *not* somebody trying to predict the future. Predicting the future *always* makes people look foolish, because they're bound to be wrong a large percentage of the time. So changing the quote from looking at the past to looking at the future is a setup from the getgo.
Second, he didn't make it a Marie Antoinette-like "let them eat cake" statement (and I realize the irony in the reference - she didn't say that either), which was also obviously set up to make him look like a jerk. He said he felt like he was making decisions that could last for a while, and then was surprised at the *speed* with which his designs were made obsolete.
Third, and related to that, in your quote he did not say he ever thought 640k would be "enough" forever. He was purely talking about the speed of technological advance, not whether technology would advance. That is a huge distinction. The bastardized quote makes him sound like a luddite, which he most assuredly isn't. The real quote makes it clear that he *expected* 640k to be eclipsed; it was just a matter of timing.
Yet you are comparing it to the IBM model M. When that model was out over 20 years ago [wikipedia.org]. A cheap keyboard was over a hundred bucks back then.
Ha! I recall the Model M selling for $249. (btw, they weren't really referred to as "Model M's" back then, they were just IBM keyboards. They only had one...)
$69 is not bad if this keyboard is really as good as a Model M. Of course, I bought my Model M new in the box for $15 on Ebay a few years ago, so that's probably still a better deal. And with a real Model M, you get key caps that pop off so you can remap them how you want or just clean them more easily.
*And* with a Model M you don't have to deal with those stupid Windows keys. That's honestly one of my favorite features about the Model M.
Suspending him like this is just a way of firing him without having to deal with unemployment--you don't get unemployment if you quit, even if you quit because you were suspended without pay.
You can get unemployment if you quit. It depends on the state. I got unemployment when I quit my job in the game industry. The standard in my state (New York) is that any "reasonable person" would have done the same thing. The conditions have to be such that it would be unreasonable to expect you to continue working there.
This would be a strange case to argue - and it is all about convincing the unemployment office of your case. I actually think under the rules of my state, at least, that he'd be eligible for unemployment if he quit. He violated the Hatch Act, yes, but then they refused to fire him, which would allow him to take another job. Instead, they decided to retain him but make it so that he could not earn a living. I think the only course of action any reasonable person would take in this case would be to quit. He was not fired for cause, and he is basically being forced to quit. Therefore, at least in my state, he would be eligible for unemployment.
In America's suit-happy society those who sued him and won would find some way to enforce the collection, even if it meant getting a court-ordered seizure of assets.
In Japan, people don't go against the court. It just doesn't happen. So there's no real mechanism for dealing with it when it does.
He is testing the government right now, but they won't let it go on forever. If Japan is good at anything, it's enforcing societal rules. They just need a mechanism in place for doing it. It all has to be by the book, at least as far as the public's aware.
Of course, maybe he won't be able to either, in the long run. Who knows? I wish him luck, that's for sure.
He'll be put in jail eventually. It's not some big secret that he has all these judgments against him - he's pretty roundly despised by the mainstream for flouting society and law like that. (This is Japan, remember.)
Every once in a while you hear things out of Japan about someone finally deciding to deal with him, but then it never happens. One of these days, though, it will. And he won't like it when it does; Japan has a way of putting people in jail and forgetting about them. Not that many people ever end up there in Japan, so those that do are treated basically like non-persons from then on.
I'd think that marketing people would be all over something like this. Want to know what people really think of companies/products/people etc. look at these blackboards and learn.
The problem is 2ch is a very narrow demographic. It gets 500 million *page views* per month, but when you consider that each user of the site probably hits about 100 pages a day, that's really not that many visitors in the grand scheme. 2ch users are really, really hardcore. They're known for it; I mean this is common knowledge in Japan, the same way if you tell someone you're a Slashdot user here, they automatically form a mental picture of you (assuming they've heard of it). There are plenty of competing BBS sites that are actually more mainstream but have fewer page views because their users are not quite as... "dedicated", I guess.
I'm sure there *is* marketing going on in 2ch, but it's not mainstream marketing and never will be. And any info gathered there wouldn't be very useful because, well, it would only apply to 2ch users. And they're just not very representative of the Japanese population.
Still, I'm sure companies *do* read 2ch for instant reactions to their products, in the same way, say, a game maker in the US might read the comments on Kotaku to see reaction there. They know it's not really indicative of overall sentiment, but yeah, it's useful. But the bulk of the marketing budget still goes to TV, print, and traditional online banner ads, because that's how you reach the most people, and a fairly broad cross section of them (targeted, of course, however you'd want your message to be).
So make a little TSR program, put a download link on the USAF homepage and say "Do your patriotic duty. Be an official Air Force Cyber Officer. Install this software today."
I guarantee within 6 months you'll have about 10 million downloads from redneck hillbillies the world over (not just in the USA, either) willing to do anything to git those goddang red Chinese, as long as it doesn't involve putting their own neck in the potential line of fire.
There's no need to do this covertly. There would be many more people available to do this willingly if asked than there will be available to do it unwillingly and unknowingly.
I mean, how did the original Star Wars movie fare? Not well. How about Dirty Harry? Again, they hated it.
Who hated these movies? Neither film was recognized as the classic that they'd eventually become - most future classics aren't at the time they're released - but I don't recall many scathingly bad reviews and I can't find many at the moment either. Star Wars was considered an exciting popcorn movie - ineffectual, but fun. Dirty Harry was criticized a bit for its politics but was still called an effective thriller.
Here are Rottentomatoes' "top critics" pages on both of these films, you can read some of the original reviews there (ignore the dates, most of these were written on the movies' release):
I mean, I dunno what your standards are, but an 88% positive rating from the top critics in the land seems pretty good to me for a film that was never intended to be anything but a light-hearted space romp.
I think you need to re-evaluate what you think of movie critics. Your stance is similar to one that I think a lot of people take, and it's based on this false premise that critics like bad movies and hate good ones. I would bet that 90% of the time, critics like the same movies you do. Where I think this idea that critics are somehow out of touch with the public comes from is the fact that they do not buy into hype. If a summer blockbuster has a $100 million marketing budget, a lot of people are going to be excited about that. Some of those people will even try to convince themselves that they liked the final product, so as not to feel they've wasted all this time and energy on anticipation. (This is the same phenomenon that's been observed in studies whereby the longer someone stands in line, the longer they're willing to keep standing in line, so as not to have wasted their time standing in line.)
Critics are trained specifically to ignore hype and judge a film purely on its merits. That means *good* blockbuster films, like the original Star Wars, do get good reviews. It also means *bad* blockbuster films, like, say, Wild Wild West, get bad reviews - even if they make hundreds of millions of dollars in box office and garner their share of fans at the time of their release. We all know that film's crap now, but the critics were ahead of the public in figuring it out. That's their job.
I'd also argue that not all classic films are really great films by any objective or even most subjective measures - go watch Dirty Harry again and tell me what's good about it. I'll tell you what's good about it: Clint Eastwood and the character that he creates. That's why the film endures today. Without him and without that character, the film would be just another cookie-cutter thriller. But critics don't review characters; they review films.
Anyway, enough of my rant. You should listen to critics if they don't like the latest Indiana Jones film, because they're looking past how cool it is to have Indiana Jones back on screen and instead reviewing the film. And they've generally got pretty much the same tastes as everybody else.
Indeed, I could almost guarantee that without the original Star Wars pedigree, Phantom Menace would never have been greenlit in the first place and would *certainly* not have been released in its existing form. It would have been reworked, re-shot and probably still eventually shelved, then dumped straight to DVD assuming it was greenlit in the first place.
Can you see the pitch now?
Lucas: "It's a film about trade disputes and tax reform... in space!"
Unless the Chinese asked were older than 65, they are unlikely to even know what it's like without government "control". It's akin to asking a wild mustang if he likes horseshoes.
On the other hand, if that wild mustang gets all the food it can eat, has owners that groom it regularly and let it have free run of the ranch, then why should it want a life without horseshoes?
Westerners, and especially Americans, seem to have a really difficult time understanding other cultures, and specifically cultures where authority is still trusted to do the right thing. You saw in the news just over the past few weeks how shocked we seem to have been by the fact that Chinese citizens actually came out to protest in favor of their government on the issue of Tibet as it relates to the Olympic torch relay - the tone of the news reports was "what's wrong with these people?" Well, there's nothing wrong with them. Under their present government, the vast majority of Chinese live in peace, their economy is growing at 8-10% per year, they're about to host the most prestigious sporting event in the world, etc. etc. Beyond those abstracts, personal wealth is at levels never before seen in China.
Why shouldn't they trust the government? The government seems to have done pretty well for them - unlike our "democratically elected" government that can barely manage 1-2% growth, gets us involved in unnecessary foreign wars and has presided over a doubling of gas prices and foreclosures in the last year. Given warrantless wiretapping, detention without trial of "enemy combatants", the movement towards prison sentences (even life sentences) for copyright violations, not to mention the Patriot Act, I would argue that we really don't have a hell of a lot more freedom than they do either. Yeah, so they've got an internet firewall. But my bet is they don't have stormtroopers knocking down their doors if they say the words "ammonium nitrate" over the phone and it gets flagged as a keyword in some NSA remote listening database.
Which side is more "brainwashed"?
We've simply learned to distrust government based on how non-functional and even harmful our own is. Well, theirs (like most of the world's) actually works pretty well for the vast majority of the country, so they've learned the opposite lesson.
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Before, though, there wasn't even any definitive proof anyone had died. I thought that was kind of a prerequisite for charging someone with murder.
Not in any state that I know of. Otherwise, the only thing you'd need to do to get away with murder is dispose of the body.
Poison someone, dump them in the ocean with a rock tied to their ankle, and poof. No murder, right?
That's not the way our legal system works. A missing person, another person who was their known last contact, poison residue on their hands, a poison bottle in their possession, a car that's got sand from a particular beach on its tires, clothing fibers from clothing the victim was known to own in the car, receipts for rope, a blindfold and other tools in the murderer's possession, existence of a motive... that's enough circumstantial evidence to arrest and probably convict somebody in any state in this country.
I mean, he knew where the body was buried.
Lucky guess!
But things change over time... is AVG still a good free AVG prog?
No. Though I'm still searching for an alternative myself.
AVG used to be fast and simple, that's why people used it. The last version used 14MB worth of memory with everything turned on. The current version used close to 100MB on my machine - that is absolutely ludicrous. *That* is why I uninstalled it, not even because of LinkScanner.
It also had a ridiculous habit of trying to download updates before my machine was connected to the internet whenever I woke it from hibernation, resulting in a "download failed" message and forcing me to manually download the update. Every single day. AVG 7 never had this problem.
I'm now using avast but I'm not particularly happy with it either. Memory footprint of about 60MB and with the "standard" scanner on, it causes annoying lags and hitches even as I'm typing this. If I turn this off, though, Windows complains that I'm unprotected (as it did when turning off LinkScanner in AVG).
What I want is a free virus scanner that takes up 15MB of RAM or less, and that doesn't kill my performance. I really just want AVG 7 back. (And before you tell me to just install it again, you can't - they don't provide virus definitions for it anymore.)
One could always just turn the link scanner off. It requires the clicking of a button, if thats not to hard?
The real problem with this is that Windows then complains that you're not protected. To any average user, that's going to look scary.
The only way to not use linkscanner with AVG 8 and not have Windows complain was to use a command line installer with the option to install it turned off. Obviously, not something most average users are going to do.
It was a bad idea, plain and simple.
Or use disinfecting wipes, which are made specifically for this purpose.
Doesn't anybody watch TV ads anymore??
Seriously, though, this is like asking "my windows are really dirty, is there any product out there that can clean them??"
Repairing a computer is much more likely to produce evidence against someone.
I would argue that firing a gun is much more likely to produce evidence against someone than repairing a computer will, but you don't need any kind of license for that in Texas.
What I find ironic is that on the second page of this story about responding to spam and pop-ups, I got... wait for it... a pop-up.
We should get rid of cigarette taxes altogether, IMHO. It's a great idea in theory but why the hell should the Government be regulating what I do with my body?
Because what you do with your body ends up costing the government a lot of money in the long run... and by extension all the rest of us who choose *not* to engage in such risky behavior.
Why should I be forced to pay higher health insurance premiums and taxes because you get lung cancer, diabetes or emphysema that's directly related to your smoking? With 48 million Americans having no insurance, in many cases the government ends up having to pay 100% of your health care costs (public hospitals cannot refuse urgent care based on insurance).
What Japan is doing is their attempt at keeping the system fair. It's *not* fair for a few idiots who choose to smoke and get fat to screw it up for everybody else who lives a healthy life. Japan's got rising obesity rates just like everywhere else, though they're still relatively thin so they're trying to nip it in the bud before it gets out of control.
Also, Japan's system of universal health care is a little different than most countries' and I find it odd that nobody in the United States ever refers to it when we talk of instituting universal health care here. It is a hybrid government/private system. All citizens are *required* to have insurance, but how they get that insurance can vary. Most people have it through their employer, who get it from private agencies that are regulated by the government. Those who don't have insurance through work can sign up for government-provided insurance at very low rates. But it's mandatory that you have it, whether employed or not. This has helped keep costs down.
(I can hear the gasps now - it's the *law* that they have to have insurance, but they still have to get it and pay for it themselves?? Yeah... do you own a car? Then you know the system.)
These waistline regulations are akin to what many private insurance agencies do in this country. The difference in Japan is it's a centralized regulation and there's no secret about it - there's no hidden list of thousands of conditions that will get you kicked off your health insurance policy if your insurance company finds out.
I do agree with those that say the regulation is too tight (literally and figuratively). 33.5" is pretty thin even in Japan, if that's the number you're expecting *everybody* to stay below.
Seriously... if Obama were as amazing as we were supposed to believe he is, it would be more than enough to promote his virtues rather than trying to smear the opponent. Guess Obama isn't all that great stuff.
So your argument is that one misguided follower serves as an indictment of Obama himself?
I'm sure you could dredge up plenty of assholes on McCain's side too. Here's one now.
So I'm guessing your vote in November will be "none of the above"? Or possibly Montgomery Brewster? (Bonus points if you get the reference.)
Everybody's got idiot followers with misguided ideas about how to promote them.
And carbon based energy sources are financially sustainable when you factor in the costs of global warming, food shortages, sea-level rise and increased disease?
No form of energy production is financially sustainable on its own. That's partly the point. You're just substituting one set of problems for another, and in the end you're back in the same boat. Only you realize it *after* having spent $40 billion or whatever on building all these reactors. (And I suspect the costs would be much higher, because nobody wants to live within 20 miles of a nuclear plant... and that drives property values down, which in turn affects property tax revenues. These hidden costs are ongoing, and over the life of a reactor probably add up to an enormous amount that's far greater than the initial outlay to build the reactor.)
Nobody would argue that the solution to our energy problems is to do nothing. But nuclear power is no cheaper than coal or oil when all of its costs are factored in, and it has a lot of other problems that sources like solar and wind don't. (Of course, they have problems that nuclear doesn't too, but I'd still rather have a bunch of ugly windmills on a hill nearby than a nuclear power plant or a nuclear waste site.)
And it's funny to see people say things like "oh, Chernobyl wasn't that bad... it's only been 20 years and it's almost inhabitable again!" Great. Tell that to New York City when Indian Point blows a proverbial gasket and spews radioactivity all over the area. What do you think would happen to our economy in the case of a single accident that affects a large metropolitan area? Indian Point is notorious for safety lapses and poor maintenance (including radiation leaks) and I see no reason to expect that any new nuclear reactors would fare any better.
The only way to blow up a nuclear power plant is to pack it full of TNT.
I'm sure the former residents of Pripyat, Ukraine would be relieved to hear that.
I'm no expert and I don't know if this helps any, but there definitely is more info out there on how this supposedly works. It's not some big mystery. Maybe some of you guys can deconstruct whether or not this is possible from the info at this link: http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080613/153276/
It is basically a water-based fuel cell, and it's supposedly using technology that already exists - it's just able to produce energy for a longer time than current fuel cells.
It doesn't seem like "free energy" - there are obviously costs involved with a fuel cell system - but it would be a major improvement in all areas over a standard combustion engine. Whether it would compete with plug-in electric cars, I don't know. Whether it's even possible, I don't know either, but the point is there are a lot more details out there to look at than just what's in the "non-critical" Reuters summary that we're all being pointed to here.
The only explanation is that all countries get a lot of money from drug dealers. Either that or the people governing us are complete retards.
Or maybe governments just don't think it's a very good idea for people to be homebrewing dangerous narcotics. Yes, it *is* possible to overdose on morphine, which is derived from the poppy plant. Continuous use even of smaller doses can cause all sorts of problems, some of which are not particularly pleasant to even talk about, much less experience (as I know first-hand). A doctor still needs to prescribe the correct dosage and manage its use and *somebody* needs to actually ensure that the correct dose is being dispensed.
You could say "well, then let doctors grow the plants and refine the medicine, at least cut out the middle man" - but I doubt most doctors would be all that interested. For one thing, it puts liability for any drug-related problems onto them. Right now, if somebody dispenses the wrong dosage - if a pill that's labeled 60mg actually contains 600mg, for example - that's not the doctor's fault. Do you think doctors would be interested in *making* it their fault?
No matter how you think about it, if you don't want a whole bunch of dead people lying around along with a whole bunch of corresponding new lawsuits against doctors who are just trying to care for their patients winding their way through the courts, then some outside entity needs to actually be refining and dispensing these drugs. In our system, that's the pharmaceutical company and the pharmacist. These are specialized jobs; they're not something just anyone can or should do.
If I take the wrong dosage of my medication (Inderal LA), my brain doesn't get enough blood, my heart eventually stops and I die. Do you think I want to be refining my own Inderal? Hell no. And honestly, nobody else should be doing so either, however libertarian your views are. If such a practice became widespread, the result would be absolute chaos in the health care system and a whole lot of unnecessary and fully preventable deaths.
This is not to say there aren't serious problems with our system for dispensing prescription drugs to those who need them. But the existence of specialists who actually know what they're doing and highly precise machines designed for the specific purpose of refining drugs are not among those problems.
If each person in a large demographic group spent $15,000 on some ridiculous and unnecessary item - say some rare Cabbage Patch Kids - and all of the the sudden the market for that ridiculous and unnecessary thing fell through the floor, could you never possibly laugh at the situation or remark on how stupid they were in the first place?
And why do you automatically think SUV's are "ridiculous" or "unnecessary"?
As the post itself points out, there will always be a market for SUV's, because SUV's are necessary. SUV's have existed at least since the days of the first commercial Jeep, and probably before that.
In my area during winter, we've regularly got a foot of snow on the ground. We get hurricanes, we get all sorts of extreme weather. Our roads even in the best of times can't take the strain. An SUV is really the only practical vehicle to own in these sorts of situations. No, not as your *only* vehicle, but as one of them. And that's not even counting the carrying and/or towing capacity.
Yes, there are *some* ridiculous SUV's (Escalade, anyone?) and it's probably good that they no longer lead the sales chart. But to assume that all SUV's are unnecessary and that everyone who bought one is "stupid" is no different than thinking anyone who bought a house 3 years ago was stupid - some people buy things because they need them.
While his quote is different than what people boil it down to (nobody will ever need more than 640k, or whatever), it meant the same thing.
It hardly meant the same thing.
First of all, it's a guy looking back in hindsight to talk about how he felt at an earlier point in time. It is *not* somebody trying to predict the future. Predicting the future *always* makes people look foolish, because they're bound to be wrong a large percentage of the time. So changing the quote from looking at the past to looking at the future is a setup from the getgo.
Second, he didn't make it a Marie Antoinette-like "let them eat cake" statement (and I realize the irony in the reference - she didn't say that either), which was also obviously set up to make him look like a jerk. He said he felt like he was making decisions that could last for a while, and then was surprised at the *speed* with which his designs were made obsolete.
Third, and related to that, in your quote he did not say he ever thought 640k would be "enough" forever. He was purely talking about the speed of technological advance, not whether technology would advance. That is a huge distinction. The bastardized quote makes him sound like a luddite, which he most assuredly isn't. The real quote makes it clear that he *expected* 640k to be eclipsed; it was just a matter of timing.
No, not the "same thing" at all.
Only when you have a poor understanding of what the Internet is.
Or the English language.
Yet you are comparing it to the IBM model M. When that model was out over 20 years ago [wikipedia.org]. A cheap keyboard was over a hundred bucks back then.
Ha! I recall the Model M selling for $249. (btw, they weren't really referred to as "Model M's" back then, they were just IBM keyboards. They only had one...)
$69 is not bad if this keyboard is really as good as a Model M. Of course, I bought my Model M new in the box for $15 on Ebay a few years ago, so that's probably still a better deal. And with a real Model M, you get key caps that pop off so you can remap them how you want or just clean them more easily.
*And* with a Model M you don't have to deal with those stupid Windows keys. That's honestly one of my favorite features about the Model M.
Suspending him like this is just a way of firing him without having to deal with unemployment--you don't get unemployment if you quit, even if you quit because you were suspended without pay.
You can get unemployment if you quit. It depends on the state. I got unemployment when I quit my job in the game industry. The standard in my state (New York) is that any "reasonable person" would have done the same thing. The conditions have to be such that it would be unreasonable to expect you to continue working there.
This would be a strange case to argue - and it is all about convincing the unemployment office of your case. I actually think under the rules of my state, at least, that he'd be eligible for unemployment if he quit. He violated the Hatch Act, yes, but then they refused to fire him, which would allow him to take another job. Instead, they decided to retain him but make it so that he could not earn a living. I think the only course of action any reasonable person would take in this case would be to quit. He was not fired for cause, and he is basically being forced to quit. Therefore, at least in my state, he would be eligible for unemployment.
In America's suit-happy society those who sued him and won would find some way to enforce the collection, even if it meant getting a court-ordered seizure of assets.
In Japan, people don't go against the court. It just doesn't happen. So there's no real mechanism for dealing with it when it does.
He is testing the government right now, but they won't let it go on forever. If Japan is good at anything, it's enforcing societal rules. They just need a mechanism in place for doing it. It all has to be by the book, at least as far as the public's aware.
Of course, maybe he won't be able to either, in the long run. Who knows? I wish him luck, that's for sure.
He'll be put in jail eventually. It's not some big secret that he has all these judgments against him - he's pretty roundly despised by the mainstream for flouting society and law like that. (This is Japan, remember.)
Every once in a while you hear things out of Japan about someone finally deciding to deal with him, but then it never happens. One of these days, though, it will. And he won't like it when it does; Japan has a way of putting people in jail and forgetting about them. Not that many people ever end up there in Japan, so those that do are treated basically like non-persons from then on.
I'd think that marketing people would be all over something like this. Want to know what people really think of companies/products/people etc. look at these blackboards and learn.
The problem is 2ch is a very narrow demographic. It gets 500 million *page views* per month, but when you consider that each user of the site probably hits about 100 pages a day, that's really not that many visitors in the grand scheme. 2ch users are really, really hardcore. They're known for it; I mean this is common knowledge in Japan, the same way if you tell someone you're a Slashdot user here, they automatically form a mental picture of you (assuming they've heard of it). There are plenty of competing BBS sites that are actually more mainstream but have fewer page views because their users are not quite as... "dedicated", I guess.
I'm sure there *is* marketing going on in 2ch, but it's not mainstream marketing and never will be. And any info gathered there wouldn't be very useful because, well, it would only apply to 2ch users. And they're just not very representative of the Japanese population.
Still, I'm sure companies *do* read 2ch for instant reactions to their products, in the same way, say, a game maker in the US might read the comments on Kotaku to see reaction there. They know it's not really indicative of overall sentiment, but yeah, it's useful. But the bulk of the marketing budget still goes to TV, print, and traditional online banner ads, because that's how you reach the most people, and a fairly broad cross section of them (targeted, of course, however you'd want your message to be).
Distributed, anonymous sources.
So make a little TSR program, put a download link on the USAF homepage and say "Do your patriotic duty. Be an official Air Force Cyber Officer. Install this software today."
I guarantee within 6 months you'll have about 10 million downloads from redneck hillbillies the world over (not just in the USA, either) willing to do anything to git those goddang red Chinese, as long as it doesn't involve putting their own neck in the potential line of fire.
There's no need to do this covertly. There would be many more people available to do this willingly if asked than there will be available to do it unwillingly and unknowingly.
I mean, how did the original Star Wars movie fare? Not well. How about Dirty Harry? Again, they hated it.
Who hated these movies? Neither film was recognized as the classic that they'd eventually become - most future classics aren't at the time they're released - but I don't recall many scathingly bad reviews and I can't find many at the moment either. Star Wars was considered an exciting popcorn movie - ineffectual, but fun. Dirty Harry was criticized a bit for its politics but was still called an effective thriller.
Here are Rottentomatoes' "top critics" pages on both of these films, you can read some of the original reviews there (ignore the dates, most of these were written on the movies' release):
Dirty Harry
Star Wars
I mean, I dunno what your standards are, but an 88% positive rating from the top critics in the land seems pretty good to me for a film that was never intended to be anything but a light-hearted space romp.
I think you need to re-evaluate what you think of movie critics. Your stance is similar to one that I think a lot of people take, and it's based on this false premise that critics like bad movies and hate good ones. I would bet that 90% of the time, critics like the same movies you do. Where I think this idea that critics are somehow out of touch with the public comes from is the fact that they do not buy into hype. If a summer blockbuster has a $100 million marketing budget, a lot of people are going to be excited about that. Some of those people will even try to convince themselves that they liked the final product, so as not to feel they've wasted all this time and energy on anticipation. (This is the same phenomenon that's been observed in studies whereby the longer someone stands in line, the longer they're willing to keep standing in line, so as not to have wasted their time standing in line.)
Critics are trained specifically to ignore hype and judge a film purely on its merits. That means *good* blockbuster films, like the original Star Wars, do get good reviews. It also means *bad* blockbuster films, like, say, Wild Wild West, get bad reviews - even if they make hundreds of millions of dollars in box office and garner their share of fans at the time of their release. We all know that film's crap now, but the critics were ahead of the public in figuring it out. That's their job.
I'd also argue that not all classic films are really great films by any objective or even most subjective measures - go watch Dirty Harry again and tell me what's good about it. I'll tell you what's good about it: Clint Eastwood and the character that he creates. That's why the film endures today. Without him and without that character, the film would be just another cookie-cutter thriller. But critics don't review characters; they review films.
Anyway, enough of my rant. You should listen to critics if they don't like the latest Indiana Jones film, because they're looking past how cool it is to have Indiana Jones back on screen and instead reviewing the film. And they've generally got pretty much the same tastes as everybody else.
Indeed, I could almost guarantee that without the original Star Wars pedigree, Phantom Menace would never have been greenlit in the first place and would *certainly* not have been released in its existing form. It would have been reworked, re-shot and probably still eventually shelved, then dumped straight to DVD assuming it was greenlit in the first place.
Can you see the pitch now?
Lucas: "It's a film about trade disputes and tax reform... in space!"
Studio: "Next!"
Unless the Chinese asked were older than 65, they are unlikely to even know what it's like without government "control". It's akin to asking a wild mustang if he likes horseshoes.
On the other hand, if that wild mustang gets all the food it can eat, has owners that groom it regularly and let it have free run of the ranch, then why should it want a life without horseshoes?
Westerners, and especially Americans, seem to have a really difficult time understanding other cultures, and specifically cultures where authority is still trusted to do the right thing. You saw in the news just over the past few weeks how shocked we seem to have been by the fact that Chinese citizens actually came out to protest in favor of their government on the issue of Tibet as it relates to the Olympic torch relay - the tone of the news reports was "what's wrong with these people?" Well, there's nothing wrong with them. Under their present government, the vast majority of Chinese live in peace, their economy is growing at 8-10% per year, they're about to host the most prestigious sporting event in the world, etc. etc. Beyond those abstracts, personal wealth is at levels never before seen in China.
Why shouldn't they trust the government? The government seems to have done pretty well for them - unlike our "democratically elected" government that can barely manage 1-2% growth, gets us involved in unnecessary foreign wars and has presided over a doubling of gas prices and foreclosures in the last year. Given warrantless wiretapping, detention without trial of "enemy combatants", the movement towards prison sentences (even life sentences) for copyright violations, not to mention the Patriot Act, I would argue that we really don't have a hell of a lot more freedom than they do either. Yeah, so they've got an internet firewall. But my bet is they don't have stormtroopers knocking down their doors if they say the words "ammonium nitrate" over the phone and it gets flagged as a keyword in some NSA remote listening database.
Which side is more "brainwashed"?
We've simply learned to distrust government based on how non-functional and even harmful our own is. Well, theirs (like most of the world's) actually works pretty well for the vast majority of the country, so they've learned the opposite lesson.