Actually, if the ticket was for 1/8/08, then they're early -- by six and a half months.
On 11/9/2001, Osama bin Laden provided us all with the only lesson we'll ever need to help us remember how Americans write the date. 'Remember, remember, the eleventh of September, 9/11 airliner plot...'
The London bombers of 2005 were considerate enough to time their attacks such that news agencies on both sides of the Atlantic could use the same date shorthand:-)
I'm not sure they could do that without breaking the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights(trips). I'm pretty sure that their will be a premium placed on EU citizens at some point for all these attacks on microsoft.
Well, being a little more serious here, revoking Microsoft's copyrights would be the nuclear option in any such dispute. That's the step they take after they've issued arrest warrants for Microsoft executives but found that they're all in the US and extradition isn't going to happen. Pretty extreme. There are treaties and so forth, but a copyright is considered a form of property, so there's no reason the EU courts couldn't confiscate Microsoft's copyrights as part of a legal penalty and declare them public domain, just as they could confiscate Microsoft's offices in Europe and auction them off.
Microsoft would probably struggle to enforce any kind of premium on EU consumers anyway. What's to stop us importing their completely weightless product from outside the Union?
And then Microsoft announced it would be delaying the release of all new products to any EU countries by 6 to 12 months along with an internal 10% EU tax increase.
And then the EU revokes all Microsoft's copyrights, designs and patents.
2. Limit military spending to 3 times any other country. (Saving ~428 billion a year.)
The principle is good, but the figure probably needs rethinking. Three times any other country roughly equals Britain + France + Japan (China and Russia spend surprisingly little, because they have cheaper manpower and generally use cheaper kit too, and things are further skewed by relative measures of purchasing power.) That's not enough to play the global superpower game; China would be a real threat at that point, and Taiwan at the very least would panic. The alliance with Europe would help, but are you so sure of that? After the last few years, we're not. Define your defence budget relative to credible threats, but don't tie it to an arbitrary figure under someone else's control.
The british pound is a very strong example. They don't want to join the eurozone (the countries, that use euro as primary currency) because the dollar/euro is fluctuating very much. If they adopted the euro, now they would have gotten very strong euro vs dollar, which is BAD for exports to USA (the primary export destination).
General theme was good. Specific example, bad.
British government policy is in fact that we should join the euro 'when the time is right'. This is officially when five economic tests are met; in practice it is whenever they think they can win a referendum on the subject, which given the current state of public opinion will be the day a ski resort opens in the City of Dis. This is indeed in large part due to what happened with ERM; however, ERM was not the euro, it was a bunch of free-floating currencies bound by treaty not to vary too much. The pound sank too far relative to the deutschmark in 1992, but the British euro would never vary in the slightest against the German euro were we to join the single currency. Other economic problems might well arise, but at least not that one:-)
As it stands, the pound has more or less been following the euro anyway. You're right that the USA is our largest customer for exports, but check the figures: the rest of the EU, taken together, enormously exceeds the USA in consumption of British exports. Right now instead of a very strong euro vs dollar, we have a strong pound vs dollar. We get the same inconvenience in trying to sell stuff to the Americans, without gaining the benefit of being able to sell stuff to the mainland. But hey, we get to keep Brenda on the coins, and maintain our traditional pounds and pence which are an ancient symbol of our sovereignty dating back to 1971, so by jingo it's worth it!
No, I think Ford is going into extinction by making shitty cars.
Huh? I've spent the last year or so driving a Ka - which is about as good as it gets for my purposes, being a few miles urban commute a day with occasional ~40 mile trips out to visit family out in the country. Very cheap, will run on petrol-scented air for miles, small and nippy in town, happily does 95mph out on the motorway. No problems at all, until last week when someone went into it at high speed while it was parked outside the office. Even then the interior was entirely intact. Once the insurance pay out I'll get another one. It's not surprising that you can't fling a brick on the average residential street without hitting one of these with it.
I've heard of no great problems with the Fiesta or Focus, and the worst anyone can say about a Mondeo is that it's a boring bourgemobile for lower-level managers. So what's so bad about Ford cars?
The point was more that you could easily pay a few months wages (even here in the states) to cheap labor instead of paying the ~$2000 to buy the suit.
Two thousand dollars would get you about one month's wages for cheap labour in England. Maybe six weeks. You'd have to hire illegals to get much cheaper. Japan's even more expensive than that.
Good point. With handicap ramps now the norm in building construction, they'll be quite practical too. Wanted: apartment in multi-story building with no elevator. Close proximity to gun store preferred.
Everyone knows Daleks have this ridiculous useless sink plunger on the front. Dalek rayguns only point forward so you're safe if you keep behind them because they can't turn fast. And above all, Daleks can't climb the stairs.
Why should we be that much poorer now that instead of having 2 things made, we have one?
Are we poorer? Where once we might have had two works with artificially restricted supply, we now have one work which is free for all to use as they see fit. Money which would otherwise have been paid to some copyright cartel for their product will now, with the abolition of copyright-enforced scarcity, be spent on something else. Where once I might have had only an album of music for my money, now I have an album of music and a nice T-shirt. I don't really feel any poorer for this.
A simple fact that many Slashdotters apparently find hard to grasp is that the "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy. That means it's not a valid argument.
Tell me: if I hold an apple in the air and let it go, will it fall to the ground, or hang in mid air?
I think you will agree with me that it will fall to the ground. Why do we predict this? Because of a long history of observing similar cases. We know that unsupported objects tend to fall. We've seen it happen so many times that we have developed a sophisticated theory describing this behaviour, and we call it gravity.
Now, just as we can observe the behaviour of unsupported objects near the surface of the Earth, we can also observe the behaviour of unscrupulous politicians. We've seen them on countless occasions introducing some awful violation of civil rights, and excusing it because it's only for terrorists, for criminals, for paedophiles, whatever. And we've seen them afterwards gradually extending the scope of this violation. Once the principle is admitted, it's just a question of haggling over the details. And no politician will ever be the one to reduce the scope of police powers, because then they look soft on crime and get the blame when some lunatic shoots up a school.
I'd prefer that it be called a ratchet effect, rather than a slippery slope, but the principle is the same, and it derives not from formal logic but from empirical observation of politics and politicians. Dismissing it as a logical fallacy is as ludicrous as dismissing gravity on the same grounds.
One of my biggest complaints with the SimCity line was the ordinances and utilities -- notice they take a decidedly left-wing, big-government political bias.
I always found that my cities ran best with a 6 or 7% tax rate, as compared to the 30-40% rate in most advanced democracies. How is this a left-wing bias?
Either that, or we would just fail to make the payments. That would crash the value of all foreign debts, and so the holders would be lucky to get ten cents on the dollar by selling their paper to speculators (who are betting that we'll pull out of it).
This is true to a certain extent; with America owing such a huge amount, nobody's really keen to do anything that would force them to default. However... if America ever did default, that would have consequences that lasted far longer than the ensuing world depression. Nobody would ever be willing to lend American governments money on such generous terms again. Right now US governments have as good a credit rating as exists in the world; lenders know that, come what may, Washington's word is good on any bond. That means that when America wants to raise money for a rocket project or a fleet of aircraft carriers or a great civil engineering work, they can get it. If America once defaults on a loan, that all changes, and it will take a long, long time to rebuild that good reputation.
I'm nearly thirty and had very poor spelling until a couple of years ago. Every time I made a mistake I would type out the word 100 times correctly. Each mistake in those 100 times would require 100 additional typings.
The Amazon river puts out 219,000 cubic metres of fresh water per second. That's 0.219 cubic kilometres per second, or 6.9 million cubic kilometres per annum. My guess was out by orders of magnitude - in fact we use about one thousandth of an Amazon.
Oops. Out by a factor of 1,000. How embarrassing.
A cubic kilometre is 1,000,000,000 cubic metres, not 1,000,000. So if we use 4,430 cubic kilometres, and the Amazon puts out 6,900 cubic kilometres, then... hey, actually, that's not so bad. My arithmetic was wrong, but my original estimate was pretty damn good! We use two thirds of an Amazon.
Apparently, human civilisation uses 4,430 cubic kilometres of fresh water per annum - not counting that portion of rainfall which goes towards the growth of non-irrigated crops.
The Amazon river puts out 219,000 cubic metres of fresh water per second. That's 0.219 cubic kilometres per second, or 6.9 million cubic kilometres per annum. My guess was out by orders of magnitude - in fact we use about one thousandth of an Amazon.
There is a limit to how much water is naturally evaporated from the ocean each year (far, far less than we're dumping into it) and rained down onto solid ground.
I find that... astonishing. At a guess, I'd say that the total fresh water consumption of human civilisation adds up to about half what the Amazon puts into the South Atlantic. Sea levels are rising because we're melting the icecaps, not because we're moving water from the land into the sea.
Make it stipulation of GPL that if you publically report bugs or bug counts in GPL software, that you must also produce a detailed account of how to reproduce the bug, and you must provide that report to the maintainer of the current source (who you got it from, or the root source as listed in the code).
Can't be done. The only reason anybody has to accept any licensing terms for software is if they intend to copy the software, because otherwise that would be forbidden by copyright law. Any use of the software that does not involve copying it does not require a licence, because that falls outside the scope of copyright law. Thus you can freely use the disks as frisbees or coasters, or, if the software comes with a full source listing, you can read through it and count bugs, and at no point do you have to agree to anybody's licence.
It makes sense to not inject things into your children that you feel uncomfortable injecting into them.
All that research that gets done on medicines to establish safety and effectiveness, when they could just ask you 'do you feel comfortable injecting this into your child' and save all that time and effort...
I'm a recent parent who insisted on a thiemerasol-free vaccine for my child. Note that I'm not against vaccines -- I just asked for the one without the mercury. They're available and didn't cost anything extra. Why? Because if there was even a 1/1000th of a percent of a chance that it could cause irreparable harm I wasn't going to take the risk.
So what chemicals were in the other vaccine? What risks were associated with that?
Thanks to the Internet and Technology the worlds Monetary and Financial systems are outdated and no longer needed so we don't need to pay 6% of the wealth we generate to the bankers. More like.5% should be enough to support our Monetary system.
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to borrow money from you at the rate of interest you propose. You are offering to lend at that rate, right?
less harmful than marijuana? wtf are you on about, of course it is. you bloody americans think that anyone who's even so much as has a freinds who's mum's dog once had a spliff when they were 16 is scum
Reread the sentence, and reread what you just wrote.
Item A: deleting the medical records of a large number of people.
Item B: smoking marijuana
To claim that item A is less harmful than item B is to place an inordinately high risk assessment on the smoking of marijuana. I'm sure you'll agree that marijuana's not particularly dangerous, while messing with medical records poses a clear threat to people undergoing life-critical treatment. So, fucking with medical records is more dangerous than marijuana, and so should be punished more heavily.
Do you remember that old Daffy Duck cartoon where he's checking ammunition by hitting it with a hammer and if it doesn't go off, he writes 'dud' on it?
Unbelievable I know, but that was Bugs Bunny. Once in a while, even he lost, and in this one he ended up doing what has got to be the worst job in the world:-)
The rationale for having me boot my computer apparently was that it may be a bomb, not that my contents might be suspicious. The logic of having me sit in front of them and power on a bomb just to find out if it is, in fact, a bomb still escapes me to this day.
Simple. If your computer switches on and acts as a computer should, then it's clearly not a bomb. There is absolutely no way to replace the hard drive with a miniature solid-state device running a basic OS install, and the battery with a much smaller one sacrificing battery life for extra room, and use the space saved for a big lump of Semtex to be triggered by echo detonate >/dev/bomb. This is entirely impossible. Which is fortunate, because otherwise they'd have to ban laptops on flights, and that would upset the rich.
Slashdot Mirror
On 11/9/2001, Osama bin Laden provided us all with the only lesson we'll ever need to help us remember how Americans write the date. 'Remember, remember, the eleventh of September, 9/11 airliner plot...'
The London bombers of 2005 were considerate enough to time their attacks such that news agencies on both sides of the Atlantic could use the same date shorthand :-)
Well, being a little more serious here, revoking Microsoft's copyrights would be the nuclear option in any such dispute. That's the step they take after they've issued arrest warrants for Microsoft executives but found that they're all in the US and extradition isn't going to happen. Pretty extreme. There are treaties and so forth, but a copyright is considered a form of property, so there's no reason the EU courts couldn't confiscate Microsoft's copyrights as part of a legal penalty and declare them public domain, just as they could confiscate Microsoft's offices in Europe and auction them off.
Microsoft would probably struggle to enforce any kind of premium on EU consumers anyway. What's to stop us importing their completely weightless product from outside the Union?
And then the EU revokes all Microsoft's copyrights, designs and patents.
The principle is good, but the figure probably needs rethinking. Three times any other country roughly equals Britain + France + Japan (China and Russia spend surprisingly little, because they have cheaper manpower and generally use cheaper kit too, and things are further skewed by relative measures of purchasing power.) That's not enough to play the global superpower game; China would be a real threat at that point, and Taiwan at the very least would panic. The alliance with Europe would help, but are you so sure of that? After the last few years, we're not. Define your defence budget relative to credible threats, but don't tie it to an arbitrary figure under someone else's control.
General theme was good. Specific example, bad.
British government policy is in fact that we should join the euro 'when the time is right'. This is officially when five economic tests are met; in practice it is whenever they think they can win a referendum on the subject, which given the current state of public opinion will be the day a ski resort opens in the City of Dis. This is indeed in large part due to what happened with ERM; however, ERM was not the euro, it was a bunch of free-floating currencies bound by treaty not to vary too much. The pound sank too far relative to the deutschmark in 1992, but the British euro would never vary in the slightest against the German euro were we to join the single currency. Other economic problems might well arise, but at least not that one :-)
As it stands, the pound has more or less been following the euro anyway. You're right that the USA is our largest customer for exports, but check the figures: the rest of the EU, taken together, enormously exceeds the USA in consumption of British exports. Right now instead of a very strong euro vs dollar, we have a strong pound vs dollar. We get the same inconvenience in trying to sell stuff to the Americans, without gaining the benefit of being able to sell stuff to the mainland. But hey, we get to keep Brenda on the coins, and maintain our traditional pounds and pence which are an ancient symbol of our sovereignty dating back to 1971, so by jingo it's worth it!
LeChuck, is that you?
Huh? I've spent the last year or so driving a Ka - which is about as good as it gets for my purposes, being a few miles urban commute a day with occasional ~40 mile trips out to visit family out in the country. Very cheap, will run on petrol-scented air for miles, small and nippy in town, happily does 95mph out on the motorway. No problems at all, until last week when someone went into it at high speed while it was parked outside the office. Even then the interior was entirely intact. Once the insurance pay out I'll get another one. It's not surprising that you can't fling a brick on the average residential street without hitting one of these with it.
I've heard of no great problems with the Fiesta or Focus, and the worst anyone can say about a Mondeo is that it's a boring bourgemobile for lower-level managers. So what's so bad about Ford cars?
Two thousand dollars would get you about one month's wages for cheap labour in England. Maybe six weeks. You'd have to hire illegals to get much cheaper. Japan's even more expensive than that.
Everyone knows Daleks have this ridiculous useless sink plunger on the front. Dalek rayguns only point forward so you're safe if you keep behind them because they can't turn fast. And above all, Daleks can't climb the stairs.
Yeah. Everyone knows that.
(Some of them _prefer_ not to climb the stairs, finding an alternative approach more aesthetically satisfying, but that's another matter ;-)
Are we poorer? Where once we might have had two works with artificially restricted supply, we now have one work which is free for all to use as they see fit. Money which would otherwise have been paid to some copyright cartel for their product will now, with the abolition of copyright-enforced scarcity, be spent on something else. Where once I might have had only an album of music for my money, now I have an album of music and a nice T-shirt. I don't really feel any poorer for this.
Tell me: if I hold an apple in the air and let it go, will it fall to the ground, or hang in mid air?
I think you will agree with me that it will fall to the ground. Why do we predict this? Because of a long history of observing similar cases. We know that unsupported objects tend to fall. We've seen it happen so many times that we have developed a sophisticated theory describing this behaviour, and we call it gravity.
Now, just as we can observe the behaviour of unsupported objects near the surface of the Earth, we can also observe the behaviour of unscrupulous politicians. We've seen them on countless occasions introducing some awful violation of civil rights, and excusing it because it's only for terrorists, for criminals, for paedophiles, whatever. And we've seen them afterwards gradually extending the scope of this violation. Once the principle is admitted, it's just a question of haggling over the details. And no politician will ever be the one to reduce the scope of police powers, because then they look soft on crime and get the blame when some lunatic shoots up a school.
I'd prefer that it be called a ratchet effect, rather than a slippery slope, but the principle is the same, and it derives not from formal logic but from empirical observation of politics and politicians. Dismissing it as a logical fallacy is as ludicrous as dismissing gravity on the same grounds.
I always found that my cities ran best with a 6 or 7% tax rate, as compared to the 30-40% rate in most advanced democracies. How is this a left-wing bias?
This is true to a certain extent; with America owing such a huge amount, nobody's really keen to do anything that would force them to default. However... if America ever did default, that would have consequences that lasted far longer than the ensuing world depression. Nobody would ever be willing to lend American governments money on such generous terms again. Right now US governments have as good a credit rating as exists in the world; lenders know that, come what may, Washington's word is good on any bond. That means that when America wants to raise money for a rocket project or a fleet of aircraft carriers or a great civil engineering work, they can get it. If America once defaults on a loan, that all changes, and it will take a long, long time to rebuild that good reputation.
Rokku Rii, is that you?
Oops. Out by a factor of 1,000. How embarrassing.
A cubic kilometre is 1,000,000,000 cubic metres, not 1,000,000. So if we use 4,430 cubic kilometres, and the Amazon puts out 6,900 cubic kilometres, then... hey, actually, that's not so bad. My arithmetic was wrong, but my original estimate was pretty damn good! We use two thirds of an Amazon.
The Amazon river puts out 219,000 cubic metres of fresh water per second. That's 0.219 cubic kilometres per second, or 6.9 million cubic kilometres per annum. My guess was out by orders of magnitude - in fact we use about one thousandth of an Amazon.
I find that... astonishing. At a guess, I'd say that the total fresh water consumption of human civilisation adds up to about half what the Amazon puts into the South Atlantic. Sea levels are rising because we're melting the icecaps, not because we're moving water from the land into the sea.
Off to look up the figures now.
Can't be done. The only reason anybody has to accept any licensing terms for software is if they intend to copy the software, because otherwise that would be forbidden by copyright law. Any use of the software that does not involve copying it does not require a licence, because that falls outside the scope of copyright law. Thus you can freely use the disks as frisbees or coasters, or, if the software comes with a full source listing, you can read through it and count bugs, and at no point do you have to agree to anybody's licence.
All that research that gets done on medicines to establish safety and effectiveness, when they could just ask you 'do you feel comfortable injecting this into your child' and save all that time and effort...
So what chemicals were in the other vaccine? What risks were associated with that?
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to borrow money from you at the rate of interest you propose. You are offering to lend at that rate, right?
Reread the sentence, and reread what you just wrote.
Item A: deleting the medical records of a large number of people.
Item B: smoking marijuana
To claim that item A is less harmful than item B is to place an inordinately high risk assessment on the smoking of marijuana. I'm sure you'll agree that marijuana's not particularly dangerous, while messing with medical records poses a clear threat to people undergoing life-critical treatment. So, fucking with medical records is more dangerous than marijuana, and so should be punished more heavily.
Hang on. We're socialists... so we don't believe in government-backed and enforced monopolies?
Unbelievable I know, but that was Bugs Bunny. Once in a while, even he lost, and in this one he ended up doing what has got to be the worst job in the world :-)
Simple. If your computer switches on and acts as a computer should, then it's clearly not a bomb. There is absolutely no way to replace the hard drive with a miniature solid-state device running a basic OS install, and the battery with a much smaller one sacrificing battery life for extra room, and use the space saved for a big lump of Semtex to be triggered by echo detonate > /dev/bomb. This is entirely impossible. Which is fortunate, because otherwise they'd have to ban laptops on flights, and that would upset the rich.