Looks like two of his constitutional rights were violated. We have a right to a jury trial for any dispute involving an amount of money over twenty dollars.
Dude, he HAD the trial. That's how it was established he owed the $2.5M. When the trial was over he a) refused to pay up, and b) refused to show any reason why he couldn't (other than an assertion that he couldn't). I have no sympathy for the guy.
While I don't agree with your assertion that we need a constitutional amendment to do national energy policy (and neither does any legal scholar that I'm aware of), I can kind of almost agree with this:
It'd be nice if he and Congress would get out of the way, eliminate energy taxes and subsidies, and let the price determine what solution prevails.
As long as one of the subsidies removed was the giant defense subsidy to the oil industry. If the oil industry had to pay for their own security in the Middle East (rather than having the DOD do it for them, for free), oil would be priced a lot more realistically, and the market would move us to other solutions. Unfortunately, the nuclear industry would benefit less than one might think, because nuclear energy is still pretty damn expensive, as Canadianshave discovered.
If turds like this guy's app were allowed, the "too many apps" problem would be 100x worse, mostly with "MAKE MONEY FAST" (or the "Web 2.0" equivalent) versions of his idea.
Yeah, and the "too many apps" problem is even worse in the PC/Mac/*nix universe. Why, absolutely anyone can publish anything at all! We need to get someone (like Microsoft) to lock down our systems and vet all our apps for us. Think of how much safer and happier we'd be, protected from all the "bad" apps!
If you're a development house and you commit resources and create a console game, is there an ironclad GUARANTEE that Walmart or Best Buy or Gamestop is going to stock it? No. The game may suck. The game may crash. And so on.
But if I create a game and Best Buy doesn't want it, I can take it to Gamestop. If I write an iPhone application, and Apple doesn't want it, I can suck it. There is no reason for Apple to have this much control over the platform.
Apple doesn't reject apps because they're stupid, they reject them if they fail to comply with the terms stated in the developer program agreement.
Or for no reason at all, apparently. In any case, the larger point is that I don't see why I should be limited to software that Apple feels is advantageous to themselves. I'd like, for example, to be able to run Firefox on my iPhone, but I can't, and for no other reason than Apple doesn't like competition.
How many of them are good? Well, quite honestly alot more are good than if there was no review process at all. If there wasn't a review process, we'd see apps that ignored or borked your settings, leaked memory like a sieve, chewed through your battery life out of ignorance, or hell - maybe we'd simply be looking at a deluge of carbon copy flashlight and porn apps, making the app store effectively useless. Hell, in my opinion (and I do have an iphone) the app store already has *too many* apps, and the quality on the ones there aren't quite high enough for my liking.
So do what every other computer platform in the damn universe does - let everyone publish applications and have the market sort out the good from the bad. Chances are you posted this from a PC (in the larger sense, including Mac, *nix, etc) - did you use an "app store" to figure out what software to put on it? No? How did you ever survive? After all, there's must be a billion useless or even actively harmful applications out there. The answer, of course, is that you're a grown-up who can decide for him/herself what to put on your machine. Why can't I do the same with my iPhone?
You've overlooked the biggest problem with your app: it's completely useless. Not even in a "fart app" sense, but more so. If Apple allows apps like yours, expect 10 million other applications just like it.
There are ALREADY about 10 freakin' billion apps like that out there... all of which got approved by the soviet-style bureaucracy which is the app store.
... the App Store model sucks. Can you imagine where we'd be today, if, say, Microsoft had thought up the App Store at the time it invented Windows? Say goodbye to Firefox, just as an example. There is absolutely no reason why Apple should have such total control over what runs on the iPhone. If nothing else, it's anti-competitive, and the federal government should be looking into it on that basis.
"You kids get off my lawn!" Seriously, dude, we could have even fewer weird rendering problems if we just went back to mailing each other documents on paper, like God intended. But here in the real world, we don't want "minimalism". We want more, better functionality out of our systems. Right now, the web might not be "designed for making remote word processors"... but it should be. I get a lot out of Google Docs, for example. The answer isn't to retreat back to the days when you couldn't do anything with the web but display static text... it's to get browsers and websites to be compliant. And in an era when there is considerable competition among browsers, I think we're making progress toward that goal.
I painted my data onto the walls of caves... 30,000 years from now, when the rest of you are crying in your beer over your lost data, the precious pictures of my hunting trip will still be retrievable!
... that no one has any idea whether the "sequestered" CO2 actually stays out of circulation for any length of time. It seems likely that the first earth tremor in the area of the "sequestration" site would cause an enormous CO2 belch, as new cracks form and let out the stored gas.
The idea that nationwide transmission of electricity is too expensive, therefore we need to do CCS... is laughably stupid. We don't even know HOW to do CCS - the only concepts so far have involved injecting CO2 back into underground rock formations. And no one has any idea how long CO2 injected in this fashion would STAY sequestered. And just CAPTURING C02 is really, really expensive. The only justification for this, as you say, is to give taxpayer dollars to the coal industry.
Maybe building super long-distance transmission isn't cost-effective - I don't know. But to say such transmission lines are too expensive, therefore - CCS - is beyond dumb. It's a non-sequitur.
It think he's talking about environmental damage - so called "barrage" devices seriously reconstruct the estuarine sites in which they're placed, which is sort of a huge inconvenience to the critters that depend on the natural configuration of these sites. Not to mention that there aren't all that many estuaries available to work with. And they would be pretty damn expensive to build. Newer designs - known as tidal stream generators, are less of a problem... they're essentially just giant underwater ducted propellers that spin from the force of tidal currents. But there are still issues: they can only be placed where the tidal currents reach significant speeds, and the design is still sort of a work in progress - there's only one plant producing electricity commercially at this point (plus some prototypes that have had pretty mixed records). See the source of all knowledge for more.
My thoughts: why bother with this? Wind/solar are way more technologically advanced, and can supply essentially inexhaustible power. You could get a lot more power generated from "traditional" clean sources than from the tides, and at a lower risk.
Yes, it's true that there's no place in the US where you're free from the risk of a natural disaster. It's not true, however, that the risks of natural disaster are EQUAL throughout the US. Your house is much more likely to be destroyed if you build on the beach in North Carolina than if you put your house even a few miles inland. No one is saying that you can't put houses anywhere you could have a disaster... that would be stupid. The idea is not to put houses in places where natural disasters are LIKELY. And insurance rates should (and to an increasing extent, do) reflect this.
The iPhone app store has a marine navigation application that handles your location (including locally stored charts). There are also several apps that do tide/current prediction. The iPhone has other problems for the marine navigation function (in my view, it's not rugged or water-resistant enough), but it's certainly got the FEATURES to do the job.
Secondly, good luck trying to drive in a city like Boston without a GPS
Right, because no one ever drove in Boston before they invented GPS. Look, I agree that GPS units are really, really handy, but even way back at the dawn of time, in the eternal mists of the past, even before... the Internet (cue trumpet blast)... people still managed to drive with these things called maps. Which you bought pre-printed on a substance called "paper". Even in Boston.
I'll agree that a standalone unit is probably going to be better than a phone GPS, for much the same reason that a standalone camera is better than a phone camera. But that doesn't mean the phone-based versions of these things aren't pretty damn handy.
There are metals that are very rare in the Earth's crust, but are extremely useful, like Platinum and Palladium.
Those metals are not that much more common in the asteroid belt, Mars, etc. And given that the asteroids are spread out over an absolutely enormous volume of space, just finding said metals is going to be exceedingly difficult (and expensive). And again, you still have to develop the technology required to do space mining and refining, and get bulk quantities of stuff back from space (without burning it up in re-entry).
If space-based mining of platinum type metals is required for a hydrogen economy... we're probably not going to have a hydrogen economy. It'll be too expensive.
You don't mine stuff for the purpose of making other stuff (except indirectly). You mine stuff to make money. And there's still no economic reason to build spacecraft, habitats, etc, in space... so no one up there is going to be buying your mined materials.
At least in 1st world societies (the study was done in Canada, correct?), availability of calories isn't the issue. I believe demographic studies have shown that obesity is much more prevalent in lower income people... they can't afford healthy food (fresh fruits and veggies, etc), but Cheetos and McDonalds are relatively cheap.
If they did, I didn't see it in the article. The problem is that sometimes the causation factor runs the other way - being unhealthy causes you to lose weight. If you have, say, AIDS, tuberculosis, or certain cancers, the disease both causes body wasting, and makes you die sooner. This can skew the statistics - yes, these people are skinny and died younger than they should have, but the skinniness didn't cause the early death - instead, both were caused by the underlying disease. It's possible that if you controlled for that, that underweight people wouldn't show such a tendency to die young.
... not really applicable to individual people, though. BMI was developed as a statistical tool to do health studies on whole populations. Because you appear to be pretty muscular based on the information provided, you're an "outlier", and the BMI numbers for you are skewed. The gym where I work out has a poster from the US HHS department that spells out this exact thing - that a high BMI doesn't necessarily mean you're "too fat". You might just be muscular.
You can't just charge whatever you want for your product - customers have to be willing to pay. And apparently, they're not even willing to pay for it now - the market for Kodachrome has apparently withered to 1% of Kodak's sales.
Dude, he HAD the trial. That's how it was established he owed the $2.5M. When the trial was over he a) refused to pay up, and b) refused to show any reason why he couldn't (other than an assertion that he couldn't). I have no sympathy for the guy.
Radioactive waste in contained in casks that MIGHT breakdown someday. Coal ash is contaminating the environment RIGHT NOW.
While I don't agree with your assertion that we need a constitutional amendment to do national energy policy (and neither does any legal scholar that I'm aware of), I can kind of almost agree with this:
As long as one of the subsidies removed was the giant defense subsidy to the oil industry. If the oil industry had to pay for their own security in the Middle East (rather than having the DOD do it for them, for free), oil would be priced a lot more realistically, and the market would move us to other solutions. Unfortunately, the nuclear industry would benefit less than one might think, because nuclear energy is still pretty damn expensive, as Canadians have discovered.
Yeah, and the "too many apps" problem is even worse in the PC/Mac/*nix universe. Why, absolutely anyone can publish anything at all! We need to get someone (like Microsoft) to lock down our systems and vet all our apps for us. Think of how much safer and happier we'd be, protected from all the "bad" apps!
But if I create a game and Best Buy doesn't want it, I can take it to Gamestop. If I write an iPhone application, and Apple doesn't want it, I can suck it. There is no reason for Apple to have this much control over the platform.
Or for no reason at all, apparently. In any case, the larger point is that I don't see why I should be limited to software that Apple feels is advantageous to themselves. I'd like, for example, to be able to run Firefox on my iPhone, but I can't, and for no other reason than Apple doesn't like competition.
So do what every other computer platform in the damn universe does - let everyone publish applications and have the market sort out the good from the bad. Chances are you posted this from a PC (in the larger sense, including Mac, *nix, etc) - did you use an "app store" to figure out what software to put on it? No? How did you ever survive? After all, there's must be a billion useless or even actively harmful applications out there. The answer, of course, is that you're a grown-up who can decide for him/herself what to put on your machine. Why can't I do the same with my iPhone?
There are ALREADY about 10 freakin' billion apps like that out there... all of which got approved by the soviet-style bureaucracy which is the app store.
Lamest post EVAR.
... the App Store model sucks. Can you imagine where we'd be today, if, say, Microsoft had thought up the App Store at the time it invented Windows? Say goodbye to Firefox, just as an example. There is absolutely no reason why Apple should have such total control over what runs on the iPhone. If nothing else, it's anti-competitive, and the federal government should be looking into it on that basis.
"You kids get off my lawn!" Seriously, dude, we could have even fewer weird rendering problems if we just went back to mailing each other documents on paper, like God intended. But here in the real world, we don't want "minimalism". We want more, better functionality out of our systems. Right now, the web might not be "designed for making remote word processors"... but it should be. I get a lot out of Google Docs, for example. The answer isn't to retreat back to the days when you couldn't do anything with the web but display static text... it's to get browsers and websites to be compliant. And in an era when there is considerable competition among browsers, I think we're making progress toward that goal.
I painted my data onto the walls of caves... 30,000 years from now, when the rest of you are crying in your beer over your lost data, the precious pictures of my hunting trip will still be retrievable!
DDT ban myth bingo.
... that no one has any idea whether the "sequestered" CO2 actually stays out of circulation for any length of time. It seems likely that the first earth tremor in the area of the "sequestration" site would cause an enormous CO2 belch, as new cracks form and let out the stored gas.
The idea that nationwide transmission of electricity is too expensive, therefore we need to do CCS... is laughably stupid. We don't even know HOW to do CCS - the only concepts so far have involved injecting CO2 back into underground rock formations. And no one has any idea how long CO2 injected in this fashion would STAY sequestered. And just CAPTURING C02 is really, really expensive. The only justification for this, as you say, is to give taxpayer dollars to the coal industry.
Maybe building super long-distance transmission isn't cost-effective - I don't know. But to say such transmission lines are too expensive, therefore - CCS - is beyond dumb. It's a non-sequitur.
It think he's talking about environmental damage - so called "barrage" devices seriously reconstruct the estuarine sites in which they're placed, which is sort of a huge inconvenience to the critters that depend on the natural configuration of these sites. Not to mention that there aren't all that many estuaries available to work with. And they would be pretty damn expensive to build. Newer designs - known as tidal stream generators, are less of a problem... they're essentially just giant underwater ducted propellers that spin from the force of tidal currents. But there are still issues: they can only be placed where the tidal currents reach significant speeds, and the design is still sort of a work in progress - there's only one plant producing electricity commercially at this point (plus some prototypes that have had pretty mixed records). See the source of all knowledge for more.
My thoughts: why bother with this? Wind/solar are way more technologically advanced, and can supply essentially inexhaustible power. You could get a lot more power generated from "traditional" clean sources than from the tides, and at a lower risk.
Yes, it's true that there's no place in the US where you're free from the risk of a natural disaster. It's not true, however, that the risks of natural disaster are EQUAL throughout the US. Your house is much more likely to be destroyed if you build on the beach in North Carolina than if you put your house even a few miles inland. No one is saying that you can't put houses anywhere you could have a disaster... that would be stupid. The idea is not to put houses in places where natural disasters are LIKELY. And insurance rates should (and to an increasing extent, do) reflect this.
(as she turns her head to look at the offramp we're passing)... "Oh, I think that was your exit"!
The iPhone app store has a marine navigation application that handles your location (including locally stored charts). There are also several apps that do tide/current prediction. The iPhone has other problems for the marine navigation function (in my view, it's not rugged or water-resistant enough), but it's certainly got the FEATURES to do the job.
Right, because no one ever drove in Boston before they invented GPS. Look, I agree that GPS units are really, really handy, but even way back at the dawn of time, in the eternal mists of the past, even before... the Internet (cue trumpet blast)... people still managed to drive with these things called maps. Which you bought pre-printed on a substance called "paper". Even in Boston.
I'll agree that a standalone unit is probably going to be better than a phone GPS, for much the same reason that a standalone camera is better than a phone camera. But that doesn't mean the phone-based versions of these things aren't pretty damn handy.
Those metals are not that much more common in the asteroid belt, Mars, etc. And given that the asteroids are spread out over an absolutely enormous volume of space, just finding said metals is going to be exceedingly difficult (and expensive). And again, you still have to develop the technology required to do space mining and refining, and get bulk quantities of stuff back from space (without burning it up in re-entry).
If space-based mining of platinum type metals is required for a hydrogen economy... we're probably not going to have a hydrogen economy. It'll be too expensive.
You don't mine stuff for the purpose of making other stuff (except indirectly). You mine stuff to make money. And there's still no economic reason to build spacecraft, habitats, etc, in space... so no one up there is going to be buying your mined materials.
At least in 1st world societies (the study was done in Canada, correct?), availability of calories isn't the issue. I believe demographic studies have shown that obesity is much more prevalent in lower income people... they can't afford healthy food (fresh fruits and veggies, etc), but Cheetos and McDonalds are relatively cheap.
If they did, I didn't see it in the article. The problem is that sometimes the causation factor runs the other way - being unhealthy causes you to lose weight. If you have, say, AIDS, tuberculosis, or certain cancers, the disease both causes body wasting, and makes you die sooner. This can skew the statistics - yes, these people are skinny and died younger than they should have, but the skinniness didn't cause the early death - instead, both were caused by the underlying disease. It's possible that if you controlled for that, that underweight people wouldn't show such a tendency to die young.
... not really applicable to individual people, though. BMI was developed as a statistical tool to do health studies on whole populations. Because you appear to be pretty muscular based on the information provided, you're an "outlier", and the BMI numbers for you are skewed. The gym where I work out has a poster from the US HHS department that spells out this exact thing - that a high BMI doesn't necessarily mean you're "too fat". You might just be muscular.
You can't just charge whatever you want for your product - customers have to be willing to pay. And apparently, they're not even willing to pay for it now - the market for Kodachrome has apparently withered to 1% of Kodak's sales.