It's the same argument as random breath testing. It is deemed probable that there are terrorists smuggling information into the US via laptops, etc. Lacking a good way to identify the terrorists, random sampling is permitted - said sampling isn't meant to be personal, so (the theory goes) as long as the data is destroyed, there is no harm done.
However, this is complete bullshit. It's bullshit because it's not probable that terrorists are smuggling information into the US via laptops, etc. If they were flying physically into the US, and they absolutely needed to take data in a digital format, then they'd use something a little smarter - say, stenographically encoded pirate movie DVDs. And even if they are doing this, the number of terrorists entering the USSA is so small compared to the total number of people coming in that random sampling won't find them. So this can only be effective if you've got reason to suspect something is up - if so, bring in a DHS agent, and arrest the person. I mean, if you take their laptop, it's not like they won't realise they're under surveillance, for god's sake.
Evets, I suggest you go back to that page and re-read the section above those charges. You know, the bit where they say there will be additional taxes that aren't quoted?
Well, first, the guy was merely listing examples of organic compounds, not saying that they were natural or likely to be found on Mars.
Second, methane can definitely be formed without life. It's found in the atmosphere of several moons, and was almost certainly a major component in the reducing atmosphere of the early Earth (before the advent of photosynthesis introduced a flood of free oxygen)
Get a better consumer regulation agency. Everywhere else, companies are required to advertise what you actually pay; the companies themselves then ensure that stupid variable-by-the-month taxes aren't passed.
Well, I'm not American, so I don't know many zip codes. So I just plugged in the only one I do know: 90210
Here's the lovely summary at the top:
The amounts shown below are based on the highest fee/surcharge rates assessed in your state; your actual fees/surcharges may be less. In addition to the AT&T charges described below, you will be billed for mandatory taxes and fees imposed by federal, state, and local governments on wireless subscribers.
So, this represents the most AT&T will charge you - would be nicer if it was exact, but an upper cap sounds good. But what's the next sentence? There will be other taxes & fees not listed?
Given that I entered a zip code, the federal, state, and local governments in question are all known. But the page doesn't list these fees. In other words, just like the OP's complaint - AT&T doesn't tell you what your costs will be upfront.
I don't know about phone companies, but I have seen this with banking & insurance companies - the front desk staff don't get trained in all the loopholes. This allows the company to reserve good deals for valued customers (or to throw as bait at customers who are leaving), while allowing the front desk staff to be totally sincere as they try to find you "the best deal".
Never understood that distinction. In Australia, income is income, and is taxed accordingly, capital gains included. There are some breaks, such as any capital gain that takes more than a year to accumulate gets a 50% reduction (meaning it's about 22% at the top end), but it's not taxed at any special rate - just the marginal rate for your income level.
Aw - that's the first time I've ever done the "I corrected that for you" meme...:(
As for fair vs. free, you can't have both. Free markets are unfair places to be, because nothing in the free market provides incentives for "fair". To get fair, you need a lot of market regulation, and then it's still not clear what "fair" means, as "fair" is subjective.
Case in point: Neilsen got their tax subsidy by promising to deliver 1100 jobs, acording to the FA. After the layoffs, there will still be over 1300 jobs, so Neilsen is still overdelivering on their promise. So why are the locals made? They're still up 200+ jobs.
Tax subsidies make for a free market by allowing for competition between local governments for the economic benefits of the subsidised activity, of course. What, local governments aren't allowed to take part in the marketplace too?
These are local government tax breaks, not state or federal. Local governments give these tax breaks because the lost tax revenue is made up for by having lots of new jobs being created, and people to fill them moving into the area (or unemployed locals getting them). This stimulates the local economy, and becomes a net plus to the area.
Local governments compete with each other, offering economic incentives to win economic rewards. This is the free market at work, and when it does work, it is very popular with the local residents.
Notice that nobody's bitching that Neilsen got the tax breaks; they're bitching because Neilsen effectively broke the contract.
This is what happens when a apathetic populace lets the free market or capitalism slide
There, corrected that for you.
Free market forces, along with the incentives in capitalism, says that the labour market shifts to where the labour is cheap. I thought Americans were fans of the free market?
(FWIW, I'm not a fan of the free market, and I'm not American)
So... the monitor locks up, the patient has a heart attack, and the nurses (who rely on the auditory alarm to alert them, as they can't visually monitor the patients) don't realise. Patient dies, family sues.
Technically, not correct. It is true that only three networks are offering the iPhone. However, as per ACCC policy, they have to offer a way to buy the iPhone by itself, unlocked and able to be used on any network. For example, Optus is selling the iPhone on the prepaid plans and offers an unlocking service (at a cost - just factor that into the price if you don't want to use Optus).
The ACCC could not force Apple to offer the iPhone to multiple networks; they could have just approached, say, Telstra. However, the ACCC could force Telstra to offer it unlocked, even if they were the only reseller.
My guess is that the terms & conditions offered by Apple to sell the iPhone weren't attractive enough for the 2nd tier providers (the ones who don't actually have their own networks fully in place; 3 is sort of in-between; they have their own network covering major urban areas, but fallback to the Telstra network elsewhere). Of course, these terms & conditions are secret, so unless you're a major telco executive, there's no way to know.
If you want to keep your legal insurance, you have to follow their legal advice. That is, when you get one of these "pay now or pay more later" notices, their legal advice would probably be "pay now".
Going contrary to their advice would almost certainly result in the insurance being voided.
A judge who drinks and drives, with pending charges, would not have to excuse himself from a DUI trial. He would have to excuse himself from a trial aimed at determining if DUIs were illegal. Similarly, if he was deciding where between 0.08 and 0.09 the limit should be - and he'd been caught with a limit of 0.086 - then he would have a conflict of interest.
In this case, the judge is being asked, in the courtcase, to define a similar limit about obscenity. Arguably, at least some of the images & video he's being asked to judge is tamer than material he has been discovered to posses. If he rules that they are obscene, he's making himself liable - therefore, he has an interest in ruling that they are not obscene, hence the conflict of interest.
Lawmakers can and do get away with these conflicts of interest all the time; judges are not meant to.
Except that's not what Copyright was originally about. Copyright was a right granted to publishers - they were granted the exclusive right to copy (from the old model where everyone could copy). The reason they were granted the right was to compensate them for the act of preparing the "copy" - doing the physical typesetting, etc. This was highly expensive, and not all published products made money, so the publishers would subsidise their risk from the ones that did make money.
The problem arose when competitors (particularly American publishing houses, in one of those ironic twists of fate) would see "oh, there's a successful book, I'll typeset that and publish it, and have much less risk". Copyright was implemented to stop that. Nowhere was copyright meant to reward the creative source. As a matter of fact, publishers would abuse copyright at times - if a manuscript got leaked and a rival publisher got in first, the original publisher was screwed (as well as the author).
This is essentially the same argument made by the RIAA today - that finding good talent is expensive & risky, and they need to amortise the risk around by making lots of money off the (relatively rare) successes.
The problems of intellectual property are not solved by copyright, as copyright was never intended to protect _intellectual_ property.
Also, popularity in terms of sales is usually done from the publisher's view point. They don't care what happens to the book. I strongly suspect that most people with bibles are given them, rather than going out and purchasing them retail.
There's no need to fid a quiet area. The subjects in question already live in a noisy area, so it's a case of thresholds rather than simple exposure (and trust me, anywhere the sun is shining counts as "noisy").
All you need is a room with a chair in it with a wifi source that can be turned on and off from another room, with the intensity able to be adjusted. Then get the subjects (and a bunch of controls) to tell you if they think the wifi is on or off at any given time. For an added spin, add a light bulb in the room, tell the subject that the wifi is only on when the light is on (and then only sometimes) and then leave the wifi _off_ all the time (or on all the time - whichever you find funnier).
Oh, and the "Australian outback" is only 45 minutes drive for me. If you in California, try the Mojave. Not that it's needed or anything...
Far from being an assumption or untrue, it's largely tautological. Any long-running system spends the majority of its time in a balanced state, which does not prohibit the possibility of rapid shifts between balanced states. Climate systems exist in mostly-balanced states most of the time, with abrupt shifts to different mostly-balanced states occurring every so often.
Lots of parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are dangerous. Wi-Fi isn't one of them.
A) there's lots of similar radiation around. You can't live in a major city and not be exposed to it. If you approach a building with Wi-Fi enabled and have some sort of reaction, I can assure you it is something besides the Wi-Fi causing it.
b) an earlier poster pinned it - double-blind testing is required to prove allergies. With Wi-Fi, this would be easy.
You open-source a protocol by providing a specification with no attached IP rights, such as patents covering the protocol. A reference implementation kind of helps, too.
*sigh* It's called a positive feedback loop. Increased temperatures do result in increased CO2 levels. Increased CO2 levels then result in increased temperatures. And thus the cycle continues upwards until something causes it to stop. The real big giveaway is that the temperature increase always accelerates as CO2 concentrations goes up.
This is a simple laboratory experiment that anyone can do. Heck, they did it on MythBusters.
And yes, it's true that natural processes put out a lot more CO2 than humans do. That's not the point. Natural processes are more or less balanced; what nature puts out, nature absorbs. What we are doing is upsetting the balance so that there isn't enough capacity. One of Dicken's characters said "Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19 six, result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds ought and six, result misery." - his point was that all you need to do is live just a little beyond your means to cause big problems.
Heck, it doesn't even matter if we _are_ the main cause or not. If we're not the main cause, we're still contributing to the problem at least a bit. Personally, I'd rather be the cause - it would imply that we could fix it.
The odd thing is that these same American multinational companies often do have sane and humane exit policies for their outsourced contractors and their overseas employees.
Nothing odd about it - most of the rest of the world doesn't have the "at-will" legal system common in many (but not all) American states.
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It's the same argument as random breath testing. It is deemed probable that there are terrorists smuggling information into the US via laptops, etc. Lacking a good way to identify the terrorists, random sampling is permitted - said sampling isn't meant to be personal, so (the theory goes) as long as the data is destroyed, there is no harm done.
However, this is complete bullshit. It's bullshit because it's not probable that terrorists are smuggling information into the US via laptops, etc. If they were flying physically into the US, and they absolutely needed to take data in a digital format, then they'd use something a little smarter - say, stenographically encoded pirate movie DVDs. And even if they are doing this, the number of terrorists entering the USSA is so small compared to the total number of people coming in that random sampling won't find them. So this can only be effective if you've got reason to suspect something is up - if so, bring in a DHS agent, and arrest the person. I mean, if you take their laptop, it's not like they won't realise they're under surveillance, for god's sake.
Evets, I suggest you go back to that page and re-read the section above those charges. You know, the bit where they say there will be additional taxes that aren't quoted?
See my previous comment.
Well, first, the guy was merely listing examples of organic compounds, not saying that they were natural or likely to be found on Mars.
Second, methane can definitely be formed without life. It's found in the atmosphere of several moons, and was almost certainly a major component in the reducing atmosphere of the early Earth (before the advent of photosynthesis introduced a flood of free oxygen)
Get a better consumer regulation agency. Everywhere else, companies are required to advertise what you actually pay; the companies themselves then ensure that stupid variable-by-the-month taxes aren't passed.
Well, I'm not American, so I don't know many zip codes. So I just plugged in the only one I do know: 90210
Here's the lovely summary at the top:
So, this represents the most AT&T will charge you - would be nicer if it was exact, but an upper cap sounds good. But what's the next sentence? There will be other taxes & fees not listed?
Given that I entered a zip code, the federal, state, and local governments in question are all known. But the page doesn't list these fees. In other words, just like the OP's complaint - AT&T doesn't tell you what your costs will be upfront.
Sorry, but both you and AT&T fail.
I don't know about phone companies, but I have seen this with banking & insurance companies - the front desk staff don't get trained in all the loopholes. This allows the company to reserve good deals for valued customers (or to throw as bait at customers who are leaving), while allowing the front desk staff to be totally sincere as they try to find you "the best deal".
Never understood that distinction. In Australia, income is income, and is taxed accordingly, capital gains included. There are some breaks, such as any capital gain that takes more than a year to accumulate gets a 50% reduction (meaning it's about 22% at the top end), but it's not taxed at any special rate - just the marginal rate for your income level.
Aw - that's the first time I've ever done the "I corrected that for you" meme... :(
As for fair vs. free, you can't have both. Free markets are unfair places to be, because nothing in the free market provides incentives for "fair". To get fair, you need a lot of market regulation, and then it's still not clear what "fair" means, as "fair" is subjective.
Case in point: Neilsen got their tax subsidy by promising to deliver 1100 jobs, acording to the FA. After the layoffs, there will still be over 1300 jobs, so Neilsen is still overdelivering on their promise. So why are the locals made? They're still up 200+ jobs.
Tax subsidies make for a free market by allowing for competition between local governments for the economic benefits of the subsidised activity, of course. What, local governments aren't allowed to take part in the marketplace too?
These are local government tax breaks, not state or federal. Local governments give these tax breaks because the lost tax revenue is made up for by having lots of new jobs being created, and people to fill them moving into the area (or unemployed locals getting them). This stimulates the local economy, and becomes a net plus to the area.
Local governments compete with each other, offering economic incentives to win economic rewards. This is the free market at work, and when it does work, it is very popular with the local residents.
Notice that nobody's bitching that Neilsen got the tax breaks; they're bitching because Neilsen effectively broke the contract.
There, corrected that for you.
Free market forces, along with the incentives in capitalism, says that the labour market shifts to where the labour is cheap. I thought Americans were fans of the free market?
(FWIW, I'm not a fan of the free market, and I'm not American)
So... the monitor locks up, the patient has a heart attack, and the nurses (who rely on the auditory alarm to alert them, as they can't visually monitor the patients) don't realise. Patient dies, family sues.
Technically, not correct. It is true that only three networks are offering the iPhone. However, as per ACCC policy, they have to offer a way to buy the iPhone by itself, unlocked and able to be used on any network. For example, Optus is selling the iPhone on the prepaid plans and offers an unlocking service (at a cost - just factor that into the price if you don't want to use Optus).
The ACCC could not force Apple to offer the iPhone to multiple networks; they could have just approached, say, Telstra. However, the ACCC could force Telstra to offer it unlocked, even if they were the only reseller.
My guess is that the terms & conditions offered by Apple to sell the iPhone weren't attractive enough for the 2nd tier providers (the ones who don't actually have their own networks fully in place; 3 is sort of in-between; they have their own network covering major urban areas, but fallback to the Telstra network elsewhere). Of course, these terms & conditions are secret, so unless you're a major telco executive, there's no way to know.
If you want to keep your legal insurance, you have to follow their legal advice. That is, when you get one of these "pay now or pay more later" notices, their legal advice would probably be "pay now".
Going contrary to their advice would almost certainly result in the insurance being voided.
A judge who drinks and drives, with pending charges, would not have to excuse himself from a DUI trial. He would have to excuse himself from a trial aimed at determining if DUIs were illegal. Similarly, if he was deciding where between 0.08 and 0.09 the limit should be - and he'd been caught with a limit of 0.086 - then he would have a conflict of interest.
In this case, the judge is being asked, in the courtcase, to define a similar limit about obscenity. Arguably, at least some of the images & video he's being asked to judge is tamer than material he has been discovered to posses. If he rules that they are obscene, he's making himself liable - therefore, he has an interest in ruling that they are not obscene, hence the conflict of interest.
Lawmakers can and do get away with these conflicts of interest all the time; judges are not meant to.
Except that's not what Copyright was originally about. Copyright was a right granted to publishers - they were granted the exclusive right to copy (from the old model where everyone could copy). The reason they were granted the right was to compensate them for the act of preparing the "copy" - doing the physical typesetting, etc. This was highly expensive, and not all published products made money, so the publishers would subsidise their risk from the ones that did make money.
The problem arose when competitors (particularly American publishing houses, in one of those ironic twists of fate) would see "oh, there's a successful book, I'll typeset that and publish it, and have much less risk". Copyright was implemented to stop that. Nowhere was copyright meant to reward the creative source. As a matter of fact, publishers would abuse copyright at times - if a manuscript got leaked and a rival publisher got in first, the original publisher was screwed (as well as the author).
This is essentially the same argument made by the RIAA today - that finding good talent is expensive & risky, and they need to amortise the risk around by making lots of money off the (relatively rare) successes.
The problems of intellectual property are not solved by copyright, as copyright was never intended to protect _intellectual_ property.
You do realise they probably spent the week writing the page, right?
Also, popularity in terms of sales is usually done from the publisher's view point. They don't care what happens to the book. I strongly suspect that most people with bibles are given them, rather than going out and purchasing them retail.
There's no need to fid a quiet area. The subjects in question already live in a noisy area, so it's a case of thresholds rather than simple exposure (and trust me, anywhere the sun is shining counts as "noisy").
All you need is a room with a chair in it with a wifi source that can be turned on and off from another room, with the intensity able to be adjusted. Then get the subjects (and a bunch of controls) to tell you if they think the wifi is on or off at any given time. For an added spin, add a light bulb in the room, tell the subject that the wifi is only on when the light is on (and then only sometimes) and then leave the wifi _off_ all the time (or on all the time - whichever you find funnier).
Oh, and the "Australian outback" is only 45 minutes drive for me. If you in California, try the Mojave. Not that it's needed or anything...
Far from being an assumption or untrue, it's largely tautological. Any long-running system spends the majority of its time in a balanced state, which does not prohibit the possibility of rapid shifts between balanced states. Climate systems exist in mostly-balanced states most of the time, with abrupt shifts to different mostly-balanced states occurring every so often.
Lots of parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are dangerous. Wi-Fi isn't one of them.
A) there's lots of similar radiation around. You can't live in a major city and not be exposed to it. If you approach a building with Wi-Fi enabled and have some sort of reaction, I can assure you it is something besides the Wi-Fi causing it.
b) an earlier poster pinned it - double-blind testing is required to prove allergies. With Wi-Fi, this would be easy.
You open-source a protocol by providing a specification with no attached IP rights, such as patents covering the protocol. A reference implementation kind of helps, too.
*sigh* It's called a positive feedback loop. Increased temperatures do result in increased CO2 levels. Increased CO2 levels then result in increased temperatures. And thus the cycle continues upwards until something causes it to stop. The real big giveaway is that the temperature increase always accelerates as CO2 concentrations goes up.
This is a simple laboratory experiment that anyone can do. Heck, they did it on MythBusters.
And yes, it's true that natural processes put out a lot more CO2 than humans do. That's not the point. Natural processes are more or less balanced; what nature puts out, nature absorbs. What we are doing is upsetting the balance so that there isn't enough capacity. One of Dicken's characters said "Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19 six, result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds ought and six, result misery." - his point was that all you need to do is live just a little beyond your means to cause big problems.
Heck, it doesn't even matter if we _are_ the main cause or not. If we're not the main cause, we're still contributing to the problem at least a bit. Personally, I'd rather be the cause - it would imply that we could fix it.
Nothing odd about it - most of the rest of the world doesn't have the "at-will" legal system common in many (but not all) American states.
You misread the article. He was inspired by paintball "tanks" - he built it for fun.