Why don't you read it with s/LGBT/polygamists/ or s/LGBT/pedophiles/
Probably because pedophelia doesn't involve acts between consenting adults able to give appropriate, informed consent. Given that you couldn't resist that analogy, it gives a pretty good idea of where you're coming from on this issue--and it's not a good place.
And if everyone's faux outrage...
Personally, I'm just going to stand up for "disappointment", rather than "outrage". (I would go with "outrage" when talking about how, for instance, it's still legal in most U.S. states to fire someone from their job for no reason other than their being gay--but that's just my opinion.) That said, I will firmly declare a "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on" for presuming that because you're not outraged, or you think it's a dumb thing to be upset about, that anyone else expressing serious anger has to be faking it.
Which is totally sound reasoning, if you would like to make the assertion that "LGBT people", "black people", and "animals" are all proper subsets of the group "people". Or, alternatively, that "LGBT people", "black people", and "animals" are all not subsets of the group "people". Which one of those arguments did you want to plant your flag on?
Don't play it. Send a message with your wallet, rather than pissing and moaning about a game you didn't create not behaving like you want it to.
Welcome to America, where we have now passed through the stage where money is equivalent to speech and reached the point where money is the only socially-acceptable form of speech.
Don't like what other people are saying about the game, pla? Guess you should stop pissing and moaning about it, and just not give any money to the people whose behaviour you disagree with. You know--follow your own advice.
I took along a couple of binders of source code [...] that I annotated during the flight with notes about changes to make, places where more comments were needed... boring stuff like that. In the following monthly progress report I noted that my software had been flight tested and the results were promising. The director was not particularly amused.
Well, of course the director was unamused. During flight testing you noted documentation errors and several out-and-out flaws in the code, and then you tried to pass that pile of dreck off to him as "promising". Be honest--your code only survived the landing because the pilot intervened and took control of the aircraft. In the future, maybe you shouldn't try to sugarcoat things.
I'd like a really slow, large elevator containing a restaurant or a bar. Have dinner or get pissed on the way home! Perfect.
The problem, of course, is that instead of the restaurant taking up space on one floor of the building, it would then occupy a restaurant-sized hole in every floor of the building. (Yes, this could be partially offset by stacking several floors of restaurant in this hypothetical elevator shaft, but you're still wasting many multiples of the restaurant's floor area in the building. And floor area in high-rise towers isn't cheap.) We'll leave aside the challenges of providing working utility connections, and the likely-to-be-appalling costs of construction and maintenance.
I am sure that you can find many other entertainment content options that also cost significantly more than $5, especially among those available on the first day of theatrical release. Many of them also require you to get off your ass and go somewhere, rather than letting you enjoy your entertainment experience in bed, at home, on your tablet.
So, yeah. $5. It costs that much because we think it's worth that much, and because we think that enough people will agree with that assessment to make this business financially viable. In a very real and tangible way "what people will pay" is very much "what something is worth", at least for dollars-and-cents pricing decisions.
Sincerely,
Joss Whedon
P.S.: I'm funnier than Louis CK, so there's that, too.
I'm using "unenforceable" in the same sense that Wilson is; that anyone who cares to break the law can, and in nearly all cases won't get caught.
The same is true for speeding. But even if you want to narrow the scope to "things I can do in my own home, where I won't get caught except if something goes terribly wrong, or by happenstance" there is still a pretty big field.
Suppose I live in a high-rise apartment tower. It would be trivially easy for me to buy a couple of dozen propane cylinders from local retailers, and slip them into my hypothetical apartment. (Put each one in a suitcase or cardboard box to carry it upstairs, and spread the purchases out over a few different stores, across several weeks of summer barbecue season. Pay cash.) No one knows my apartment is now a giant bomb. Totally illegal under an assortment of fire codes and municipal bylaws. Probably runs into state and/or federal rules about the transportation and storage of dangerous goods. To be honest, I can't be bothered to look up all the different ways in which it is illegal.
Anyone could do it. No one who does it would get caught (unless they talk about it). Should it therefore be legal to store a quarter ton of compressed, flammable gas inside a residential apartment building?
They're already unenforcable -- against criminals, who steal them (both wholesale and retail, sometimes even from police evidence rooms) and illegally import them.
I have to admit that I am always surprised by people who confuse and conflate the notion that something is possible with the notion that laws against that possible-to-do thing are thereby rendered unenforceable.
It is extraordinarily easy to acquire an automobile with a top speed exceeding 75 miles per hour. They can be found readily on our city streets, in the garages of our homes, all across America. Millions of such vehicles exchange hands, legally, every year. Shockingly, that doesn't actually render laws against speeding unenforceable--even though every driver has access to technology with which they can speed, available at the twitch of a foot.
In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.
Well, no. That figure only applies if a power outage (affecting both the city power and the building's emergency power, so as to disable the building's tuned mass damper) occurs simultaneously with every occurrence of high winds. Or if the building's owners decide to just turn off the tuned mass damper for giggles, and leave it turned off for a decade and a half.
Far more interesting - and potentially scary - was the fact that even with the mass damper, the building would expect to see winds sufficient to cause toppling approximately once every 55 years. As the building is now approaching its fortieth birthday, there's a better than even chance that it would have fallen by now.
If indeed they were speeding to a ridiculous degree, and it was a safety issue, and it caused them to be at fault in an accident --- some silly license plate frame is not going to get them out of it, or protect them from the multi-million$ personal injury lawsuit from the impacted driver.
Which, I'm sure, is a great comfort for that now-crippled or -deceased driver. The guy with the license plate frame is probably very sorry after the fact, and would probably do things differently in retrospect. Meanwhile, the guy who lost his legs doesn't want a million dollars; he wants his legs.
In occupational health and safety, it is generally and widely understood that serious or fatal accidents seldom occur out of the blue. A fatality will nearly always be surrounded in time and space by a cloud of (usually unrecorded or unreported) near misses and minor incidents. Relatedly, there is the concept of "normalization of deviance". Essentially, the idea that if you let your standards slip a bit and nothing bad happens, the tendency is to allow that lower level of vigilance to become the new acceptable standard. Lather, rinse, repeat until a major failure occurs. (The Challenger disaster is an oft-cited example.)
Coming back to the licence plate frames, I don't care whether or not someone gets a fine for speeding. I do care that we've created a pool of privileged drivers who are no longer receiving any feedback when they engage in higher-risk driving behaviors. "Go ahead and drive as fast as you want; we'll trust your judgement on that until after your first high-speed collision..." probably isn't a real solid basis for road safety.
On the other hand... is donating $2500 to a charity, really worth avoiding a couple potential traffic tickets?
Depends on the tickets, perhaps. Shaving a $400 'big' ticket down to a $200 'small' one, or even down to a warning--that can add up. Remember that nominally-small tickets often have a large number of fundraising surcharges and taxes from different levels of government piled on top.
And the tickets themselves aren't always the greatest cost. Insurance companies will bump an owner's rates substantially after a couple of tickets (sometimes after one ticket), and those higher rates will linger for years.
Between two and four moving violations in a 12-month period will get your license suspended in California, with all the personal and financial costs associated with resolving and working around that.
Finally, this 'charitable' donation is tax deductible--so the effective price tag on this bribe is lower.
...there is no justification for equating the regular, children-producing marriage and gay-unions...
Which would be at least a vaguely-credible argument, if marriage and its associated legal rights and benefits were also stripped from every childless heterosexual couple where one or both members were infertile, where the woman had reached menopause, where the couple had failed to submit proof that they regularly engaged in unprotected intercourse, and where either partner ever used any form of birth control.
Oh, and where adoption by homosexual couples was illegal, and there was a legitimate and reality-based argument supporting such a policy. (Good luck with that.) And where homosexual couples were unable to employ less-traditional reproductive methods and technologies (sperm or egg donations, in vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, etc.) to have children. (Note: not an option in Athens.)
So...yeah. If Prop 8 had made it illegal to supply birth control to married couples, then the child-free versus child-producing argument might hold a small amount of water. Oddly enough, it wasn't about that.
waving of moral rights is needed to maintain journalistic integrity.
It sounds bad, but it isn't. It's how you combat people playing games with articles and data in order to give weight to a politcal or theological opinion.
I can't help but interpret your comment to mean that you don't quite understand what moral rights are, nor how they might apply in this context. Among other things, 'moral rights' include the right of a creator to attribution (that is, to be credited as an author when their work is published), and the right of a creator not to have their published work distorted, mutilated, or otherwise substantially modified without their permission. Waiving all moral rights means that a journal is free to modify the text of a scientist's article as they see fit, and to publish a scientist's work without that scientist's name on it. It's rather the opposite of journalistic integrity.
What Nature asserts is that they require authors to cede all moral rights so that the journal can withdraw or retract papers (involving serious errors, omissions, or misconduct) even without the authors' consent. The problem is not that Nature has a mechanism for involuntary retraction of findings; that's a necessary and useful thing. The problem is that Nature demands the whole grab bag of all moral rights, when all they really need is a specific exception to deal with a relatively narrow set of unfortunate circumstances: [Author] grants [journal] the right to withdraw or retract from publication this article, at the discretion of [editorial board], following [some process].
I remember hearing about a Lvl 4 containment site getting concreted with people inside of it.
This is an urban legend often associated with Building 470, a facility at Fort Detrick used to culture large (like, thousands-of-gallons large) quantities of biological weapons, including anthrax. Building 470 was decommissioned in 1971, and demolished in 2003; there were no dead bodies sealed in the walls, and demolition workers were more concerned about exposure to asbestos and lead paint used in the 1953 structure.
Since the issue seems to be about publishing in the open immediately vs. waiting 6 months, asking for a waiver of all moral rights seems like using a cannon to swat a fly.
I believe that the waiver of open access and the waiver of moral rights are actually separate clauses within the NPG contract, separately obnoxious and objectionable in their own independent ways.
...awarded Boeing a $137 million contract for the X-37... That's a bargain. Most commercial passenger jets cost more than that.
Ah, the hopeless naivete of someone unfamiliar with government contracting for military and aerospace programs.
The first four years of the program actually cost $192 million, though to be fair Boeing "contributed" a nominal $67 million of that, presumably with the expectation of future contracts if the program continued. (Not if it was successful, necessarily, just as long as it continued. And the $67 million probably included significant in-kind contributions of labour and materials, where Boeing would 'bill' itself market rates for parts and labour, rather than their actual internal cost.)
In 2002, Boeing picked up a subsequent $301 million government contract; their investment paid off quite handsomely. In 2004, the X-37 became a classified DARPA project, so we don't really know how much more it cost over the last decade, but I would be shocked if the total program cost didn't run into ten figures. The first X-37 mission didn't occur until 2010.
So no--not a 'bargain'. Two modest-sized, unmanned, robotic space vehicles (space drones) at a quarter billion each, plus whatever secret development costs accrued between 2004 and 2010. It's a neat technical achievement, and putting drones in space is certainly less costly than putting warm bodies up there, but don't delude yourself by thinking that it's cheap.
Except being drunk is actually a benefit in a car crash. You are relatively relaxed, which reduces the extent of injury.
This is a 'fact' that I hear quoted a lot, but for which I hear the actual relevant research cited very seldom. Not saying it's not true, but I am more than a little concerned that too much may be read into it in the retelling. Among other things, I suspect that the latter claim - specifically, a reduced risk of (musculoskeletal?) injury - is more plausible and more likely supported than the former assertion: a general, overall 'benefit'.
I'll leave aside the incidence of crashes when drunk; we'll take it as read that drunk drivers are so much more likely to be involved in a collision in the first place that it complete swamps any benefit from reduced injury severity. (There's probably also an increased risk of collision when a sober driver is distracted by drunk passengers, but we'll skip that, too.)
A study that looked just at injury severity versus 'degree of inebriation' probably tried to do an apples-to-apples comparison that controlled for things like vehicle size and speed, type of collision, and whether or not a seatbelt was worn. If there was a significant difference in seatbelt compliance between the 'drunk' and 'control' groups - that is, if the drunks were less likely to wear a seatbelt - the benefit of seatbelt-wearing would have been lost from the final analysis. (In other words, the study would have compared belted sober to belted drunk, and unbelted sober to unbelted drunk--but not looked at belted sober versus unbelted drunk.)
And then there is the post-crash treatment of injuries. Immediately after a collision, the drunk is less likely to be able to provide or effectively receive aid from his companions. Once medical personnel arrive on scene, and after transport to a hospital, the drunk is less likely to be conscious, less likely to be able to communicate problems to doctors, and less likely to be able to follow instructions or answer questions. Potential symptoms of serious injury - like altered mental state, vomiting, loss of bladder control, etc. - may be misattributed to intoxication. (These are all pretty moot in the event of relatively minor injuries, but for a severely injured patient can have a drastic effect on outcome.) Medical interventions (everything from drugs to surgery) may be less effective or more dangerous in an intoxicated patient.
All that may lead to statistically better outcomes for the drunk who suffers mild-to-moderate injuries, but worse outcomes for one with severe injuries--which is why I would put a big question mark over the claim of overall 'benefit'.
I would like to present the results of [experiment].
I would like to lead a group discussion about the implications of [novel hypothesis].
I would like to teach you how to perform [new calculation].
I would like to tell everyone how to comply with [complex new regulations].
...Are at least four very different communication tasks. Some are better accomplished with PowerPoint (or other similar presentation tools) than others. The way that a presenter uses those tools is likely to have a significantly greater impact on the effectiveness of the presentation than the presence or absence of those tools. Uses of the different presentation aids need not be mutually exclusive--PowerPoint decks, whiteboards, handouts, etc. can be used singly or in combination for best effect.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. I've been at very productive scientific meetings where someone puts up one or two slides of data and we spend the rest of the time in an open discussion around the whiteboard trying to figure out what it means (and which experiments should come next).
Autonomous cars: oh, lordy lord lord, what a colossal fuck-up that will be; hubris on a scale undreamed of heretofore. Absolute perfection required of billions of kilos of metal racing around at high speed...
You seem to have entirely accidentally illustrated why it's very difficult to improve things with technology. In the United States, there are something like six million automobile accidents per year. Motor vehicle accidents kill about thirty-five thousand people each year, and maim many times that number. Yet for some reason, the expected standard for autonomous vehicles is no deaths, and no accidents.
It's a weird quirk of human psychology that we're predisposed to tolerate and accept - essentially without thought - any risk that we've faced for most of our lives, but primed to respond with terror to any 'new' threat, even if it replaces an older, more dangerous threat. The old, dangerous ways are always better than the newfangled ones. Heck, we build that prejudice into our regulatory frameworks. Compare the level of regulation - and level of passenger safety - associated with, for example, aircraft versus automobiles. If Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) or Tylenol (paracetamol/acetaminophen) had been brought to market in 1990, they'd be behind the pharmacist's counter, not sold on open shelves in 200-tablet extra-strength bottles. Our brains 'grandfather in' old risks, and react disproportionately to new ones.
...nothing to keep him from taking them to court and suing over the original thing. Might even work to their favor. "Well your honor, they were going to pay us off, but then didn't when word of it got leaked out via facebook."
Suuuuuuure....because a judge is definitely going to want to incentivize violation of contracts and out-of-court settlements. That sort of encouragement couldn't possibly have negative effects.
And I'll leave aside the plaintiff's likely difficulties that would arise from saying "Well, I broke part of the contract already; let's go violate some more terms!"
It's hard to think that FaceBook would take this threat seriously. It's a $10+ Billion deal. Throwing in some extra first class seats for a different day would be the equivalent of a give-a-penny-take-a-penny dish compared to this.
Indeed. I expect that the deal happened in spite of, and not because of, this 'threat'. Sure, Facebook's team would have had an "Oh shit!" moment--but it would have been "Oh shit, we're dealing with an unprofessional nitwit" and not "Oh shit, he might walk away". Given that Koum has apparently decided it's a good idea to broadcast his unprofessional nitwittery, I imagine that Facebook's first move will be to keep him as far away as possible from anything dealing with 'business' as they possibly can.
it's happening 11x per day. where's this mass murder? shouldn't it have happened by now?
Slashdot poster is bad at statistics. Quelle surprise.
San Francisco (SFO) had about 400,000 aircraft movements last year, but only one passenger jet crash resulting in any loss of life (Asiana Airlines). If we suppose that laser dazzle makes landing ten times more dangerous, and we assume that 1 in 400,000 is the baseline rate of air crashes (it's actually a vast over-estimate; there weren't any other deaths involving passenger jets anywhere else in the U.S. last year) and we assume that all 4000 or so incidents involving laser pointers happened on approach to SFO...
...then we still would expect just one extra crash at SFO per decade. Air travel starts out as really, really safe. When you've only got a few thousand incidents, and you're trying to detect changes in a one-in-a-million rate, you're not getting enough data.
If you point to stars with a laser [one of the advertized uses of those devices and the only use I would care about if I had one] it might be a tad difficult not to hit a plane by accident from time to time [move your arm by an inch and you cover many miles up there].
It's not that difficult. Aircraft are actually relatively easily identified even by the amateur astronomer; just look for the stars that are moving rapidly across the sky while strobing brightly. Even right next to an airport, the aircraft tend to be miles apart and following specific corridors through the sky. Turn off the pointer and wait a minute if there's a plane in the piece of sky you're interested in. Anyone not capable of that trivial bit of due diligence shouldn't be outside pointing a laser at the sky--and probably shouldn't be trusted with scissors, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you read it with s/LGBT/polygamists/ or s/LGBT/pedophiles/
Probably because pedophelia doesn't involve acts between consenting adults able to give appropriate, informed consent. Given that you couldn't resist that analogy, it gives a pretty good idea of where you're coming from on this issue--and it's not a good place.
And if everyone's faux outrage...
Personally, I'm just going to stand up for "disappointment", rather than "outrage". (I would go with "outrage" when talking about how, for instance, it's still legal in most U.S. states to fire someone from their job for no reason other than their being gay--but that's just my opinion.) That said, I will firmly declare a "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on" for presuming that because you're not outraged, or you think it's a dumb thing to be upset about, that anyone else expressing serious anger has to be faking it.
Now read that with s/LGBT/Black/
Now read that with s/LGBT/animals/.
Which is totally sound reasoning, if you would like to make the assertion that "LGBT people", "black people", and "animals" are all proper subsets of the group "people". Or, alternatively, that "LGBT people", "black people", and "animals" are all not subsets of the group "people". Which one of those arguments did you want to plant your flag on?
Don't play it. Send a message with your wallet, rather than pissing and moaning about a game you didn't create not behaving like you want it to.
Welcome to America, where we have now passed through the stage where money is equivalent to speech and reached the point where money is the only socially-acceptable form of speech.
Don't like what other people are saying about the game, pla? Guess you should stop pissing and moaning about it, and just not give any money to the people whose behaviour you disagree with. You know--follow your own advice.
I took along a couple of binders of source code [...] that I annotated during the flight with notes about changes to make, places where more comments were needed... boring stuff like that. In the following monthly progress report I noted that my software had been flight tested and the results were promising. The director was not particularly amused.
Well, of course the director was unamused. During flight testing you noted documentation errors and several out-and-out flaws in the code, and then you tried to pass that pile of dreck off to him as "promising". Be honest--your code only survived the landing because the pilot intervened and took control of the aircraft. In the future, maybe you shouldn't try to sugarcoat things.
I'd like a really slow, large elevator containing a restaurant or a bar. Have dinner or get pissed on the way home! Perfect.
The problem, of course, is that instead of the restaurant taking up space on one floor of the building, it would then occupy a restaurant-sized hole in every floor of the building. (Yes, this could be partially offset by stacking several floors of restaurant in this hypothetical elevator shaft, but you're still wasting many multiples of the restaurant's floor area in the building. And floor area in high-rise towers isn't cheap.) We'll leave aside the challenges of providing working utility connections, and the likely-to-be-appalling costs of construction and maintenance.
Dear fan,
I am sure that you can find many other entertainment content options that also cost significantly more than $5, especially among those available on the first day of theatrical release. Many of them also require you to get off your ass and go somewhere, rather than letting you enjoy your entertainment experience in bed, at home, on your tablet.
So, yeah. $5. It costs that much because we think it's worth that much, and because we think that enough people will agree with that assessment to make this business financially viable. In a very real and tangible way "what people will pay" is very much "what something is worth", at least for dollars-and-cents pricing decisions.
Sincerely,
Joss Whedon
P.S.: I'm funnier than Louis CK, so there's that, too.
Don't forget the people living on a... um... "government income"...
You know that by far the largest group of unemployed people living on a government income are retired old folks collecting Social Security, right?
But I'm guessing that "grandma" isn't the demographic group I'm supposed to think of when you blow your ill-informed dog whistle.
I'm using "unenforceable" in the same sense that Wilson is; that anyone who cares to break the law can, and in nearly all cases won't get caught.
The same is true for speeding. But even if you want to narrow the scope to "things I can do in my own home, where I won't get caught except if something goes terribly wrong, or by happenstance" there is still a pretty big field.
Suppose I live in a high-rise apartment tower. It would be trivially easy for me to buy a couple of dozen propane cylinders from local retailers, and slip them into my hypothetical apartment. (Put each one in a suitcase or cardboard box to carry it upstairs, and spread the purchases out over a few different stores, across several weeks of summer barbecue season. Pay cash.) No one knows my apartment is now a giant bomb. Totally illegal under an assortment of fire codes and municipal bylaws. Probably runs into state and/or federal rules about the transportation and storage of dangerous goods. To be honest, I can't be bothered to look up all the different ways in which it is illegal.
Anyone could do it. No one who does it would get caught (unless they talk about it). Should it therefore be legal to store a quarter ton of compressed, flammable gas inside a residential apartment building?
They're already unenforcable -- against criminals, who steal them (both wholesale and retail, sometimes even from police evidence rooms) and illegally import them.
I have to admit that I am always surprised by people who confuse and conflate the notion that something is possible with the notion that laws against that possible-to-do thing are thereby rendered unenforceable.
It is extraordinarily easy to acquire an automobile with a top speed exceeding 75 miles per hour. They can be found readily on our city streets, in the garages of our homes, all across America. Millions of such vehicles exchange hands, legally, every year. Shockingly, that doesn't actually render laws against speeding unenforceable--even though every driver has access to technology with which they can speed, available at the twitch of a foot.
In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.
Well, no. That figure only applies if a power outage (affecting both the city power and the building's emergency power, so as to disable the building's tuned mass damper) occurs simultaneously with every occurrence of high winds. Or if the building's owners decide to just turn off the tuned mass damper for giggles, and leave it turned off for a decade and a half.
Far more interesting - and potentially scary - was the fact that even with the mass damper, the building would expect to see winds sufficient to cause toppling approximately once every 55 years. As the building is now approaching its fortieth birthday, there's a better than even chance that it would have fallen by now.
If indeed they were speeding to a ridiculous degree, and it was a safety issue, and it caused them to be at fault in an accident --- some silly license plate frame is not going to get them out of it, or protect them from the multi-million$ personal injury lawsuit from the impacted driver.
Which, I'm sure, is a great comfort for that now-crippled or -deceased driver. The guy with the license plate frame is probably very sorry after the fact, and would probably do things differently in retrospect. Meanwhile, the guy who lost his legs doesn't want a million dollars; he wants his legs.
In occupational health and safety, it is generally and widely understood that serious or fatal accidents seldom occur out of the blue. A fatality will nearly always be surrounded in time and space by a cloud of (usually unrecorded or unreported) near misses and minor incidents. Relatedly, there is the concept of "normalization of deviance". Essentially, the idea that if you let your standards slip a bit and nothing bad happens, the tendency is to allow that lower level of vigilance to become the new acceptable standard. Lather, rinse, repeat until a major failure occurs. (The Challenger disaster is an oft-cited example.)
Coming back to the licence plate frames, I don't care whether or not someone gets a fine for speeding. I do care that we've created a pool of privileged drivers who are no longer receiving any feedback when they engage in higher-risk driving behaviors. "Go ahead and drive as fast as you want; we'll trust your judgement on that until after your first high-speed collision..." probably isn't a real solid basis for road safety.
On the other hand... is donating $2500 to a charity, really worth avoiding a couple potential traffic tickets?
Depends on the tickets, perhaps. Shaving a $400 'big' ticket down to a $200 'small' one, or even down to a warning--that can add up. Remember that nominally-small tickets often have a large number of fundraising surcharges and taxes from different levels of government piled on top.
And the tickets themselves aren't always the greatest cost. Insurance companies will bump an owner's rates substantially after a couple of tickets (sometimes after one ticket), and those higher rates will linger for years.
Between two and four moving violations in a 12-month period will get your license suspended in California, with all the personal and financial costs associated with resolving and working around that.
Finally, this 'charitable' donation is tax deductible--so the effective price tag on this bribe is lower.
...there is no justification for equating the regular, children-producing marriage and gay-unions...
Which would be at least a vaguely-credible argument, if marriage and its associated legal rights and benefits were also stripped from every childless heterosexual couple where one or both members were infertile, where the woman had reached menopause, where the couple had failed to submit proof that they regularly engaged in unprotected intercourse, and where either partner ever used any form of birth control.
Oh, and where adoption by homosexual couples was illegal, and there was a legitimate and reality-based argument supporting such a policy. (Good luck with that.) And where homosexual couples were unable to employ less-traditional reproductive methods and technologies (sperm or egg donations, in vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, etc.) to have children. (Note: not an option in Athens.)
So...yeah. If Prop 8 had made it illegal to supply birth control to married couples, then the child-free versus child-producing argument might hold a small amount of water. Oddly enough, it wasn't about that.
waving of moral rights is needed to maintain journalistic integrity. It sounds bad, but it isn't. It's how you combat people playing games with articles and data in order to give weight to a politcal or theological opinion.
I can't help but interpret your comment to mean that you don't quite understand what moral rights are, nor how they might apply in this context. Among other things, 'moral rights' include the right of a creator to attribution (that is, to be credited as an author when their work is published), and the right of a creator not to have their published work distorted, mutilated, or otherwise substantially modified without their permission. Waiving all moral rights means that a journal is free to modify the text of a scientist's article as they see fit, and to publish a scientist's work without that scientist's name on it. It's rather the opposite of journalistic integrity.
What Nature asserts is that they require authors to cede all moral rights so that the journal can withdraw or retract papers (involving serious errors, omissions, or misconduct) even without the authors' consent. The problem is not that Nature has a mechanism for involuntary retraction of findings; that's a necessary and useful thing. The problem is that Nature demands the whole grab bag of all moral rights, when all they really need is a specific exception to deal with a relatively narrow set of unfortunate circumstances: [Author] grants [journal] the right to withdraw or retract from publication this article, at the discretion of [editorial board], following [some process].
I remember hearing about a Lvl 4 containment site getting concreted with people inside of it.
This is an urban legend often associated with Building 470, a facility at Fort Detrick used to culture large (like, thousands-of-gallons large) quantities of biological weapons, including anthrax. Building 470 was decommissioned in 1971, and demolished in 2003; there were no dead bodies sealed in the walls, and demolition workers were more concerned about exposure to asbestos and lead paint used in the 1953 structure.
Since the issue seems to be about publishing in the open immediately vs. waiting 6 months, asking for a waiver of all moral rights seems like using a cannon to swat a fly.
I believe that the waiver of open access and the waiver of moral rights are actually separate clauses within the NPG contract, separately obnoxious and objectionable in their own independent ways.
Ah, the hopeless naivete of someone unfamiliar with government contracting for military and aerospace programs.
The first four years of the program actually cost $192 million, though to be fair Boeing "contributed" a nominal $67 million of that, presumably with the expectation of future contracts if the program continued. (Not if it was successful, necessarily, just as long as it continued. And the $67 million probably included significant in-kind contributions of labour and materials, where Boeing would 'bill' itself market rates for parts and labour, rather than their actual internal cost.)
In 2002, Boeing picked up a subsequent $301 million government contract; their investment paid off quite handsomely. In 2004, the X-37 became a classified DARPA project, so we don't really know how much more it cost over the last decade, but I would be shocked if the total program cost didn't run into ten figures. The first X-37 mission didn't occur until 2010.
So no--not a 'bargain'. Two modest-sized, unmanned, robotic space vehicles (space drones) at a quarter billion each, plus whatever secret development costs accrued between 2004 and 2010. It's a neat technical achievement, and putting drones in space is certainly less costly than putting warm bodies up there, but don't delude yourself by thinking that it's cheap.
Except being drunk is actually a benefit in a car crash. You are relatively relaxed, which reduces the extent of injury.
This is a 'fact' that I hear quoted a lot, but for which I hear the actual relevant research cited very seldom. Not saying it's not true, but I am more than a little concerned that too much may be read into it in the retelling. Among other things, I suspect that the latter claim - specifically, a reduced risk of (musculoskeletal?) injury - is more plausible and more likely supported than the former assertion: a general, overall 'benefit'.
I'll leave aside the incidence of crashes when drunk; we'll take it as read that drunk drivers are so much more likely to be involved in a collision in the first place that it complete swamps any benefit from reduced injury severity. (There's probably also an increased risk of collision when a sober driver is distracted by drunk passengers, but we'll skip that, too.)
A study that looked just at injury severity versus 'degree of inebriation' probably tried to do an apples-to-apples comparison that controlled for things like vehicle size and speed, type of collision, and whether or not a seatbelt was worn. If there was a significant difference in seatbelt compliance between the 'drunk' and 'control' groups - that is, if the drunks were less likely to wear a seatbelt - the benefit of seatbelt-wearing would have been lost from the final analysis. (In other words, the study would have compared belted sober to belted drunk, and unbelted sober to unbelted drunk--but not looked at belted sober versus unbelted drunk.)
And then there is the post-crash treatment of injuries. Immediately after a collision, the drunk is less likely to be able to provide or effectively receive aid from his companions. Once medical personnel arrive on scene, and after transport to a hospital, the drunk is less likely to be conscious, less likely to be able to communicate problems to doctors, and less likely to be able to follow instructions or answer questions. Potential symptoms of serious injury - like altered mental state, vomiting, loss of bladder control, etc. - may be misattributed to intoxication. (These are all pretty moot in the event of relatively minor injuries, but for a severely injured patient can have a drastic effect on outcome.) Medical interventions (everything from drugs to surgery) may be less effective or more dangerous in an intoxicated patient.
All that may lead to statistically better outcomes for the drunk who suffers mild-to-moderate injuries, but worse outcomes for one with severe injuries--which is why I would put a big question mark over the claim of overall 'benefit'.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. I've been at very productive scientific meetings where someone puts up one or two slides of data and we spend the rest of the time in an open discussion around the whiteboard trying to figure out what it means (and which experiments should come next).
Autonomous cars: oh, lordy lord lord, what a colossal fuck-up that will be; hubris on a scale undreamed of heretofore. Absolute perfection required of billions of kilos of metal racing around at high speed...
You seem to have entirely accidentally illustrated why it's very difficult to improve things with technology. In the United States, there are something like six million automobile accidents per year. Motor vehicle accidents kill about thirty-five thousand people each year, and maim many times that number. Yet for some reason, the expected standard for autonomous vehicles is no deaths, and no accidents.
It's a weird quirk of human psychology that we're predisposed to tolerate and accept - essentially without thought - any risk that we've faced for most of our lives, but primed to respond with terror to any 'new' threat, even if it replaces an older, more dangerous threat. The old, dangerous ways are always better than the newfangled ones. Heck, we build that prejudice into our regulatory frameworks. Compare the level of regulation - and level of passenger safety - associated with, for example, aircraft versus automobiles. If Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) or Tylenol (paracetamol/acetaminophen) had been brought to market in 1990, they'd be behind the pharmacist's counter, not sold on open shelves in 200-tablet extra-strength bottles. Our brains 'grandfather in' old risks, and react disproportionately to new ones.
...nothing to keep him from taking them to court and suing over the original thing. Might even work to their favor. "Well your honor, they were going to pay us off, but then didn't when word of it got leaked out via facebook."
Suuuuuuure....because a judge is definitely going to want to incentivize violation of contracts and out-of-court settlements. That sort of encouragement couldn't possibly have negative effects.
And I'll leave aside the plaintiff's likely difficulties that would arise from saying "Well, I broke part of the contract already; let's go violate some more terms!"
It's hard to think that FaceBook would take this threat seriously. It's a $10+ Billion deal. Throwing in some extra first class seats for a different day would be the equivalent of a give-a-penny-take-a-penny dish compared to this.
Indeed. I expect that the deal happened in spite of, and not because of, this 'threat'. Sure, Facebook's team would have had an "Oh shit!" moment--but it would have been "Oh shit, we're dealing with an unprofessional nitwit" and not "Oh shit, he might walk away". Given that Koum has apparently decided it's a good idea to broadcast his unprofessional nitwittery, I imagine that Facebook's first move will be to keep him as far away as possible from anything dealing with 'business' as they possibly can.
Once you own one, you'll probably want to take it to a LAN party and show it off... which means it will need to be engraved.
This basically means you need to buy two.
Who wants to come to my engraver party?
it's happening 11x per day. where's this mass murder? shouldn't it have happened by now?
Slashdot poster is bad at statistics. Quelle surprise.
San Francisco (SFO) had about 400,000 aircraft movements last year, but only one passenger jet crash resulting in any loss of life (Asiana Airlines). If we suppose that laser dazzle makes landing ten times more dangerous, and we assume that 1 in 400,000 is the baseline rate of air crashes (it's actually a vast over-estimate; there weren't any other deaths involving passenger jets anywhere else in the U.S. last year) and we assume that all 4000 or so incidents involving laser pointers happened on approach to SFO...
...should the FBI get involved?
Air safety is a federal responsibility in the United States. That's why the FBI is involved; this is their jurisdiction.
If you point to stars with a laser [one of the advertized uses of those devices and the only use I would care about if I had one] it might be a tad difficult not to hit a plane by accident from time to time [move your arm by an inch and you cover many miles up there].
It's not that difficult. Aircraft are actually relatively easily identified even by the amateur astronomer; just look for the stars that are moving rapidly across the sky while strobing brightly. Even right next to an airport, the aircraft tend to be miles apart and following specific corridors through the sky. Turn off the pointer and wait a minute if there's a plane in the piece of sky you're interested in. Anyone not capable of that trivial bit of due diligence shouldn't be outside pointing a laser at the sky--and probably shouldn't be trusted with scissors, either.