Finding a person who can check you out, and actually getting their attention so you are able to check out, are entirely separate things in my experience. I can find someone no problem. But they will be busy and distracted, and it'll take me 5-10 minutes, easy, from finding someone to actually checking out - and that's if it's something on the floor that I have in my hand.
The five-pages theory was that Best Buy is incompentenly run, and will be dead before they fix things. They didn't say anything about any other retailer directly - other than it's a competitive market, and you had better treat the customer well. Microcenter probably isn't even on his radar; if it was, they would probably compare-contrast, to show how Best Buy should be run.
I'm not always sure they even sell electronics. Have you tried to purchase something at one of them recently? It's nearly impossible to find someone to check out with.
The point is to show off shiny devices, and to have a local point-of-contact for in-person support. Actual sales are secondary.
There is a difference between 'a device inspired by, and with similar functionality to' a fictional device, and 'a device who's sole selling point is it's resemblance to a fictional device'. An iPad and a PADD may be conceptually related, but no more than Burger King and McDonalds are conceptually related. (Less, probably.)
Probably not much, really. But it had some nice things, and is also based on a Linux core. So, hopefully, there will be some cross-polination with Android.
If my Pre was still working, I'd probably still be running it. I'd miss a couple of apps from Android, but overall I prefer the Pre. But there's nothing that couldn't be moved/implemented in Android, if the licensing problems are out of the way.
As far as I can tell, the rules are 'whatever we can convince the legislature the rules are'. No holds barred on how to do the convincing. By either side.
I fail to see any difference between that and Comcast where I live. One bad bureaucracy is the same as another.
I'm for competition. If the only competition we are getting is between the local monopoly provider and the local government... Well, it's better than no competition.
I decided to focus on just the issue at hand, but you are of course right. Animals have to move to new areas, as do plants. The sea levels are rising. Storms are becoming stronger and more frequent. It becomes harder to get O2, and easier to get CO2. The oceans are becoming more acidic. Ice cover is shrinking. Etc. Etc. Etc.
A lot of the life on this planet is likely to come out the worse for wear because of this. People try to claim that humans won't be one of them. I doubt it.
We are building a civilization on a limited, single-use resource. This is not sustainable. Sooner or later we will run out of fossil fuels. As you said, much of our standard of living depends on oil and coal. Shouldn't we be planning to move off them to something we can get more of while we can still do so at a leisurely pace?
There are good effects of global warming, and there are bad effects. It's sometimes hard to predict which are which. What we do know is that it is change, and a major one, to the support system which keeps the human race alive. Unmoderated change is likely to be a bad thing, and we know that lots of the effects will be bad. Best not to run the experiment with our only life-support system.
Take the article you linked to: Ok, so that's an increase in arable land. This will be offset by other lands becoming less useful. The total might be higher or lower: Hard to say for sure. However, the Sahara doesn't have great soil, so even if it's wet enough to grow crops, it's unlikely to be as productive as, say, the American mindwest. Also, many plants are fairly picky about the conditions they grow in. Temperatures, elevation, type of soil, total rainfall, rainfall pattern, length of growing season, ratios of daylight to darkness during the growing season, all of these are known to impact the productivity of many crops. Taking a crop that grows well in one place and moving it someplace else often cuts yield significantly. Even if the total amount of arable land goes up, that doesn't mean we'll be able to grow more useful crops.
Global warming is a massive uncontrolled experiment, and if it goes badly humanity will suffer for it. We don't necessarily know it will go badly, but it appears at least as likely as it going well. (In fact, it appears more likely, overall.) I'd rather avoid that type of situation.
Megaupload is also a very good way to share large files that you have created with others, without setting up your own website. An entirely legitimate and legal use.
What's the balance between the two? Was there a better way to reduce piracy? What unintended effects are present?
I have downloaded many files from Megaupload and MediaFire - always files uploaded and released by the original authors, who don't want to pay to host files of multi-megabyte (often 10's of mbegabyte or more) size. I know it's an easy target, but I fail to see why this business model is necessarily 'piracy'.
I don't have time to search the P-Tr and Tr-J literature at the moment, which would list the geological and fossil evidence for this, but, basically: Yes. Proof exists.
(Though prior to the Proterozoic period the question is really irrelevant: CO2 was much more common than O2, and there wasn't a whole lot of life on the planet to speak of. So that's about 1000 million years ago.)
I won't argue on 'should'. Realistically though; they are only human, and they have a limited amount of time to acquaint themselves with the details of different fields. In general, they only need to know the broad strokes and to listen to some good advisors. They just have to pick good advisors.
And listening to the quiet sides is important, but they need to know when the quiet side is quiet because they are busy, and when they are quiet because they don't care. Again, hard to tell from outside the issue quite often.
I'm not saying it's a good system. (In fact, I think it's a horrible system in many respects. And that it wouldn't take a whole lot to fix large portions of it.) Just that it is the system, and within it the people aren't as acting in as bad faith as they appear to be, because the system is so bad.
Most of their promises usually have to do with either vague platitudes ('cutting the budget', 'eliminate waste', 'work to support local farmers', etc.) or are completely impossible/illegal to implement ('eliminate abortion', 'outlaw guns'). And they only cover a narrow range of topics, not the broad range that they will be considering legislation on.
SOPA is actually a good example: No-one that I know of campaigned on copyright issues. So none of them made any promises on the issue, they can only listen to the groups who claim to represent people and industries important to the USA. In this case, that's the RIAA and MIAA. (At least to start.) Our problem in a nutshell: They didn't make any promises, and are being told there is a major problem, and that this will solve it with minor fallout. Meanwhile, other groups are crying bloody murder, saying it will wreck the country. Unfortunately, none of this is new or unique to this issue, so either they need to get a public poll to get their voters priorities, or they need to actually understand the issue. The latter is unlikely, and the former is basically what Wikipedia, Google, and others are calling for. ('Write your Congressperson!' If people do, the size of that pile of letters will be compared to the pile of letters from SOPA supporters, and that will decide the Congressperson's vote.)
Which doesn't actually solve (or address) the problem we have in the USA: that our congresspeople don't have a good way to get the opinions/wishes of their constituents. Instead they have to listen to polls and PACs who claim to represent the people.
It's not the money. They aren't actually corrupt. They are doing their job the best they can in the system they have. The problem is 'the best they can' means PACs tell them what the people want. Because elections don't, and they have no direct way of reading the minds of thousands of people.
At no point in history did 97% (or any significant amount) of the world's scientists think the world was flat. By the time we invented science as a discipline, the world had been proven round for over 2000 years, and anyone educated enough to be a part of the discipline knew that. (Though there was some disagreement about the exact size. Columbus for instance followed one of the lower estimates, that turns out to be about half the size of reality.)
We can scientifically prove that the Earth's climate is warming, and has been warming on a steady trend since the beginning of the Industrial age. We can prove that the sea levels are rising, and that ice caps and glaciers that have stood for millennium are disappearing. Those we've all seen because we were there. We can prove that CO2 levels (and levels of other greenhouse gases and industrial pollutants) are significantly higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution, and are on a significant rising trend. We can prove that CO2 levels have never risen this fast naturally, and that the last time they rose this much (though over a longer timescale, which would have mitigated the effects) there was one of the largest extinction events in the Earth's history.
If 97% percent of the people who have educated themselves on the issue, and made a living of studying it, agree that the issue has a particular cause, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt unless presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I defer to their expertise, just as I would hope they defer to mine on the technical subjects I've studied and made a living working on.
If you want to argue what exactly the results will be of the ends of the trends we've proven, fine. There's lots of discussions there. If you want to argue about what the best strategies to mitigate possible adverse effects are, there are even more discussions there. If you want to discuss exactly what percentage of the amount is attributable to man-made causes and what's attributable to natural ones, there's even some discussion there.
But the large preponderance of evidence points to man's CO2 emissions having a significant effect on global climate in the past few hundred years. No other theory is seen as reasonable to explain the measured effects that we have seen.
Doing that on purpose takes money and skill. Or lots of time, for a grass-roots movement. V-loggers and such either get lucky, or take a couple of years to get famous. Politicians have a few months per election season to get their name, stance, and story out. And they are doing it directly against others who have money and (hired) skill.
And of course there is the point that Facebook/Twitter followers are not the same as voters. Often, it's a completely different demographic. (Senior citizens are still the largest voting percentage, I believe.)
Because they don't have time to go around to every one of their constituents and discuss every issue for several hours. (Any less and a random voter probably won't understand the issue in the first place: Law isn't in their area of expertize, unless they are a lawyer, and most laws would require additional expertize in the subject the law is about.)
You send them a letter, they will listen to the letter - as one voice. (Although a letter from a voter does tend to mean more than a letter from a PAC to most of them.) Or they can take a poll - or listen to one of the groups that already has.
Which gets us back to where we started: With them listening to the PACs because they are supposed to be consensus voices from the voters on specific issues.
It would be the proper solution, however: It's not possible. The current problem isn't really that lawmakers are being bought, it's that they have no way to do their jobs without being bought. It takes money to get known enough to win elections, and votes themselves are an almost uselessly imprecise tool to judge preferences, leading to lawmakers needing to listen to some group to understand what their voters want. In the absence of any better system, that tends to be the loudest group with money on an issue. Which is almost invariably a corporation lobbying for it's own benefit. (Or a PAC lobbying for a sub-group of the populations' benefit, typically a sub-group that has money to fund the PAC.)
Usually the wording is along the lines of 'This just shows what a bondaggle $pet_NASA_program is! It should be canceled!' from one side and 'If $other_party had let the funding for the program go through, they would have fixed this!'
Unfortunately, I can see that very conversation happening. (Although you'd need to make that initial size 'larger than the current average', just to keep the upcry down. So probably 70" or something.)
Slashdot Mirror
Finding a person who can check you out, and actually getting their attention so you are able to check out, are entirely separate things in my experience. I can find someone no problem. But they will be busy and distracted, and it'll take me 5-10 minutes, easy, from finding someone to actually checking out - and that's if it's something on the floor that I have in my hand.
The five-pages theory was that Best Buy is incompentenly run, and will be dead before they fix things. They didn't say anything about any other retailer directly - other than it's a competitive market, and you had better treat the customer well. Microcenter probably isn't even on his radar; if it was, they would probably compare-contrast, to show how Best Buy should be run.
I'm not always sure they even sell electronics. Have you tried to purchase something at one of them recently? It's nearly impossible to find someone to check out with.
The point is to show off shiny devices, and to have a local point-of-contact for in-person support. Actual sales are secondary.
There is a difference between 'a device inspired by, and with similar functionality to' a fictional device, and 'a device who's sole selling point is it's resemblance to a fictional device'. An iPad and a PADD may be conceptually related, but no more than Burger King and McDonalds are conceptually related. (Less, probably.)
Probably not much, really. But it had some nice things, and is also based on a Linux core. So, hopefully, there will be some cross-polination with Android.
If my Pre was still working, I'd probably still be running it. I'd miss a couple of apps from Android, but overall I prefer the Pre. But there's nothing that couldn't be moved/implemented in Android, if the licensing problems are out of the way.
As far as I can tell, the rules are 'whatever we can convince the legislature the rules are'. No holds barred on how to do the convincing. By either side.
An entirely sensible and logical approach, that could be good for everyone involved.
Which of course means it'll never happen in this country.
I fail to see any difference between that and Comcast where I live. One bad bureaucracy is the same as another.
I'm for competition. If the only competition we are getting is between the local monopoly provider and the local government... Well, it's better than no competition.
I decided to focus on just the issue at hand, but you are of course right. Animals have to move to new areas, as do plants. The sea levels are rising. Storms are becoming stronger and more frequent. It becomes harder to get O2, and easier to get CO2. The oceans are becoming more acidic. Ice cover is shrinking. Etc. Etc. Etc.
A lot of the life on this planet is likely to come out the worse for wear because of this. People try to claim that humans won't be one of them. I doubt it.
Ok, how about this one:
We are building a civilization on a limited, single-use resource. This is not sustainable. Sooner or later we will run out of fossil fuels. As you said, much of our standard of living depends on oil and coal. Shouldn't we be planning to move off them to something we can get more of while we can still do so at a leisurely pace?
Of course, it's not like the people will just die quietly, or without fighting...
There are good effects of global warming, and there are bad effects. It's sometimes hard to predict which are which. What we do know is that it is change, and a major one, to the support system which keeps the human race alive. Unmoderated change is likely to be a bad thing, and we know that lots of the effects will be bad. Best not to run the experiment with our only life-support system.
Take the article you linked to: Ok, so that's an increase in arable land. This will be offset by other lands becoming less useful. The total might be higher or lower: Hard to say for sure. However, the Sahara doesn't have great soil, so even if it's wet enough to grow crops, it's unlikely to be as productive as, say, the American mindwest. Also, many plants are fairly picky about the conditions they grow in. Temperatures, elevation, type of soil, total rainfall, rainfall pattern, length of growing season, ratios of daylight to darkness during the growing season, all of these are known to impact the productivity of many crops. Taking a crop that grows well in one place and moving it someplace else often cuts yield significantly. Even if the total amount of arable land goes up, that doesn't mean we'll be able to grow more useful crops.
Global warming is a massive uncontrolled experiment, and if it goes badly humanity will suffer for it. We don't necessarily know it will go badly, but it appears at least as likely as it going well. (In fact, it appears more likely, overall.) I'd rather avoid that type of situation.
Megaupload is also a very good way to share large files that you have created with others, without setting up your own website. An entirely legitimate and legal use.
What's the balance between the two? Was there a better way to reduce piracy? What unintended effects are present?
I have downloaded many files from Megaupload and MediaFire - always files uploaded and released by the original authors, who don't want to pay to host files of multi-megabyte (often 10's of mbegabyte or more) size. I know it's an easy target, but I fail to see why this business model is necessarily 'piracy'.
I don't have time to search the P-Tr and Tr-J literature at the moment, which would list the geological and fossil evidence for this, but, basically: Yes. Proof exists.
(Though prior to the Proterozoic period the question is really irrelevant: CO2 was much more common than O2, and there wasn't a whole lot of life on the planet to speak of. So that's about 1000 million years ago.)
I won't argue on 'should'. Realistically though; they are only human, and they have a limited amount of time to acquaint themselves with the details of different fields. In general, they only need to know the broad strokes and to listen to some good advisors. They just have to pick good advisors.
And listening to the quiet sides is important, but they need to know when the quiet side is quiet because they are busy, and when they are quiet because they don't care. Again, hard to tell from outside the issue quite often.
I'm not saying it's a good system. (In fact, I think it's a horrible system in many respects. And that it wouldn't take a whole lot to fix large portions of it.) Just that it is the system, and within it the people aren't as acting in as bad faith as they appear to be, because the system is so bad.
Most of their promises usually have to do with either vague platitudes ('cutting the budget', 'eliminate waste', 'work to support local farmers', etc.) or are completely impossible/illegal to implement ('eliminate abortion', 'outlaw guns'). And they only cover a narrow range of topics, not the broad range that they will be considering legislation on.
SOPA is actually a good example: No-one that I know of campaigned on copyright issues. So none of them made any promises on the issue, they can only listen to the groups who claim to represent people and industries important to the USA. In this case, that's the RIAA and MIAA. (At least to start.) Our problem in a nutshell: They didn't make any promises, and are being told there is a major problem, and that this will solve it with minor fallout. Meanwhile, other groups are crying bloody murder, saying it will wreck the country. Unfortunately, none of this is new or unique to this issue, so either they need to get a public poll to get their voters priorities, or they need to actually understand the issue. The latter is unlikely, and the former is basically what Wikipedia, Google, and others are calling for. ('Write your Congressperson!' If people do, the size of that pile of letters will be compared to the pile of letters from SOPA supporters, and that will decide the Congressperson's vote.)
Which doesn't actually solve (or address) the problem we have in the USA: that our congresspeople don't have a good way to get the opinions/wishes of their constituents. Instead they have to listen to polls and PACs who claim to represent the people.
It's not the money. They aren't actually corrupt. They are doing their job the best they can in the system they have. The problem is 'the best they can' means PACs tell them what the people want. Because elections don't, and they have no direct way of reading the minds of thousands of people.
At no point in history did 97% (or any significant amount) of the world's scientists think the world was flat. By the time we invented science as a discipline, the world had been proven round for over 2000 years, and anyone educated enough to be a part of the discipline knew that. (Though there was some disagreement about the exact size. Columbus for instance followed one of the lower estimates, that turns out to be about half the size of reality.)
We can scientifically prove that the Earth's climate is warming, and has been warming on a steady trend since the beginning of the Industrial age. We can prove that the sea levels are rising, and that ice caps and glaciers that have stood for millennium are disappearing. Those we've all seen because we were there. We can prove that CO2 levels (and levels of other greenhouse gases and industrial pollutants) are significantly higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution, and are on a significant rising trend. We can prove that CO2 levels have never risen this fast naturally, and that the last time they rose this much (though over a longer timescale, which would have mitigated the effects) there was one of the largest extinction events in the Earth's history.
If 97% percent of the people who have educated themselves on the issue, and made a living of studying it, agree that the issue has a particular cause, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt unless presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I defer to their expertise, just as I would hope they defer to mine on the technical subjects I've studied and made a living working on.
If you want to argue what exactly the results will be of the ends of the trends we've proven, fine. There's lots of discussions there. If you want to argue about what the best strategies to mitigate possible adverse effects are, there are even more discussions there. If you want to discuss exactly what percentage of the amount is attributable to man-made causes and what's attributable to natural ones, there's even some discussion there.
But the large preponderance of evidence points to man's CO2 emissions having a significant effect on global climate in the past few hundred years. No other theory is seen as reasonable to explain the measured effects that we have seen.
Doing that on purpose takes money and skill. Or lots of time, for a grass-roots movement. V-loggers and such either get lucky, or take a couple of years to get famous. Politicians have a few months per election season to get their name, stance, and story out. And they are doing it directly against others who have money and (hired) skill.
And of course there is the point that Facebook/Twitter followers are not the same as voters. Often, it's a completely different demographic. (Senior citizens are still the largest voting percentage, I believe.)
Because they don't have time to go around to every one of their constituents and discuss every issue for several hours. (Any less and a random voter probably won't understand the issue in the first place: Law isn't in their area of expertize, unless they are a lawyer, and most laws would require additional expertize in the subject the law is about.)
You send them a letter, they will listen to the letter - as one voice. (Although a letter from a voter does tend to mean more than a letter from a PAC to most of them.) Or they can take a poll - or listen to one of the groups that already has.
Which gets us back to where we started: With them listening to the PACs because they are supposed to be consensus voices from the voters on specific issues.
It would be the proper solution, however: It's not possible. The current problem isn't really that lawmakers are being bought, it's that they have no way to do their jobs without being bought. It takes money to get known enough to win elections, and votes themselves are an almost uselessly imprecise tool to judge preferences, leading to lawmakers needing to listen to some group to understand what their voters want. In the absence of any better system, that tends to be the loudest group with money on an issue. Which is almost invariably a corporation lobbying for it's own benefit. (Or a PAC lobbying for a sub-group of the populations' benefit, typically a sub-group that has money to fund the PAC.)
The system is operating as designed: Broken.
Usually the wording is along the lines of 'This just shows what a bondaggle $pet_NASA_program is! It should be canceled!' from one side and 'If $other_party had let the funding for the program go through, they would have fixed this!'
This verses the USA, where we blame the 'internal enemy': The other political party.
Yeah... It works just as well for us as it works for Russia.
Is the change in the R&D percentage because of an increase in privately funded R&D, or a decrease in government funded R&D?
Or, more to the point: Has R&D funding increased or decreased?
Unfortunately, I can see that very conversation happening. (Although you'd need to make that initial size 'larger than the current average', just to keep the upcry down. So probably 70" or something.)