It seems to be a publicity stunt. I find it very unlikely that it'll ever be efficient to lug solar cells around on a plane - not to say that there won't be airliners run from solar power, just that generating that power onboard, in real time, seems ridiculously wasteful. The panels add weight, restrict the design, and depend on the aircraft being in the light pretty much continuously; rather than trying to cram a few square metres of solar cells on the wings, why not just use a whole field full of the things on the ground to produce the energy, and load it onto the plane in the form of (say) hydrogen?
See.. theres a little problem here "UK govt. builds council houses" bit like saying "GM builds Ford cars"? Local Councils build council houses.
And the collective term for the local authorities across the UK is 'local government', not to mention the fact that many of the policies driving the councils are made at a national level anyway. I don't see what you're getting at with that argument.
And where do the people in council houses get the money to buy them, and what happens about the clawback provisions when sold? And how does the rent get pushed to 3 or 4 times its original (maybe up to 50% greater). And what about local housing allowance, the maximum rent the DWP will pay.
Presumably the money comes from diligent saving and/or an improvement in employment situation. If it's enough to buy or rent a home on the open market, the government subsidised program is unnecessary; if it isn't enough to do so, well that's exactly why the government was allowing them to live in a council house in the first place, and there's no reason for their circumstances to change. As for the clawback clauses - if they were stringent enough to prevent the resale of council houses from being a profitable business, we wouldn't see the situation as it stands, simple as that.
The rent increase is the straightforward impact of the market: the whole purpose of social housing is to account for the fact that the market screws the poor, but society won't accept too many people being forced to live on the streets. By moving social housing into the free market, the rents spike; since the whole 'keeping people off the streets' issue is still in effect, the maximum amount that the government must be willing to pay to the private landlords also spikes. If there are middlemen making a profit, it stands to reason that the system would be cheaper for the taxpayer without them - removing the middlemen means the government must own the houses, which brings us back to where we started.
And after selling their cheaply bought council house where do these people then live?
In other houses, purchased on the private market using their government-subsidised profits. Which they wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford. Which logically implies that the price difference was, in one way or another, extracted from the taxpayer.
I am bitter about the situation, and I'm quite willing to admit that. I wouldn't quite say jealous, though - I'm aware that I have a choice, and I'm aware that it was my own decision not to take advantage of this broken system. I do, however, think it's quite legitimate for me to feel aggrieved at the fact that arbitraging social housing, at the expense of the taxpayer, is a potentially profitable option to consider. It hits me in the wallet in terms of both the taxes I pay and the houses I can't afford.
Much of the price inflation (at least at the 'low end') is more the fault of the government, so it's hard to make market-based assumptions like that. Basically, the UK has ended up with a public-private hybrid social housing system, and (as expected) it exacerbates the disadvantages of both. It's similar to the US healthcare system, in that it takes the inefficiencies and 'unlimited' budget of tax funding and then funnels them into the profits of private enterprise.
In short: UK govt. builds council houses, which are rented to the poor at subsidised rents. This is fine, and actually puts pressure on the market to improve offerings at the low end. Govt. then thinks (for some reason) that the 'right to buy' one's council house is a good idea; many people do so. Owners then sell ex-council houses to private landlords at significant profit, private landlords put them back on the market at three to four times their original rent. Since the council is short of space (because it sold off most of its housing and couldn't build more), those on housing benefit are placed in these buildings, with the council paying much of the private landlord's requested rent - on a building they built themselves, and wouldn't have had to pay a penny more on if they hadn't fucking sold it off in the first place. Anyway, because cheap supply exists in the form of sold-off council houses, and many low-end rents can be government subsidised at a high rate, the investment value of these properties is much higher than many could afford if they wanted to buy one to, y'know, actually live in.
Of course it's by no means the whole problem, not even close, but it is significant, not to mention fucking irritating for those of us too poor to even look at buying a flat, as a direct result of this, but too rich to benefit from the government paying our rent.
Your points seem more or less valid, but somewhat irrelevant to the situation: CS is not IT, and university is not vocational training. Even putting that aside, it strikes me as an odd choice of department to cut - I can't imagine running a CS department costs much, in comparison to engineering or physical sciences.
If they're not famous why are they trying to gag facebook and twitter? This is not the first brain dead girl to have the plug pulled, why are these people soooo special that anyone would care so much as to go on twitter or facebook and talk about it?
Because there are plenty of people who strongly, even violently believe that survival (even if the entire duration will be miserable, painful, or simply vegetative) is to be extended by all means possible. The family are having a tough time already, and if their names got out there then there's every chance that the forced survival brigade would come along making their lives, and whatever time the daughter may have left, even more unpleasant.
It's really a no-win situation; the injunction is unenforceable and will irritate many (myself included) simply on principle, but the judge's heart was in the right place - it's basically a legal way of saying "Seriously, guys, don't be dicks.".
If you're opportunistically grabbing laptops, you're probably not particularly smart or forward thinking. An intelligent person, operating outside the law, could almost certainly find a safer and significantly more profitable scheme.
He does hold some responsibility. I don't know the precise details of the situation, but if the supporters are that fervent then I'm sure his making a speech along the lines of "If you wish to defend my honour and my dignity, do so not by repressing people in my name, but by protecting above all else the freedom of every person to speak as they wish, regardless of how abhorrent you may find what they choose to say." would go a very long way towards pointing them in the right direction.
Streaming, by the way, is not going to make up for lost DVD sales. The studies gets about 80 cents per steam vs a few dollars on a DVD.
[Mythbusters]Well there's your problem![/Mythbusters]
Seriously, there's no difference between renting a DVD and paying for time-limited stream access. If the prices are different, then the prices are wrong, simple as that.
How? The client computer isn't making a copy any more than your TV makes a copy of what the DVD player sends it. The 'really long HDMI cable' argument is extremely apt.
It's not quite that bad yet, thankfully. Most Europeans can get away with an ESTA - a basic online form - for tourist purposes. I needed the visa because I was spending a year at a US university.
Ah yes, I remember the fun of that one. I seem to recall that I ended up writing the answers in order in a text document, then just starting a new session and quickly copy-pasting them across to the web page before it timed out. The associated interview process was odd, too - call a premium rate phone number (around £10, IIRC) to book an appointment at the embassy, go to embassy, go through metal detector, have bag x-rayed and mini-stapler confiscated, sit in a waiting room, get asked extremely terse and rudimentary questions about my plans, pay visa fee (£100 or thereabouts), have visa approved, go pay another £10 or £15 to their 'approved courier service' (a private, UK company) at the side desk in order to get my passport back. Not that I object to paying for what it costs to process my application, it just seems petty and unnecessary to tack the extra little bits on either end for the phone call and the delivery, especially as it's outside companies that are profiting.
Apparently there is a legitimate (if somewhat convoluted) logic behind the 'trick questions', though - they aren't actually expecting anyone to answer 'yes', but if, at a later date, it turns out that you were an evil dictator, they have a quick and iron-clad reason to revoke your visa: you liked on the application when you ticked 'no'.
Don't think so - they certainly give a decent chunk of cash to the big labels, and apparently independent artists get somewhat screwed in comparison to the big guys (I wouldn't be especially surprised if the RIAA members are getting paid even for non-RIAA song plays), but as far as I'm aware they're an independent company.
Absolutely agreed. Last time I went to Australia I did the leg from Singapore on a (working) ship, and it was by far the most pleasant form of long-haul transport I've used - I'd highly recommend it for anyone who can spare the time. Shame about the expense, though - I was hoping to do my next transatlantic trip by sea, but even on a cargo ship the prices were several times that of a business class airline ticket. I still considered it, but in the end I just don't have the cash to justify spending that on a luxury, even if that 'luxury' is avoiding a grope from the TSA.
I'm inclined to agree with the poster who said that the Israeli system probably wouldn't scale to the entire US. That's fine, though, because the situations are very different - Israel actually has a genuine and significant threat from terrorists [or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view. I'm staying out of that debate.], whereas the US quite simply does not. As I've said in a couple of other posts: airlines may be a tempting target, but they're hardly the only one. If there were really any appreciable number of terrorists with the will and capability to strike within the US, we'd be seeing attacks against any number of other totally unguarded parts of the infrastructure.
The fact that the TSA haven't actually found any bombs means, pretty much by definition, that they aren't catching any terrorists. The fact that nobody's attacking any other areas where people congregate implies that the TSA isn't acting as a deterrent - if that were the case, at least some of those deterred from attacking airlines would attack other targets instead.
Precisely. The threat just isn't significant - if it were, we'd see evidence. As for the comment about knives, you may not be able to bring them any more, but the broken glass possibility more than makes up for it; it's theatre, plain and simple.
If there were terrorists with the will and capability to bomb a plane, but who were put off purely by the probability of being caught by the TSA, don't you think the would've attacked one of the many, many other totally unguarded areas of our infrastructure? Airliners are big, flashy, somewhat fragile targets, but I don't understand how so many people seem to have decided that they're the only targets.
If someone was willing to blow themselves to pieces for a cause, but couldn't because of the TSA (something I find unlikely to begin with), it's mind-boggling to claim that they'll just sit back, accept it, and become a productive member of society. If anything, it would create a lot more panic to show that we're at risk everywhere, from the subway to the supermarket to the airline security queue. If terrorism were actually an appreciable threat within the US, we'd see some evidence of it. The TSA are fighting an enemy that is vastly few and far between, and even so they're doing a terrible job of it while encroaching horribly on our civil liberties; terrorism just isn't the threat that people make it out to be.
Perhaps. Didn't Comcast claim not to be sending reset packets on P2P traffic, too, though? They don't exactly have goodwill to spare or a reputation for honesty.
Although I'm sure Slashdot isn't in danger of becoming too sympathetic to non-techies, I do think it's worth pointing out that 'computer illiterate' should be no more socially acceptable than 'illiterate' - these are the basic tools that most people interact with on a daily basis, and while gaining a full understanding of every part is probably several lifetimes' work, the basics are simply not that difficult.
I know familiarity somewhat blinds us to the complexities that we take for granted, but I refuse to accept that anyone without a genuine mental disability can fail to understand the basic concepts of hierarchical folders, not blindly giving your password to every prompt that requests it, the difference between an actual application window and an image in a browser that looks like one, and similar day-to-day basics. Sure, anyone might make the occasional mistake, but what we see time and again isn't an occasional lapse in concentration, it's utter, wilful ignorance. Those things are no harder than driving a car, or doing your taxes, or any number of other things that people have to do in their normal lives.
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It seems to be a publicity stunt. I find it very unlikely that it'll ever be efficient to lug solar cells around on a plane - not to say that there won't be airliners run from solar power, just that generating that power onboard, in real time, seems ridiculously wasteful. The panels add weight, restrict the design, and depend on the aircraft being in the light pretty much continuously; rather than trying to cram a few square metres of solar cells on the wings, why not just use a whole field full of the things on the ground to produce the energy, and load it onto the plane in the form of (say) hydrogen?
See .. theres a little problem here "UK govt. builds council houses" bit like saying "GM builds Ford cars"? Local Councils build council houses.
And the collective term for the local authorities across the UK is 'local government', not to mention the fact that many of the policies driving the councils are made at a national level anyway. I don't see what you're getting at with that argument.
And where do the people in council houses get the money to buy them, and what happens about the clawback provisions when sold? And how does the rent get pushed to 3 or 4 times its original (maybe up to 50% greater). And what about local housing allowance, the maximum rent the DWP will pay.
Presumably the money comes from diligent saving and/or an improvement in employment situation. If it's enough to buy or rent a home on the open market, the government subsidised program is unnecessary; if it isn't enough to do so, well that's exactly why the government was allowing them to live in a council house in the first place, and there's no reason for their circumstances to change. As for the clawback clauses - if they were stringent enough to prevent the resale of council houses from being a profitable business, we wouldn't see the situation as it stands, simple as that.
The rent increase is the straightforward impact of the market: the whole purpose of social housing is to account for the fact that the market screws the poor, but society won't accept too many people being forced to live on the streets. By moving social housing into the free market, the rents spike; since the whole 'keeping people off the streets' issue is still in effect, the maximum amount that the government must be willing to pay to the private landlords also spikes. If there are middlemen making a profit, it stands to reason that the system would be cheaper for the taxpayer without them - removing the middlemen means the government must own the houses, which brings us back to where we started.
And after selling their cheaply bought council house where do these people then live?
In other houses, purchased on the private market using their government-subsidised profits. Which they wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford. Which logically implies that the price difference was, in one way or another, extracted from the taxpayer.
I am bitter about the situation, and I'm quite willing to admit that. I wouldn't quite say jealous, though - I'm aware that I have a choice, and I'm aware that it was my own decision not to take advantage of this broken system. I do, however, think it's quite legitimate for me to feel aggrieved at the fact that arbitraging social housing, at the expense of the taxpayer, is a potentially profitable option to consider. It hits me in the wallet in terms of both the taxes I pay and the houses I can't afford.
You know, I don't think that's quite the point they were going for...
Much of the price inflation (at least at the 'low end') is more the fault of the government, so it's hard to make market-based assumptions like that. Basically, the UK has ended up with a public-private hybrid social housing system, and (as expected) it exacerbates the disadvantages of both. It's similar to the US healthcare system, in that it takes the inefficiencies and 'unlimited' budget of tax funding and then funnels them into the profits of private enterprise.
In short: UK govt. builds council houses, which are rented to the poor at subsidised rents. This is fine, and actually puts pressure on the market to improve offerings at the low end. Govt. then thinks (for some reason) that the 'right to buy' one's council house is a good idea; many people do so. Owners then sell ex-council houses to private landlords at significant profit, private landlords put them back on the market at three to four times their original rent. Since the council is short of space (because it sold off most of its housing and couldn't build more), those on housing benefit are placed in these buildings, with the council paying much of the private landlord's requested rent - on a building they built themselves, and wouldn't have had to pay a penny more on if they hadn't fucking sold it off in the first place. Anyway, because cheap supply exists in the form of sold-off council houses, and many low-end rents can be government subsidised at a high rate, the investment value of these properties is much higher than many could afford if they wanted to buy one to, y'know, actually live in.
Of course it's by no means the whole problem, not even close, but it is significant, not to mention fucking irritating for those of us too poor to even look at buying a flat, as a direct result of this, but too rich to benefit from the government paying our rent.
Your points seem more or less valid, but somewhat irrelevant to the situation: CS is not IT, and university is not vocational training. Even putting that aside, it strikes me as an odd choice of department to cut - I can't imagine running a CS department costs much, in comparison to engineering or physical sciences.
If they're not famous why are they trying to gag facebook and twitter? This is not the first brain dead girl to have the plug pulled, why are these people soooo special that anyone would care so much as to go on twitter or facebook and talk about it?
Because there are plenty of people who strongly, even violently believe that survival (even if the entire duration will be miserable, painful, or simply vegetative) is to be extended by all means possible. The family are having a tough time already, and if their names got out there then there's every chance that the forced survival brigade would come along making their lives, and whatever time the daughter may have left, even more unpleasant.
It's really a no-win situation; the injunction is unenforceable and will irritate many (myself included) simply on principle, but the judge's heart was in the right place - it's basically a legal way of saying "Seriously, guys, don't be dicks.".
If you're opportunistically grabbing laptops, you're probably not particularly smart or forward thinking. An intelligent person, operating outside the law, could almost certainly find a safer and significantly more profitable scheme.
He does hold some responsibility. I don't know the precise details of the situation, but if the supporters are that fervent then I'm sure his making a speech along the lines of "If you wish to defend my honour and my dignity, do so not by repressing people in my name, but by protecting above all else the freedom of every person to speak as they wish, regardless of how abhorrent you may find what they choose to say." would go a very long way towards pointing them in the right direction.
While true, that's hardly the point. Being able to hide from a repressive regime does not justify or negate the actions of that regime.
You're absolutely right, and what I meant (and should have said) is that the price paid to the studio should be the same.
Streaming, by the way, is not going to make up for lost DVD sales. The studies gets about 80 cents per steam vs a few dollars on a DVD.
[Mythbusters]Well there's your problem![/Mythbusters]
Seriously, there's no difference between renting a DVD and paying for time-limited stream access. If the prices are different, then the prices are wrong, simple as that.
Technically and logically speaking, they aren't in violation. Legally speaking, who knows.
How? The client computer isn't making a copy any more than your TV makes a copy of what the DVD player sends it. The 'really long HDMI cable' argument is extremely apt.
It's not quite that bad yet, thankfully. Most Europeans can get away with an ESTA - a basic online form - for tourist purposes. I needed the visa because I was spending a year at a US university.
Ah yes, I remember the fun of that one. I seem to recall that I ended up writing the answers in order in a text document, then just starting a new session and quickly copy-pasting them across to the web page before it timed out. The associated interview process was odd, too - call a premium rate phone number (around £10, IIRC) to book an appointment at the embassy, go to embassy, go through metal detector, have bag x-rayed and mini-stapler confiscated, sit in a waiting room, get asked extremely terse and rudimentary questions about my plans, pay visa fee (£100 or thereabouts), have visa approved, go pay another £10 or £15 to their 'approved courier service' (a private, UK company) at the side desk in order to get my passport back. Not that I object to paying for what it costs to process my application, it just seems petty and unnecessary to tack the extra little bits on either end for the phone call and the delivery, especially as it's outside companies that are profiting.
Apparently there is a legitimate (if somewhat convoluted) logic behind the 'trick questions', though - they aren't actually expecting anyone to answer 'yes', but if, at a later date, it turns out that you were an evil dictator, they have a quick and iron-clad reason to revoke your visa: you liked on the application when you ticked 'no'.
I'm wondering where the hell Limewire got $100m in the first place? What part of their model made them that kind of money?
Don't think so - they certainly give a decent chunk of cash to the big labels, and apparently independent artists get somewhat screwed in comparison to the big guys (I wouldn't be especially surprised if the RIAA members are getting paid even for non-RIAA song plays), but as far as I'm aware they're an independent company.
Absolutely agreed. Last time I went to Australia I did the leg from Singapore on a (working) ship, and it was by far the most pleasant form of long-haul transport I've used - I'd highly recommend it for anyone who can spare the time. Shame about the expense, though - I was hoping to do my next transatlantic trip by sea, but even on a cargo ship the prices were several times that of a business class airline ticket. I still considered it, but in the end I just don't have the cash to justify spending that on a luxury, even if that 'luxury' is avoiding a grope from the TSA.
I'm inclined to agree with the poster who said that the Israeli system probably wouldn't scale to the entire US. That's fine, though, because the situations are very different - Israel actually has a genuine and significant threat from terrorists [or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view. I'm staying out of that debate.], whereas the US quite simply does not. As I've said in a couple of other posts: airlines may be a tempting target, but they're hardly the only one. If there were really any appreciable number of terrorists with the will and capability to strike within the US, we'd be seeing attacks against any number of other totally unguarded parts of the infrastructure.
The fact that the TSA haven't actually found any bombs means, pretty much by definition, that they aren't catching any terrorists. The fact that nobody's attacking any other areas where people congregate implies that the TSA isn't acting as a deterrent - if that were the case, at least some of those deterred from attacking airlines would attack other targets instead.
Precisely. The threat just isn't significant - if it were, we'd see evidence. As for the comment about knives, you may not be able to bring them any more, but the broken glass possibility more than makes up for it; it's theatre, plain and simple.
If there were terrorists with the will and capability to bomb a plane, but who were put off purely by the probability of being caught by the TSA, don't you think the would've attacked one of the many, many other totally unguarded areas of our infrastructure? Airliners are big, flashy, somewhat fragile targets, but I don't understand how so many people seem to have decided that they're the only targets.
If someone was willing to blow themselves to pieces for a cause, but couldn't because of the TSA (something I find unlikely to begin with), it's mind-boggling to claim that they'll just sit back, accept it, and become a productive member of society. If anything, it would create a lot more panic to show that we're at risk everywhere, from the subway to the supermarket to the airline security queue. If terrorism were actually an appreciable threat within the US, we'd see some evidence of it. The TSA are fighting an enemy that is vastly few and far between, and even so they're doing a terrible job of it while encroaching horribly on our civil liberties; terrorism just isn't the threat that people make it out to be.
Perhaps. Didn't Comcast claim not to be sending reset packets on P2P traffic, too, though? They don't exactly have goodwill to spare or a reputation for honesty.
Although I'm sure Slashdot isn't in danger of becoming too sympathetic to non-techies, I do think it's worth pointing out that 'computer illiterate' should be no more socially acceptable than 'illiterate' - these are the basic tools that most people interact with on a daily basis, and while gaining a full understanding of every part is probably several lifetimes' work, the basics are simply not that difficult.
I know familiarity somewhat blinds us to the complexities that we take for granted, but I refuse to accept that anyone without a genuine mental disability can fail to understand the basic concepts of hierarchical folders, not blindly giving your password to every prompt that requests it, the difference between an actual application window and an image in a browser that looks like one, and similar day-to-day basics. Sure, anyone might make the occasional mistake, but what we see time and again isn't an occasional lapse in concentration, it's utter, wilful ignorance. Those things are no harder than driving a car, or doing your taxes, or any number of other things that people have to do in their normal lives.
You start with a reasonable and accurate point, why ruin it with biased, hugely generalised partisan ranting?