It's just silly when there's a media reaction to events, they create this fantastical link between this new "menace", and then laws are rushed into place to deal with it.
I agree with you, but in this case media silliness doesn't apply. The sheriff specifically requested the town council pass laws regulating CyberCafes based on his take on the issue. This is particulalry troubling to me since it wasn't any sort of groundswell of public concern that initiated this, but the police simply deciding they didn't like these businesses.
If the police find there is a higher crime rate in a certain area they should address it in the traditional manner and step up patrols in the area to protect the citizens AND the store owners - NOT punish the store owners who are running legitimate and respectable businesses.
If you allowed people to wander into the cafe off the street, with no identification or means to identify them later, then you have jsut created a magnificent safe haven for all sorts of criminals.
The most freightening thing about your viewpoint is that you seem to think that it is normal and OK for the police to track and monitor everyone simply based on the justification that there may be some criminals there. For some reasaon you seem to think that surveillance is normal and places where surveillance is not allowed are exceptions. And what's more - you're against creating any exceptions!
The only correct thing you said was that the popular vote does not elect a President. HOWEVER, the popular vote in Florida did decide which candidate got all of Florida's electoral votes and hence the election. The Republican's brought the legal challenges to the courts (nor Gore). The Supreme Court, when the matter was brought to then by the Republicans, returned an unbelievable and partisan decision that it was more important to get the election results quickly than have them be accurate - a clear advantge to Bush.
The Supreme Court ignored the Constitution and its established method of the transition of power. The election winner in November is only President-elect until January. This waiting period was partly designed to take away the kind of rush-to-close mania that can result in the wrong person being sworn in as President - as happened in the 2000 election.
Oh, not so ironic. Just because i believe there should be controls on gun ownership doesn't mean I'm not patriotic or don't believe in defending my (and your) rights. I just don't interpret "An organized militia being..." as granting an unfettered right for everyone to own unlimited untraceable weapons. When the Constitution was written the most advanced weapon was a musket and the military was actually made up of volunteers from state militias who brought their own guns. Things have changed.
Maybe you think I am more extreme than I really am - I don't support a total ban on gun ownership, and I actually own a handgun, but lets face it - if I blow away everyone in a McDonalds my biggest worry in being identified is the car I drove up in and NOT the ballistics of the weapons I used. That's just screwy in my opinion.
"Chicago and Washington DC banned handguns. New York has almost done so. Those places don't seem to have a shortage of armed criminals though, do they? So who, I ask you, is really affected by the law? The good guys, or the bad guys?"
There is a logical error in your argument because we have no way of knowing what the death rate from handguns would be in these cities if there were no gun control laws. I find it difficult to believe that the shootings (accidental and criminal) in these cities would not rise if everyone had a corner gunshop as well as a corner deli.
Also, your argument that restrictions make no difference does not take into account that there is an extensive trade in guns purchased in other states and brought into these cities. If guns were more tightly controlled everywhere the availability of guns for criminals in these cities would likely be much less.
Reports of the recent attempt to hold manufacturers accountable for who they sell to have been subtley spun by the gun lobby to make it appear ridiculous. In the case of the Colt lawsuit, the suit was not to hold Colt responsible if someone was killed by any old Colt gun, but was made because Colt was selling handguns to a few large-volume gun dealers who were shipping those guns illegally to areas with restrictive gun laws. Colt knew these dealers were running guns to New York and selling them illegally (they hd been informed by law-enforcement) and yet did not stop selling to them. It is not ridiculous at all to hold Colt responsible when they knew very well their product was being re-sold illegally.
I assume you are talking about the political expediencies of building the Three Gorges Dam and the villages that were wiped out as a result. You might be interested to know that many small hamlets and villages were wiped out in Tennessee during the 30's due to the construction of the TVA system, and also in the 70's in New York to build the NYC watershed system.
The cultural revolution happened three decades ago and was NOT a government program. An attempt at political manipulation and power consolidation by what became known as the Gang of Four got monstrously out of hand and could not be stopped. It went far beyond what was planned even by that corrupt group.
too bad this country seems to be filled with the sort of simple, non-logically-thinking, irrational, US-centric, self-righteous voter that would make such asinine comparisons.
I suppose these people are non-logical, irrational, and self-righteous because they don't agree with YOU? While we are on the topic of irrational I would like to point out that your description of people who are faulting the US as being "US-centric" makes absolutely no sense.
Yeah, Uh-huh...and does anyone actually believe this? Even more to the point, you think this is OK? The East German Stasi had extensive records on every single citizen and they could have put out the same type of press release. Their records were confidential too, legal, and they didn't release the information to the public. That doesn't make it right in my opinion.
The above press release implies that everything is OK because it is being done in accordance to law. I'm not convinced that is correct, but even if it is - so what? Everyone forgets that governments make the laws. The cancellation of the constitutional rights of Jews and gypsies in Nazi Germany was perfectly legal in German law because the Nazi party with its rubber-stamp, party-controlled Reichstag made the laws. Wait - "stripped of ther constitutional rights and sent to a detention camp without legal recourse" - that sounds very similar to our current administration's approach to protecting the Fatherland (oops, I mean "Homeland") doesn't it? Even the administration's aborted TIPS program encouraging citizen-on-citizen spying was taken directly from a page of the Nazi/Stasi playbook.
Before I get flamed, I'm not saying the Bush administration is commiting genocide, but except for that one endpoint let's face facts - the Bush way of doing things...
- government security files on every single citizen - cancellation of constitutional rights for sub-groups of the population - state-sanctioned informer networks, - concentration camps, - torture (yes, it has happened), - people whisked away by intelligence agents and "disappeared", - no recourse to the legal system for detainees, - pre-emptive wars justified with false official statements (both incidently capturing large oil reserves), - massive state contracts to loyal companies having close personal and economic ties to the regime (Krups/Halliburton), - casting anyone who does not support the party as un-patriotic,
...more closely resembles the totalitarian Nazi/Stasi way of doing things than it does our founding fathers' way of doing things.
I knew this would happen. I was just using the return issue as a specific illustration that sustainability is complicated and not always obvious.
You left out such things that favor rentals such as the toxicity of the chemicals used to make the DVD degrade, and the higher transportation costs of single-use products. Incidently, the most environmentally advantageous way to rent movies is with a by-mail service where the postman, who is coming by anyway, drops it off in your mailbox.
However, you also make some assumptions that are not valid if you are trying to support Blockbuster rentals as environmentally superior to one-use DVDs. First, I assume the the packaging for single-use DVDs would be a lot less than the current semi-permanent cases we get - perhaps even paper. I do not think everyone lives half a mile from a Blockbusters and almost no one outside of NYC where I live ever walks to one. The average fuel economy for vehicles in the US is far from 30 MPG.
Sure we can set up an artificial situation where rentals are more environmentally sensitive if you re-plan cities and change everyones cars and lifestyle, but that is not real-life. Also, what about the huge negative environmental impact of building tens of thousands of stores so that everyone lives within half a mile of one? See - it isn't so simple. My assumptions that people live about 2.5 miles from the blockbuster and drive cars that get between 20 and 30 MPG seems a lot more realistic.
Here is the point of this reply: We can all do things that make us feel good about helping the environment (such as rent DVDs), but we shouldn't do them blindly - we need to actually think about the overall consequences of how our actions impact the planet. Sometimes a little waste in one area reaps huge benefits in other areas.
What I objected to is wastefulness of discarding the disc...I would pay $7 for being able to watch a movie when I want and not take it back, as long as the media didn't end up in a land fill.
I applaud your environmental conciousness, but the disposable nature of the DVD may not be as bad as you think. I spend a lot of my time creating Sustainable Development programs, and I have learned that one needs to look at many factors in order to determine true environmental impact.
For example, how much does one extra car trip to return a rented DVD cost the environment? One extra 5-mile round-trip will take between.1 and.25 gallons of gas. If only a million DVDs per year were purchased and thrown away rather than rented it would save 5 million extra miles driven. That equates to 100,000 to 250,000 gallons of gas burned and between 2,500 - 7,000 TONS of CO2 released into the atmosphere (from carbon-debt calculator at www.amfor.org). These numbers are even higher if those are SUV miles.
Also, how many traffic accidents are there in 5-million miles driven and what are the social and environmental costs of those?
A million DVDs probably take up only a couple of cubic yard of landfill. Individually there are probably far fewer environmental costs to manufacture and distribute them than result from one single return trip to Blockbuster. Yes, it seems wasteful to throw away those plastic DVDs, but what's really wasteful is using 3,000 lb vehicles to provide them with their own chauffeur service back to Blockbuster.
The point here is that we live in a very complex world and the best course of action to foster environmental sustainability is not always the most obvious.
You're clearly defining criminals as car-thief, convenience-store robber, mugger, etc. What about the REAL criminals such as Ken Lay, Marvin Boesky, John Cowland (current governor of Connecticut), hundreds of mutual funds managers, Martha Stewart, Andrew and Lea Fastow, Dennis Koslowski, Parmalat, Tyco,...
In the late 80's and until the mid 90's many computers above a certain level (many desktops of the day fell under the rule) and lots of common everyday software were classified as munitions and could not be exported to certain countries. It wasn't just Apples. After a few years the laws became unenforcable because of global markets. They may still be on the books.
I think Apples are definately more secure because fewer people use them. There is practically a whole underground industry built around training people to hack Windows platforms that does not exist for Mac platforms. The amount of effort and resources being devoted to cracking Windows is orders of magnitude greater than is being devoted to Mac OS.
To try and prove the point that Macs are inherently more secure than Win-based machines, many people use examples of Windows hacks and techniques that will not work on Macs - but that is faulty logic. I am absolutely sure that there are many undiscovered unique vulnerabilities in Mac OS's simply because no one has bothered to find them. Let's face it - Win machines are where the money is - corporations use them, governments use them, banks use them, and almost everyone else uses them. As Willie Sutton famously said when asked why he robbed banks - "That's where the money is."
It has gotten to the point where it is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. There are now so many script-kiddy tools and other information available for Windows that it has become the OS of choice to learn to hack.
Here is an interesting double-blind study that no one will ever do: Hire ten top-notch hackers and assign five to find NEW vulnerabilities in OSX and five to find NEW vulnerabilities in Windows. At the end of a year tally up the scores.
Believe me - I am no Microsoft fan, but until 99% of the world's hackers go after Macs exclusively for a few years I will not buy in to the "inherently better" theory of Mac security.
So you will be able to buy clothes without trying them on by seeing them on your avatar, but guess what happens then - you take them home and try them on. Although on the surface the avatar seems more efficient, I believe it will just mean more trips to the store for returning things, more used items and higher administrative and restocking costs.
Probably the best use of this system will two-fold:
1)be to screen clothes to find those you really like to decide which to actually try on in the fitting room.
2) to put outlandish clothes on your avatar to see if there is some hidden combination that magically transforms you into a cool person.
I don't think the report is crap at all. You think it is useless since it only dealt with weight, but that is the way research is done, my friend. One uses a simple situation in which it is possible to control variables and then one makes an inference about general principles from the data. The researches couldn't care less how much people value their weight-privacy because they were just using that as a tool to determine the validity of their main hypothesis (and by the way, they did state a hypothesis and then stated their conclusion and then stated the confidence level of its validity - you just didn't recognize it).
This paper is actually quite good. It doesn't use psuedo-statistics at all - but you wouldn't know that since you clearly aren't familiar with statistical methods. I'm not criticizing you - 99+% of the population doesn't know enough statistics to tell good methodology from bad. The statistical analyses used were valid and appropriate for this kind of study. The p-value calculated, at 0.003, was more than low enough to prove their hypothesis. The big buggabo for most statistical studies, sample size, was avoided by an impressive n-value of 127.
What I suspect happened is that you read it expecting it to provide you with "answers" to some question you would find interesting. It is necessary to think about these studies and recognize the IMPLICATION of the research for yourself - what the researchers chose as a vehicle to prove their hypothesis is unimportant. After all, who cares if over-weight people value their weight-secrets more than average-weight people? The important and interesting information was that people give more value to privacy the further they are from the population norm. Now THAT'S interesting, useful and not at all obvious.
But since you want implications spelled out let me give you some: Sick patients are less likely to tell their physicians about their health problems. People needing financial help are less likely to admit it to social workers. People who are in below average physical condition are less likely to admit it before going on that hike with friends People with heart conditions are less likely to alert tour operators about it before on that 5-hour plane ride. Unemployed people are less likely to confide in relatives and friends to get needed emotional support Workers on the airplane assembly line that can't really weld as well as their colleagues are less likely to ask for training to improve.
You are right, but that turns out not to be the whole story. Although I specifically said landmines and not anti-personnel mines I did mistakenly imply that the US manufacturers received profit from the sale of anti-personnel landmines, and that was wrong (but who knows what their offshore subsidiaries do). The US does manufacture and export landmines - just not anti-personnel landmines. But since that was what we were talking about my statement was incorrect. The US has prohibited the transfer of anti-personnel mines since 1992. However, that's not the whole story. In investigating the facts I have discovered that we are not exactly lilly white when it comes to anti-personnel mines either.
US law prohibits the transfer of anti-personnel landmines. However, the US has continued to supply friendly governments with anti-personnel mines on occasion, including Canada and Afghanistan.[UN report] Although the Canadian transfer technically violated both treaty and law, it was probably for testing and disposal training purposes which is OK in my book - but the US law did not prevent us from supplying the new Afghan government with _captured_ supplies of anti-personnel landmines [US GAO report] which is NOT ok in my book.
Also, the US manufactures, sells, and uses cluster munitions. Cluster bombs are not *classified* as anti-personnel mines, but do effectively become that when they do not explode on the initial impact (to hinder runway repair or vehicle recovery efforts). Because the size of the explosive is large enough to disable vehicles they are classified as anti-vehicle mines even though they lay directly on the surface and are triggered by slight movement.
The United States last acknowledged using antipersonnel mines in 1991 in Kuwait and Iraq, scattering 117,634 landmines, 30,000 of which were classified anti-personnel.[US GAO Report] I suspect the rest were cluster munitions. Thankfully, we stopped the practice after there were news reports of children being drawn to the brighty colored butterfly-shaped bombs. There is no information about anti-personnel landmine use in recent and current middle east wars, but I suspect our use is very small with the exception of cluster munitions. Also from the GAO, the US has stockpiled over 10 million anti-personnel mines.
So, I was wrong about the current profit/manufacture/policy links of anti-personnel mines - the US has changed its ways although that link DID exist prior to 1992. However we do manufacture and export anti-vehicle landmines, we do manufacture and sell landmines which although classified anti-vehicle effectively act as anti-personnel mines, and we do transfer captured anti-personnel mines to others.
This is not to say that we are the Great Satan. Our behavior is MUCH better because of policies developed during the Clinton administration, we devote significant resources to mine clearing and awareness, and I hope we continue to improve, particularly in the area of transfering captured anti-personnel landmines.
Also, the Constitution of the United States will not technically allow us to sign a treaty that weakens the ability of us to defend ourselves if needed.
I've read the Constitution, and I must have missed that part. But it is a moot point anyway. I can easily make the case that the US military would be stronger if there were no mines - not weaker. Mines are the poor man's fortifications. A strong military force can be held at bay by a much weaker force that employs land mines. Since the US has the strongest military in the world by far, the presence of land mines can only have an overall negative impact on the effectiveness of our military. It's simple logic.
This is great spin, and is true as far as it goes, but the REAL reason the US has not signed the treaty is that we are the world's largest exporter of arms, and banning mines would cost US companies MILLIONS of dollars yearly.
I think "conventionally cleared" referred to conventional mine clearing, not conventional scrub-brush clearing. But the logic of using an indicator plant works for both types of clearing - mine and brush. Deep mines are often overlooked by mine-clearing operations, but because buried objects tend to gradually work their way to the surface, several people are killed yearly in fields thought cleared of mines. In any event people do often start cultivating land suspected of having mines even without formal mine-clearing having occurred. This usually happens when the alternative is to starve to death. Planting such an indicator grass would be very valuable in both these situations.
Ahhhhhh! I like the way you think. One of my life goals is to convince more people to be less accepting of self-serving press releases and to look for the "real" reason things are the way they are. This is a nice example of spin.
I cannot start a company and remain on unemplyment, it is against the rules.
Sorry - tht is not correct. You can start a company you just can't make any wages. In New York the weekly unemployment form specifically asks: "Did you receive any salary or wages in the preceeding week?" - it does not ask "Did you work for free during the week?".
Unless the stars align for some lucky stiff there won't be any "problem" with wages in the time before unemployment benefits run out.
"In all fairness"!!?? The words "fair" and "pharmaceutical companies" don't go together. You are right that we need patents to insure drug production, but the pharma companies are abusing the system. For example, they produce a drug that they keep in patent for 8 years and then, miraculously, they come up with a better version 7.5 years later. The better version can be just a new tablet that is time-release so patients only have to take one pill daily rather than 4. You tell me - does that deserve another 8-year patent? What is so maddening is that they blow their own horn about improving the plight of patients with the "new" version when they do. Does anyone believe they didn't have the timed-release version ready a few months after the original one? If patient health was their concern they would have released it as soon as they had it.
don't believe the pharma companies' spin about research costs. They spend more on marketing than research, but they never tell you that in their self-serving press releases. Their "research budgets" are grossly inflated because they pile anything into it they can for tax and public relations reasons. "Research" budgets also include things like fleets of corporate jets for the company executives who occasionally think about research, and the funding of tame studies _designed_ to show their new drugs are better than others. These tame studies are billed as research, but in fact are nothing more than marketing tools. The pharma industry is worse than the tobacco industry ever was in creating their own self-serving research using tame researchers masquarading as independent, but they are much better at it than tobacco ever dreamed.
We in the US pay the highest drug prices in the world, largely because of this abuse of the patent system. But to add insult to injury, the pharma lobby keeps us from getting lower prices by claiming the very same drugs they just sold to CANADA are unsafe!!! Does anyone really believe that? If pharma companies had the health of the public as their goal they would lower drug prices so more people could afford them and let their drugs go off-patent after a reasonable time period and reasonable profit. I'd even support a high profit for their valuable products, but the current obscene profits are...well...obscene.
Moderators - the previous post was NOT offtopic. However, this one is...
Sheesh! Just register. It doesn't cost anything. They don't send email or share your address with anyone. You don't get advertisements. Make up a name.
You are correct. However I have a problem with the *obscene* profits of the pharmaceutical companies.
Yes, as they say in their press releases they spend 100s of millions on their research budgets for drugs that don't pay off, but what their press releases don't say is that they spend MORE that their research budgets on marketing and lobbying. They also don't mention that the sum of the yearly compensation packages of the top ten executives of any pharmaceutical company is usually *at least* 10% of the company's total research budget.
There needs to be a middle ground between no profits and obscene profits that provides the maximum benefit for the society at large.
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It's just silly when there's a media reaction to events, they create this fantastical link between this new "menace", and then laws are rushed into place to deal with it.
I agree with you, but in this case media silliness doesn't apply. The sheriff specifically requested the town council pass laws regulating CyberCafes based on his take on the issue. This is particulalry troubling to me since it wasn't any sort of groundswell of public concern that initiated this, but the police simply deciding they didn't like these businesses.
If the police find there is a higher crime rate in a certain area they should address it in the traditional manner and step up patrols in the area to protect the citizens AND the store owners - NOT punish the store owners who are running legitimate and respectable businesses.
Roe v. Wade? ROE v. WADE?? That was a challenge to a Texas law making it a crime to perform an abortion. It had nothing to do with privacy.
If you allowed people to wander into the cafe off the street, with no identification or means to identify them later, then you have jsut created a magnificent safe haven for all sorts of criminals.
The most freightening thing about your viewpoint is that you seem to think that it is normal and OK for the police to track and monitor everyone simply based on the justification that there may be some criminals there. For some reasaon you seem to think that surveillance is normal and places where surveillance is not allowed are exceptions. And what's more - you're against creating any exceptions!
Read my sig.
You must live in an alternate universe.
The only correct thing you said was that the popular vote does not elect a President. HOWEVER, the popular vote in Florida did decide which candidate got all of Florida's electoral votes and hence the election. The Republican's brought the legal challenges to the courts (nor Gore). The Supreme Court, when the matter was brought to then by the Republicans, returned an unbelievable and partisan decision that it was more important to get the election results quickly than have them be accurate - a clear advantge to Bush.
The Supreme Court ignored the Constitution and its established method of the transition of power. The election winner in November is only President-elect until January. This waiting period was partly designed to take away the kind of rush-to-close mania that can result in the wrong person being sworn in as President - as happened in the 2000 election.
Oh, not so ironic. Just because i believe there should be controls on gun ownership doesn't mean I'm not patriotic or don't believe in defending my (and your) rights. I just don't interpret "An organized militia being..." as granting an unfettered right for everyone to own unlimited untraceable weapons. When the Constitution was written the most advanced weapon was a musket and the military was actually made up of volunteers from state militias who brought their own guns. Things have changed.
Maybe you think I am more extreme than I really am - I don't support a total ban on gun ownership, and I actually own a handgun, but lets face it - if I blow away everyone in a McDonalds my biggest worry in being identified is the car I drove up in and NOT the ballistics of the weapons I used. That's just screwy in my opinion.
"Chicago and Washington DC banned handguns. New York has almost done so. Those places don't seem to have a shortage of armed criminals though, do they? So who, I ask you, is really affected by the law? The good guys, or the bad guys?"
There is a logical error in your argument because we have no way of knowing what the death rate from handguns would be in these cities if there were no gun control laws. I find it difficult to believe that the shootings (accidental and criminal) in these cities would not rise if everyone had a corner gunshop as well as a corner deli.
Also, your argument that restrictions make no difference does not take into account that there is an extensive trade in guns purchased in other states and brought into these cities. If guns were more tightly controlled everywhere the availability of guns for criminals in these cities would likely be much less.
Reports of the recent attempt to hold manufacturers accountable for who they sell to have been subtley spun by the gun lobby to make it appear ridiculous. In the case of the Colt lawsuit, the suit was not to hold Colt responsible if someone was killed by any old Colt gun, but was made because Colt was selling handguns to a few large-volume gun dealers who were shipping those guns illegally to areas with restrictive gun laws. Colt knew these dealers were running guns to New York and selling them illegally (they hd been informed by law-enforcement) and yet did not stop selling to them. It is not ridiculous at all to hold Colt responsible when they knew very well their product was being re-sold illegally.
Wiping out villages...
I assume you are talking about the political expediencies of building the Three Gorges Dam and the villages that were wiped out as a result. You might be interested to know that many small hamlets and villages were wiped out in Tennessee during the 30's due to the construction of the TVA system, and also in the 70's in New York to build the NYC watershed system.
The cultural revolution happened three decades ago and was NOT a government program. An attempt at political manipulation and power consolidation by what became known as the Gang of Four got monstrously out of hand and could not be stopped. It went far beyond what was planned even by that corrupt group.
too bad this country seems to be filled with the sort of simple, non-logically-thinking, irrational, US-centric, self-righteous voter that would make such asinine comparisons.
I suppose these people are non-logical, irrational, and self-righteous because they don't agree with YOU? While we are on the topic of irrational I would like to point out that your description of people who are faulting the US as being "US-centric" makes absolutely no sense.
The above press release implies that everything is OK because it is being done in accordance to law. I'm not convinced that is correct, but even if it is - so what? Everyone forgets that governments make the laws. The cancellation of the constitutional rights of Jews and gypsies in Nazi Germany was perfectly legal in German law because the Nazi party with its rubber-stamp, party-controlled Reichstag made the laws. Wait - "stripped of ther constitutional rights and sent to a detention camp without legal recourse" - that sounds very similar to our current administration's approach to protecting the Fatherland (oops, I mean "Homeland") doesn't it? Even the administration's aborted TIPS program encouraging citizen-on-citizen spying was taken directly from a page of the Nazi/Stasi playbook.
Before I get flamed, I'm not saying the Bush administration is commiting genocide, but except for that one endpoint let's face facts - the Bush way of doing things...
- government security files on every single citizen
- cancellation of constitutional rights for sub-groups of the population
- state-sanctioned informer networks,
- concentration camps,
- torture (yes, it has happened),
- people whisked away by intelligence agents and "disappeared",
- no recourse to the legal system for detainees,
- pre-emptive wars justified with false official statements (both incidently capturing large oil reserves),
- massive state contracts to loyal companies having close personal and economic ties to the regime (Krups/Halliburton),
- casting anyone who does not support the party as un-patriotic,
...more closely resembles the totalitarian Nazi/Stasi way of doing things than it does our founding fathers' way of doing things.
I knew this would happen. I was just using the return issue as a specific illustration that sustainability is complicated and not always obvious.
You left out such things that favor rentals such as the toxicity of the chemicals used to make the DVD degrade, and the higher transportation costs of single-use products. Incidently, the most environmentally advantageous way to rent movies is with a by-mail service where the postman, who is coming by anyway, drops it off in your mailbox.
However, you also make some assumptions that are not valid if you are trying to support Blockbuster rentals as environmentally superior to one-use DVDs. First, I assume the the packaging for single-use DVDs would be a lot less than the current semi-permanent cases we get - perhaps even paper. I do not think everyone lives half a mile from a Blockbusters and almost no one outside of NYC where I live ever walks to one. The average fuel economy for vehicles in the US is far from 30 MPG.
Sure we can set up an artificial situation where rentals are more environmentally sensitive if you re-plan cities and change everyones cars and lifestyle, but that is not real-life. Also, what about the huge negative environmental impact of building tens of thousands of stores so that everyone lives within half a mile of one? See - it isn't so simple. My assumptions that people live about 2.5 miles from the blockbuster and drive cars that get between 20 and 30 MPG seems a lot more realistic.
Here is the point of this reply: We can all do things that make us feel good about helping the environment (such as rent DVDs), but we shouldn't do them blindly - we need to actually think about the overall consequences of how our actions impact the planet. Sometimes a little waste in one area reaps huge benefits in other areas.
What I objected to is wastefulness of discarding the disc...I would pay $7 for being able to watch a movie when I want and not take it back, as long as the media didn't end up in a land fill.
.1 and .25 gallons of gas. If only a million DVDs per year were purchased and thrown away rather than rented it would save 5 million extra miles driven. That equates to 100,000 to 250,000 gallons of gas burned and between 2,500 - 7,000 TONS of CO2 released into the atmosphere (from carbon-debt calculator at www.amfor.org). These numbers are even higher if those are SUV miles.
I applaud your environmental conciousness, but the disposable nature of the DVD may not be as bad as you think. I spend a lot of my time creating Sustainable Development programs, and I have learned that one needs to look at many factors in order to determine true environmental impact.
For example, how much does one extra car trip to return a rented DVD cost the environment? One extra 5-mile round-trip will take between
Also, how many traffic accidents are there in 5-million miles driven and what are the social and environmental costs of those?
A million DVDs probably take up only a couple of cubic yard of landfill. Individually there are probably far fewer environmental costs to manufacture and distribute them than result from one single return trip to Blockbuster. Yes, it seems wasteful to throw away those plastic DVDs, but what's really wasteful is using 3,000 lb vehicles to provide them with their own chauffeur service back to Blockbuster.
The point here is that we live in a very complex world and the best course of action to foster environmental sustainability is not always the most obvious.
You guarantee it? Then I want my money back.
...
You're clearly defining criminals as car-thief, convenience-store robber, mugger, etc. What about the REAL criminals such as Ken Lay, Marvin Boesky, John Cowland (current governor of Connecticut), hundreds of mutual funds managers, Martha Stewart, Andrew and Lea Fastow, Dennis Koslowski, Parmalat, Tyco,
As I said, I want my money back - literally.
In the late 80's and until the mid 90's many computers above a certain level (many desktops of the day fell under the rule) and lots of common everyday software were classified as munitions and could not be exported to certain countries. It wasn't just Apples. After a few years the laws became unenforcable because of global markets. They may still be on the books.
I think Apples are definately more secure because fewer people use them. There is practically a whole underground industry built around training people to hack Windows platforms that does not exist for Mac platforms. The amount of effort and resources being devoted to cracking Windows is orders of magnitude greater than is being devoted to Mac OS.
To try and prove the point that Macs are inherently more secure than Win-based machines, many people use examples of Windows hacks and techniques that will not work on Macs - but that is faulty logic. I am absolutely sure that there are many undiscovered unique vulnerabilities in Mac OS's simply because no one has bothered to find them. Let's face it - Win machines are where the money is - corporations use them, governments use them, banks use them, and almost everyone else uses them. As Willie Sutton famously said when asked why he robbed banks - "That's where the money is."
It has gotten to the point where it is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. There are now so many script-kiddy tools and other information available for Windows that it has become the OS of choice to learn to hack.
Here is an interesting double-blind study that no one will ever do: Hire ten top-notch hackers and assign five to find NEW vulnerabilities in OSX and five to find NEW vulnerabilities in Windows. At the end of a year tally up the scores.
Believe me - I am no Microsoft fan, but until 99% of the world's hackers go after Macs exclusively for a few years I will not buy in to the "inherently better" theory of Mac security.
Sheesh! With all that gaming how did you find the time to post to /.? Have you even seen the sun since 2003? Do you have food delivered?
So you will be able to buy clothes without trying them on by seeing them on your avatar, but guess what happens then - you take them home and try them on. Although on the surface the avatar seems more efficient, I believe it will just mean more trips to the store for returning things, more used items and higher administrative and restocking costs.
Probably the best use of this system will two-fold:
1)be to screen clothes to find those you really like to decide which to actually try on in the fitting room.
2) to put outlandish clothes on your avatar to see if there is some hidden combination that magically transforms you into a cool person.
I don't think the report is crap at all. You think it is useless since it only dealt with weight, but that is the way research is done, my friend. One uses a simple situation in which it is possible to control variables and then one makes an inference about general principles from the data. The researches couldn't care less how much people value their weight-privacy because they were just using that as a tool to determine the validity of their main hypothesis (and by the way, they did state a hypothesis and then stated their conclusion and then stated the confidence level of its validity - you just didn't recognize it).
This paper is actually quite good. It doesn't use psuedo-statistics at all - but you wouldn't know that since you clearly aren't familiar with statistical methods. I'm not criticizing you - 99+% of the population doesn't know enough statistics to tell good methodology from bad. The statistical analyses used were valid and appropriate for this kind of study. The p-value calculated, at 0.003, was more than low enough to prove their hypothesis. The big buggabo for most statistical studies, sample size, was avoided by an impressive n-value of 127.
What I suspect happened is that you read it expecting it to provide you with "answers" to some question you would find interesting. It is necessary to think about these studies and recognize the IMPLICATION of the research for yourself - what the researchers chose as a vehicle to prove their hypothesis is unimportant. After all, who cares if over-weight people value their weight-secrets more than average-weight people? The important and interesting information was that people give more value to privacy the further they are from the population norm. Now THAT'S interesting, useful and not at all obvious.
But since you want implications spelled out let me give you some:
Sick patients are less likely to tell their physicians about their health problems.
People needing financial help are less likely to admit it to social workers.
People who are in below average physical condition are less likely to admit it before going on that hike with friends
People with heart conditions are less likely to alert tour operators about it before on that 5-hour plane ride.
Unemployed people are less likely to confide in relatives and friends to get needed emotional support
Workers on the airplane assembly line that can't really weld as well as their colleagues are less likely to ask for training to improve.
The applicability of this study goes on and on.
You are right, but that turns out not to be the whole story. Although I specifically said landmines and not anti-personnel mines I did mistakenly imply that the US manufacturers received profit from the sale of anti-personnel landmines, and that was wrong (but who knows what their offshore subsidiaries do). The US does manufacture and export landmines - just not anti-personnel landmines. But since that was what we were talking about my statement was incorrect. The US has prohibited the transfer of anti-personnel mines since 1992. However, that's not the whole story. In investigating the facts I have discovered that we are not exactly lilly white when it comes to anti-personnel mines either.
US law prohibits the transfer of anti-personnel landmines. However, the US has continued to supply friendly governments with anti-personnel mines on occasion, including Canada and Afghanistan.[UN report] Although the Canadian transfer technically violated both treaty and law, it was probably for testing and disposal training purposes which is OK in my book - but the US law did not prevent us from supplying the new Afghan government with _captured_ supplies of anti-personnel landmines [US GAO report] which is NOT ok in my book.
Also, the US manufactures, sells, and uses cluster munitions. Cluster bombs are not *classified* as anti-personnel mines, but do effectively become that when they do not explode on the initial impact (to hinder runway repair or vehicle recovery efforts). Because the size of the explosive is large enough to disable vehicles they are classified as anti-vehicle mines even though they lay directly on the surface and are triggered by slight movement.
The United States last acknowledged using antipersonnel mines in 1991 in Kuwait and Iraq, scattering 117,634 landmines, 30,000 of which were classified anti-personnel.[US GAO Report] I suspect the rest were cluster munitions. Thankfully, we stopped the practice after there were news reports of children being drawn to the brighty colored butterfly-shaped bombs. There is no information about anti-personnel landmine use in recent and current middle east wars, but I suspect our use is very small with the exception of cluster munitions. Also from the GAO, the US has stockpiled over 10 million anti-personnel mines.
So, I was wrong about the current profit/manufacture/policy links of anti-personnel mines - the US has changed its ways although that link DID exist prior to 1992. However we do manufacture and export anti-vehicle landmines, we do manufacture and sell landmines which although classified anti-vehicle effectively act as anti-personnel mines, and we do transfer captured anti-personnel mines to others.
This is not to say that we are the Great Satan. Our behavior is MUCH better because of policies developed during the Clinton administration, we devote significant resources to mine clearing and awareness, and I hope we continue to improve, particularly in the area of transfering captured anti-personnel landmines.
Also, the Constitution of the United States will not technically allow us to sign a treaty that weakens the ability of us to defend ourselves if needed.
I've read the Constitution, and I must have missed that part. But it is a moot point anyway. I can easily make the case that the US military would be stronger if there were no mines - not weaker. Mines are the poor man's fortifications. A strong military force can be held at bay by a much weaker force that employs land mines. Since the US has the strongest military in the world by far, the presence of land mines can only have an overall negative impact on the effectiveness of our military. It's simple logic.
This is great spin, and is true as far as it goes, but the REAL reason the US has not signed the treaty is that we are the world's largest exporter of arms, and banning mines would cost US companies MILLIONS of dollars yearly.
I think "conventionally cleared" referred to conventional mine clearing, not conventional scrub-brush clearing. But the logic of using an indicator plant works for both types of clearing - mine and brush. Deep mines are often overlooked by mine-clearing operations, but because buried objects tend to gradually work their way to the surface, several people are killed yearly in fields thought cleared of mines. In any event people do often start cultivating land suspected of having mines even without formal mine-clearing having occurred. This usually happens when the alternative is to starve to death. Planting such an indicator grass would be very valuable in both these situations.
Ahhhhhh! I like the way you think. One of my life goals is to convince more people to be less accepting of self-serving press releases and to look for the "real" reason things are the way they are. This is a nice example of spin.
Still - it is a nice side-effect.
I cannot start a company and remain on unemplyment, it is against the rules.
Sorry - tht is not correct. You can start a company you just can't make any wages. In New York the weekly unemployment form specifically asks: "Did you receive any salary or wages in the preceeding week?" - it does not ask "Did you work for free during the week?".
Unless the stars align for some lucky stiff there won't be any "problem" with wages in the time before unemployment benefits run out.
"In all fairness"!!?? The words "fair" and "pharmaceutical companies" don't go together. You are right that we need patents to insure drug production, but the pharma companies are abusing the system. For example, they produce a drug that they keep in patent for 8 years and then, miraculously, they come up with a better version 7.5 years later. The better version can be just a new tablet that is time-release so patients only have to take one pill daily rather than 4. You tell me - does that deserve another 8-year patent? What is so maddening is that they blow their own horn about improving the plight of patients with the "new" version when they do. Does anyone believe they didn't have the timed-release version ready a few months after the original one? If patient health was their concern they would have released it as soon as they had it.
don't believe the pharma companies' spin about research costs. They spend more on marketing than research, but they never tell you that in their self-serving press releases. Their "research budgets" are grossly inflated because they pile anything into it they can for tax and public relations reasons. "Research" budgets also include things like fleets of corporate jets for the company executives who occasionally think about research, and the funding of tame studies _designed_ to show their new drugs are better than others. These tame studies are billed as research, but in fact are nothing more than marketing tools. The pharma industry is worse than the tobacco industry ever was in creating their own self-serving research using tame researchers masquarading as independent, but they are much better at it than tobacco ever dreamed.
We in the US pay the highest drug prices in the world, largely because of this abuse of the patent system. But to add insult to injury, the pharma lobby keeps us from getting lower prices by claiming the very same drugs they just sold to CANADA are unsafe!!! Does anyone really believe that? If pharma companies had the health of the public as their goal they would lower drug prices so more people could afford them and let their drugs go off-patent after a reasonable time period and reasonable profit. I'd even support a high profit for their valuable products, but the current obscene profits are...well...obscene.
Moderators - the previous post was NOT offtopic. However, this one is...
Sheesh! Just register. It doesn't cost anything. They don't send email or share your address with anyone. You don't get advertisements. Make up a name.
You are correct. However I have a problem with the *obscene* profits of the pharmaceutical companies.
Yes, as they say in their press releases they spend 100s of millions on their research budgets for drugs that don't pay off, but what their press releases don't say is that they spend MORE that their research budgets on marketing and lobbying. They also don't mention that the sum of the yearly compensation packages of the top ten executives of any pharmaceutical company is usually *at least* 10% of the company's total research budget.
There needs to be a middle ground between no profits and obscene profits that provides the maximum benefit for the society at large.