Men can get vaccinated. The FDA approved the vaccine for women, but it can be prescribed off-label for men. Doctors prescribe medicine off-label all the time.
Brush up on your copyright law. Free does not mean public domain, and copyright is the default -- no shrink-wrap license is necessary to forbid copying.
The theory is that the fine should equal the expected harm of the act, adjusted for the probability of getting caught. If parking illegally in front of a fire hydrant causes a building to burn down one time in 100,000, and if the building burning down causes $1 million of damage, then parking in front of the fire hydrant has an expected cost of $10. Since the odds of getting caught are only about one out of five, we multiply $10 by 5 so that the average illegal parking job -- including all the times you don't get caught -- will cost you $10. Thus, the fine is set at $50. Add a few bucks to pay for the meter maid's time and the administrative cost of processing your ticket, and the fine is around $60.
But what about all the rich people who won't be deterred by a paltry $60 fine? No problem; they put as much money back into the system through fines as they take out through damage they cause by their acts. In fact, if it is worth $1000 to you to park illegally -- imagine your wife is in labor and you are rushing to the hospital but have to park a block away because of a traffic jam, and only the fire hydrant spot is available -- then we WANT you to do it. Suppose you get $1000 worth of value out of parking there, and you only cause an average of $10 of damage. Then by parking illegally, you create $990 of value.
Certainly there are some crimes where this logic does not apply. Crimes like murder or rape, where the damage is to a fundamental human right, cannot be efficient, and crimes like securities fraud corrupt the cost-weighing process by which we'd normally determine whether an act is efficient. Therefore, for these, we have jail time.
You seem pretty confident about that. I'm not sure, but it seems possible to me that by selling its product in the US, the company establishes sufficient contacts for the US courts to assert jurisdiction.
ESRB ratings are not enforced by a government. AO games do not get stocked because Wal Mart, EB Games, and the rest freely choose in a free market not to stock them. You can still buy them on Amazon or directly from the retailer. The government is not involved, and your nanny state diatribe, while probably right generally, does not bear on the situation here.
Is there any indication that these third-party AJAX apps won't be locally stored like Widgets? If they're stored locally and have access to enough system-level calls, why would they be any worse than any other kind of language? This debate reminds me of C++ trolls claiming that Java could never write real programs, or better, ASM trolls dismissing "high-end" languages like C++ and Pascal. As long as the language is turing-complete, relatively fast, and has the keys to the kingdom (i.e. access to system-level functionality), what's the problem?
Wait wait wait. I'm not a techie and I'm not 100% sure that I know what you're talking about, but I think you're saying that Apple can't allow binary code to run on the iPhone because it would by necessity have access to the memory assigned to iPod functionality, thus potentially compromising DRM.
But isn't that already the case with iTunes on any mac or PC? Sure, Mac OS X has memory protection, but the user can circumvent it by punching in the admin password.
Science and Christianity don't have to be diametrically apposed, as many absolutists would have you think.
Perhaps not diametrically opposed, but science and Christianity certainly conflict with one another. The Catholics claim to believe that communion wafers literally turn into the flesh of Christ, particles of bread transforming in a very real way into skin and muscle and fat. The Creationists believe literally in the Genesis story, Eden, vengeful god and all. And all Christians -- more or less by definition -- believe that Christ performed an extensive list of miracles and then rose from the dead. This is not rhetorical sleight of hand -- allegedly, he cured leprosy at the touch of his hand, caused in apparent defiance of the law of conservation of matter a few fish and loaves of bread to feed a cast of thousands, turned water into wine, brought a dead man back to life, walked on water, and then came back to life after three days of being dead.
These are supernatural phenomena, no more compatible with science than a belief in magic, or astrology, or voodoo. You can believe in the social benefits of your religion -- a point with which I take issue, but it's a topic for another post -- but you cannot seriously claim that Christianity and science can be wholly complementary. It's a noble aim that you have, to reconcile the scientists and the god-worshippers, to bring the feuding children together, but it's factually inaccurate and intellectually dishonest.
'Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin angrily retorted that he found it "hard to believe that the New York court would tell American families that 'sh*t' and 'f@ck' are fine to say on broadcast television during the hours when children are most likely to be in the audience
Am I the only one who wonders what harm, precisely, these words actually do to children? Does hearing these words (as opposed to substitutes like "shoot" and "fudge" spoken in the same tone of voice) cause children to be more aggressive? More likely to abuse their future spouse/children? More likely to become alcoholic? More prone to thyroid cancer?
Is there any, you know, actual evidence to back up whatever the theory is?
What precisely is the harm that has FCC Chairman Kevin Martin so concerned?
Also, your definition of "simultaneous" depends on your frame of reference. Things that happen simultaneously in one frame of reference happen sequentially in a frame of reference with a velocity relative to the first.
No need to get all religious about it. If the "you" that shows up on the other end behaves identically, who's to say it's not really you? If and when the technology comes to fruition, your reservations will come to be seen as the same kind of quaint superstition as the belief of certain primitive cultures that being photographed extracts your soul.
There has always, always been a higher standard for breaking a company up than for allowing it to merge, since the former incurs all of the substantial costs of making an autonomous company out of a department. A better litmus test for whether two companies should be able to merge -- and the one that the government actually uses -- is whether the aggregate benefits to the consumers and shareholders (through increased returns to scale, usually, though also through synergies) outweigh the harm of decreased competition.
I had a Microsoft mouse at work that was just covered in buttons. Besides the ordinary two + scroll wheel on the top, it had two on one side and three on the other and the track wheel could be pushed in or pushed to either side horizontally. These extraneous buttons had nearly no resistance to them, so I would push them accidently all the time. Microsoft programmed them to do the most awful things, too. Each movement of my hand would typically send me back a web page, or hide all applications, or turn on some sort of universal access mode for retarded people.
Also, I am increasingly frustrated with the "Information Bar" in IE that pops up from time to time with a loud "bloop!" to inform you that it blocked a popup or wants to install an ActiveX control or something like that. In the help system, there's a FAQ question called "Can I turn off the information bar?" Never mind the deferential tone that they expect their users to take; their answer is "yes, but you have to turn it off individually for each function. To turn it off when a popup is blocked..." Then they send you through eight layers of preferences for each individual feature. In other words, they recognized a user desire to kill the damn thing but CONSCIOUSLY CHOSE not to let you do it conveniently. And the very worst part? To turn of the ActiveX control function, you have to endure a DIALOG BOX instead, every time. The dialog box has as its default option to allow the ActiveX installation. There is no option for "rip ActiveX out of my machine by its roots and never let it come back," which is ideally what I'd choose.
In fact, ActiveX is a topic for another three-page rant all by itself, but I'll leave it for another day. I'll also leave the topic of MS Word, except to say that I can't for the life of me understand why when you highlight and delete a paragraph, it applies the style from that paragraph to the one before. I find myself trying to delete the paragraph in such a way that Word won't notice. Microsoft, why do you make me play these games?
"But in the end it comes down to two competing visions of what society should be. In mine government derives it's just powers from the People. The People are generally sane, trustworthy people who are capable of self government. I trust my neighbor with a ballot so I have no problem with trusting him with a gun cabinet."
But then shouldn't you be okay with The People democratically deciding to give up guns? If you trust him with a ballot, doesn't that mean you have to accept the outcome? Or do you only trust him with a ballot when he votes the way you want him to vote?
"If I want to sell a gun to a friend then there's no reason the government should get involved in that"
Ooh! I can think of a reason! What if your friend has a history of mental illness like paranoid schizophrenia? Or what if he's a violent felon? He's pretty likely to do some pretty horrible things with the gun. Makes sense to me for the government to get involved.
On the other hand, a single papercut does not mean that you're going to die. The fact that slander subjects you to a lawsuit does not mean we've given up on freedom of speech. The fact that you can't smoke peyote or have ten wives doesn't mean that we've given up on freedom of religion. The fact that there's a background check and waiting period to own a gun doesn't mean we've given up on the second amendment.
The statute of limitations exists because evidence tends to degrade over time, not because we forgive people morally if they don't get caught right away. If you are forced to kill in self-defense, you don't want the prosecutor to carefully curate all of the evidence of your act for 28 years while all the witnesses who could explain that it was self-defense forget, fall out of contact, or die.
Whether you have a college degree is a cut-and-dry question with very, very strong and durable evidence. Twenty-eight years later -- hell, probably even a century later -- the evidence is still accessible and decisive. The statute of limitations is not analogous.
If you're an average person selling off unwanted stuff on ebay and buying the junk you want instead, then you aren't going owe income tax. You already paid income tax on the money you made to purchase your junk years ago. Most of it has not appreciated, to put it bluntly. If the IRS were to start playing hardball and try to tax you on the sale as Capital Gains, you would play hardball right back and show them your original basis and then the IRS would owe YOU for your loss.
No, that's only for investment property. Most of the stuff that people buy and sell is personal property. If you buy a car for your own personal use and then five years later sell it at a lower price, you're not entitled to deduct the difference. And even if you were, things would be complicated by an anti-shelter rule called the Passive Activity Loss rule, which caps the amount of loss from passive sources (e.g. investments) that you can deduct to the amount of passive income that you made in the year. So if you sell a stock at a loss, you can only apply the deduction to gains that you made from selling other stocks that year. Since most people aren't making money from passive sources, most people wouldn't be able to claim a loss from this sort of thing even if it weren't purely personal property.
You're neglecting the supply side of the price/quantity equilibrium. If some suppliers were willing to supply their (equivalent) games for $50, then even consumers who would tolerate a $60 pricepoint will instead by the $50 games. Your formulation assumes that the developers would all collude to fix their price at the maximum the consumer would bear -- which may be true, but I haven't seen any evidence to support it.
Slashdot Mirror
Men can get vaccinated. The FDA approved the vaccine for women, but it can be prescribed off-label for men. Doctors prescribe medicine off-label all the time.
Brush up on your copyright law. Free does not mean public domain, and copyright is the default -- no shrink-wrap license is necessary to forbid copying.
The theory is that the fine should equal the expected harm of the act, adjusted for the probability of getting caught. If parking illegally in front of a fire hydrant causes a building to burn down one time in 100,000, and if the building burning down causes $1 million of damage, then parking in front of the fire hydrant has an expected cost of $10. Since the odds of getting caught are only about one out of five, we multiply $10 by 5 so that the average illegal parking job -- including all the times you don't get caught -- will cost you $10. Thus, the fine is set at $50. Add a few bucks to pay for the meter maid's time and the administrative cost of processing your ticket, and the fine is around $60.
But what about all the rich people who won't be deterred by a paltry $60 fine? No problem; they put as much money back into the system through fines as they take out through damage they cause by their acts. In fact, if it is worth $1000 to you to park illegally -- imagine your wife is in labor and you are rushing to the hospital but have to park a block away because of a traffic jam, and only the fire hydrant spot is available -- then we WANT you to do it. Suppose you get $1000 worth of value out of parking there, and you only cause an average of $10 of damage. Then by parking illegally, you create $990 of value.
Certainly there are some crimes where this logic does not apply. Crimes like murder or rape, where the damage is to a fundamental human right, cannot be efficient, and crimes like securities fraud corrupt the cost-weighing process by which we'd normally determine whether an act is efficient. Therefore, for these, we have jail time.
Yeah, except that Soap is nothing like that. Thank you for your smugness though.
You seem pretty confident about that. I'm not sure, but it seems possible to me that by selling its product in the US, the company establishes sufficient contacts for the US courts to assert jurisdiction.
Sort of like how prosecutors and police officers should publicly commend any citizens who do not break the law? It's not their job.
ESRB ratings are not enforced by a government. AO games do not get stocked because Wal Mart, EB Games, and the rest freely choose in a free market not to stock them. You can still buy them on Amazon or directly from the retailer. The government is not involved, and your nanny state diatribe, while probably right generally, does not bear on the situation here.
Ah, okay, and presumably the iPhone wouldn't have the resources to implement similar memory obfuscation. Thanks, that makes sense.
Is there any indication that these third-party AJAX apps won't be locally stored like Widgets? If they're stored locally and have access to enough system-level calls, why would they be any worse than any other kind of language? This debate reminds me of C++ trolls claiming that Java could never write real programs, or better, ASM trolls dismissing "high-end" languages like C++ and Pascal. As long as the language is turing-complete, relatively fast, and has the keys to the kingdom (i.e. access to system-level functionality), what's the problem?
Wait wait wait. I'm not a techie and I'm not 100% sure that I know what you're talking about, but I think you're saying that Apple can't allow binary code to run on the iPhone because it would by necessity have access to the memory assigned to iPod functionality, thus potentially compromising DRM.
But isn't that already the case with iTunes on any mac or PC? Sure, Mac OS X has memory protection, but the user can circumvent it by punching in the admin password.
Falwell's already taken care of, fortunately.
Perhaps not diametrically opposed, but science and Christianity certainly conflict with one another. The Catholics claim to believe that communion wafers literally turn into the flesh of Christ, particles of bread transforming in a very real way into skin and muscle and fat. The Creationists believe literally in the Genesis story, Eden, vengeful god and all. And all Christians -- more or less by definition -- believe that Christ performed an extensive list of miracles and then rose from the dead. This is not rhetorical sleight of hand -- allegedly, he cured leprosy at the touch of his hand, caused in apparent defiance of the law of conservation of matter a few fish and loaves of bread to feed a cast of thousands, turned water into wine, brought a dead man back to life, walked on water, and then came back to life after three days of being dead.
These are supernatural phenomena, no more compatible with science than a belief in magic, or astrology, or voodoo. You can believe in the social benefits of your religion -- a point with which I take issue, but it's a topic for another post -- but you cannot seriously claim that Christianity and science can be wholly complementary. It's a noble aim that you have, to reconcile the scientists and the god-worshippers, to bring the feuding children together, but it's factually inaccurate and intellectually dishonest.
Am I the only one who wonders what harm, precisely, these words actually do to children? Does hearing these words (as opposed to substitutes like "shoot" and "fudge" spoken in the same tone of voice) cause children to be more aggressive? More likely to abuse their future spouse/children? More likely to become alcoholic? More prone to thyroid cancer?
Is there any, you know, actual evidence to back up whatever the theory is?
What precisely is the harm that has FCC Chairman Kevin Martin so concerned?
Also, your definition of "simultaneous" depends on your frame of reference. Things that happen simultaneously in one frame of reference happen sequentially in a frame of reference with a velocity relative to the first.
No need to get all religious about it. If the "you" that shows up on the other end behaves identically, who's to say it's not really you? If and when the technology comes to fruition, your reservations will come to be seen as the same kind of quaint superstition as the belief of certain primitive cultures that being photographed extracts your soul.
There has always, always been a higher standard for breaking a company up than for allowing it to merge, since the former incurs all of the substantial costs of making an autonomous company out of a department. A better litmus test for whether two companies should be able to merge -- and the one that the government actually uses -- is whether the aggregate benefits to the consumers and shareholders (through increased returns to scale, usually, though also through synergies) outweigh the harm of decreased competition.
I had a Microsoft mouse at work that was just covered in buttons. Besides the ordinary two + scroll wheel on the top, it had two on one side and three on the other and the track wheel could be pushed in or pushed to either side horizontally. These extraneous buttons had nearly no resistance to them, so I would push them accidently all the time. Microsoft programmed them to do the most awful things, too. Each movement of my hand would typically send me back a web page, or hide all applications, or turn on some sort of universal access mode for retarded people.
Also, I am increasingly frustrated with the "Information Bar" in IE that pops up from time to time with a loud "bloop!" to inform you that it blocked a popup or wants to install an ActiveX control or something like that. In the help system, there's a FAQ question called "Can I turn off the information bar?" Never mind the deferential tone that they expect their users to take; their answer is "yes, but you have to turn it off individually for each function. To turn it off when a popup is blocked..." Then they send you through eight layers of preferences for each individual feature. In other words, they recognized a user desire to kill the damn thing but CONSCIOUSLY CHOSE not to let you do it conveniently. And the very worst part? To turn of the ActiveX control function, you have to endure a DIALOG BOX instead, every time. The dialog box has as its default option to allow the ActiveX installation. There is no option for "rip ActiveX out of my machine by its roots and never let it come back," which is ideally what I'd choose.
In fact, ActiveX is a topic for another three-page rant all by itself, but I'll leave it for another day. I'll also leave the topic of MS Word, except to say that I can't for the life of me understand why when you highlight and delete a paragraph, it applies the style from that paragraph to the one before. I find myself trying to delete the paragraph in such a way that Word won't notice. Microsoft, why do you make me play these games?
"But in the end it comes down to two competing visions of what society should be. In mine government derives it's just powers from the People. The People are generally sane, trustworthy people who are capable of self government. I trust my neighbor with a ballot so I have no problem with trusting him with a gun cabinet."
But then shouldn't you be okay with The People democratically deciding to give up guns? If you trust him with a ballot, doesn't that mean you have to accept the outcome? Or do you only trust him with a ballot when he votes the way you want him to vote?
"If I want to sell a gun to a friend then there's no reason the government should get involved in that"
Ooh! I can think of a reason! What if your friend has a history of mental illness like paranoid schizophrenia? Or what if he's a violent felon? He's pretty likely to do some pretty horrible things with the gun. Makes sense to me for the government to get involved.
On the other hand, a single papercut does not mean that you're going to die. The fact that slander subjects you to a lawsuit does not mean we've given up on freedom of speech. The fact that you can't smoke peyote or have ten wives doesn't mean that we've given up on freedom of religion. The fact that there's a background check and waiting period to own a gun doesn't mean we've given up on the second amendment.
"If two sane people had had guns at VT or Kileen, Tx Luby's, a lot less people would have died."
Of course. The trick is sorting out who's sane. Somehow Cho slipped through the cracks. I don't know how you can be confident that more won't.
Also, incidentally, EVEN FEWER people would have died at VT if NO ONE had guns.
The statute of limitations exists because evidence tends to degrade over time, not because we forgive people morally if they don't get caught right away. If you are forced to kill in self-defense, you don't want the prosecutor to carefully curate all of the evidence of your act for 28 years while all the witnesses who could explain that it was self-defense forget, fall out of contact, or die.
Whether you have a college degree is a cut-and-dry question with very, very strong and durable evidence. Twenty-eight years later -- hell, probably even a century later -- the evidence is still accessible and decisive. The statute of limitations is not analogous.
I don't recall Bush destroying evidence in response to congressional subpoenas prior to 2004.
You're neglecting the supply side of the price/quantity equilibrium. If some suppliers were willing to supply their (equivalent) games for $50, then even consumers who would tolerate a $60 pricepoint will instead by the $50 games. Your formulation assumes that the developers would all collude to fix their price at the maximum the consumer would bear -- which may be true, but I haven't seen any evidence to support it.