These are real children being abused. Their abusers are handing the police evidence. Why the rush to ignore it? Why not just monitor them? Keep track of who visits www.kiddieporn.com or whatever.
Actually, this is what Canada does. It doesn't make me happy not knowing what they consider to be "suspect" and whether I'm being logged for some reason, but at least they don't stop me. Based on the prosecutions that have happened, they are only going after the actual abusers or very heavy distributers, leaving the accidental or casual users alone.
I don't think a liquid air collection engine (LACE) was ever successful, but there were preliminary designs for some (don't know about prototypes). Here's a short article on the subject:
By keeping the air a gas, it simplifies the plumbing while still letting you use essentially a rocket engine design (liquid fuel is vapourised before burning anyway, usually by using it to cool the nozzle).
The downside to this is that water vapour will freeze on the cooling fins/surface of the intake, and cause ice buildup. For the length of time this engine is expected to operate that's not a big deal, but in humid air or for longer operation, ice could clog the air intake.
The Unites States never attempted a landing, though one mission did send several probes into the atmosphere (they landed in the sense that a meteorite lands, but that's not what you meant).
Oh, someone re-processed the images, using modern computer technology. A great improvement over the very limited techniques of the time, they're pretty amazing:
I'm reminded of a study over a decade ago which linked bras to breast cancer. It was published in a book with complete data on about 4700 women, roughly half with breast cancer and half without. What it found, in brief, is that women who wore bras rarely or for very short periods had about the same breast cancer rates as men (who also don't wear bras). Here's an article about it:
However, notice that there's no evidence presented against the idea, only vague dismissals of "unlikely" or "far-fetched". The book's original authors admit that it's not definitive, but meant to be a basis for further investigation.
What strikes me as odd is that there's been no followup studies at all. Even if the idea of bras causing cancer is wrong, that study stumbled across something which may be the cause of over 99% of breast cancers, and I would be very interested to find out what it was. And I'm sure a lot of women who's lives have been devastated because of it would like to know that too (those who died from it probably would have also been interested).
But not only is preventing breast cancer not profitable, the prevention itself could cost a fortune, if it's that simple. Much like the fight to prevent the prevention of lung cancer has been fought to absurd lengths by the tobacco industry. Here's an article by one of the original authors of the bra/cancer study on the opposition to even presenting the idea and (scant, but growing) evidence to the public.
This certainly supports the view that the money is all in the treatment after the fact, not in the prevention, so prevention will never get the same effort put into it as both promoting the disease (McDonalds) and treating it (cholesterol reducing drugs). Billions of dollars are deafening even when they whisper.
"Elected" (or "referendum") does not mean "democratic" in all places, least of which is Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was often "elected" with 100% of the vote.
Hamas was also "elected". And also shot all opposition in Gaza.
What the people of Iraq voted for, in all likelihood, was "It's getting worse, God make it stop, I'll do anything - sacrifice a chicken, donate to the mosque, vote 'yes' to this complex political document which I, who have never read it, am probably not literate enough to understand if I saw it". In that situation, I bet they could have been convinced to vote for anything or anyone.
Iraq was terrible under Saddam Hussein, and it's terrible now. Those were not the only two choices, and I'm sick of those who act like they are. The Russian plan sounded better, for example.
Isn't it more likely that the manufacturing drawings, supplier rumours, etc. are for a "iPod Touch Nano" rather than a nano iPhone? That would explain the lack of reported phone testing.
And where does the money to pay the interest come from? It was never created, and when credit pays off debt, there is nothing left over. You call the grantparent uneducated but clearly either don't understand how banking works or are deliberately misrepresenting the process.
In brief, interest is accounted for in two ways:
The risk of bankruptcies. A certain amount of money isn't coming back, so the interest ensures that those who will repay loans will cover those who don't.
Growth, specifically increased productivity from technology, better organisation and planning, economies of scale, and so on. Maybe this can't go on forever, but while it does, the same results have lower expenses, the difference being profit shared between the capital owner and the lender (as interest paid).
Lenders also use some interest for profits, but they are like any other business. All this is also subject to government intervention (taxes, fees, subsidies, etc.).
The simple solution, IMO, is to have a bill make a quick side trip to the SCOTUS before going on to the President. Glaringly unconstitutional items could be stripped out well in advance of them causing any problems. It means all three branches have a say in the creation of the laws, as opposed to two doing so and the third being left to clean up the mess.
This is actually the role an appointed senate is supposed to have. Basically, elected legislators are usually amateurs, and partisan. Appointed-for-life (or at least longer terms than elected legislators) senators have the luxury of building up experience of what things are most likely legal, as well as identifying unintended consequences of badly written legislation. Plus they no longer have to pander for re-election to the masses who may be emotional, uninformed, or inattentive, so the senators can point out flaws in the intent of legislation as well. Basically, they act as editors, ensuring that the lower house legislation actually does what it is intended to.
Unfortunately, in many countries that is seen as undemocratic.
Probably little chance of success, since it would not be interoperable with established tools (primitive though they weree) and more importantly, wouldn't be "hackable" by random geniuses who created all the web applications that succeeded as well as failed. With all useful applications in the HTMP/CGI domain, a proprietary project wouldn't have had a chance.
Except for Microsoft's tradition of making a large number of pale imitations of successful products after the fact, most of which fail. True, a few succeed enough to gain traction and are wildly successful (Office, Visual Studio, XBox) enough to support all the other me-too development, but when you are fighting network effects, even a very good execution is useless (Zune vs. iPod). Web development has happened faster than any single entity could keep up with (in the same way that microcomputer development far exceeded even giant IBM's ability to make comparable mainframe applications when PCs hit the world).
I've thought about what it is that makes me fear spiders, since they're really fascinating creatures that I'd like to be able to enjoy.
For me, there are specific aspects of spiders that spook me:
I'm ticklish, and anything that'll crawl on me can tickle me and startle me. Most insects fly, so don't spend a lot of time crawling on my skin, spiders (and ants) tickle.
Spiders move fast and unpredictably - that makes them different from ants which I have no problem with. A spider can be sitting on a table by my arm, then crawling up my sleeve before I even know it.
Spiders suspend themselves on an invisible strand of thread, so even if I see there is nothing where I'm moving, hitting that thread can whip a spider onto me without knowing. Certain caterpillars also do this, and I also don't like them, though not as severely as spiders because of all the other aspects.
A flying insect moves mostly predictably, a spider on a thread can move erratically when the thread is disturbed, or blown by a breeze.
Spiders sometimes drop. As I said, I'm ticklish, and feeling a spider drop on my neck and start crawling is very startling.
The common thing of all of these is the unpredictability. As babies grow up, they learn how the world behaves, and start predicting it. For me, unpredictable unpleasantness leads to a fear reflex. On a related note, the fact that spiders have eight legs means they have more movement options than six-legged insects, which again leads to unpredictability. In that case it's not fear-inducing, just gives a creepy feeling, which doesn't help.
You can't carbon date rocks. Carbon dating compares the ratio of carbon 12 and carbon 14 in the atmosphere to that in life forms that once consumed carbon from the atmosphere (plants) or from other life forms (those same plants, or animals that ate the plants, etc.). Since carbon 14 is radioactive and slowly transforms into non-radioactive carbon 12, that ratio changes, while the ratio in the air is mostly constant (cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere at a roughly constant rate transform carbon 12 to carbon 14 at the same rate carbon 14 decays to carbon 12).
Trying to date volcanic rocks is trickier, and you have to be careful what you're measuring or you could be measuring the date when the components were smooshed together under the Earth's crust, hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Every major ISP in Canada logs all web site access, using software developed for the Totonto Police Service and the RCMP by Microsoft. It is freely available to anyone who wants to use it, and used around the world:
A friend of mine works at a major ISP, and claims that "tens of thousands" of IP addresses (out of maybe a quarter million) are captured for accessing "child pornography" web sites.
So far, prosecutors and police have limited the use to go after producers of child porn, who are the ones really victimizing children, and not the viewers, but rest assured everyone is monitored across Canada.
It probably is illegal under Canadian law, but nobody is looking at it too closely. I don't know if it will be abused in the future - Canada is ranked as one of the least corrupt nations in the world. But given time, I wouldn't be surprised.
It depends on how the pull model is implemented. For example, an RSS feed can't get spammed, because it's polling based - you know where it's coming from and you decide when to get something. It could be extended to add email functionality. For example, getting email from someone you don't know could be supported by allowing a notification message to be propagated through an intermediary known by both, or several intermediaries, all of who are essentially "vouching" for the trustworthiness of the sender.
Spam wouldn't be absolutely impossible in a system like that, but each instance would get shut down so fast (e.g. if someone's machine is infected, you can stop polling their feed, yet you can still send email to them telling them their machine is a bot now because they could still poll you), and the spread would be so limited, that spam would probably not be worthwhile anymore.
Has everyone overlooked threats other than RIAA/MPAA? Such as: What will Scientology do, once they are able to have critics arrested and all materials taken by armed police, not just harassed?
To the fan, I don't think it matters much what they get, the attention of someone they admire even for a moment is reward enough.
Send a joke - on topic or personalised if possible. Or do what the performers do and talk about where the fan is from.
My mother in law was meeting the band after an Arrogant Worms concert once. She said to the member signing her new CD "You're my favorite", to which he replied "You're my favourite too". Still makes her happy.
This poster is allowed to dislike something and say so. Plus it was a clever phrase he used, and I appreciate it. Give him a +1 Funny at least, please.
Eventually, BluRay will be as cheap or cheaper than DVD's, and at that point it will make no sense NOT to upgrade.
There are other considerations. BlueRay discs are harder to pirate than DVDs. Remember that China introduced a rival format to DVD (to avoid license fees) which has flopped almost entirely due to the fact that all pirated (as well as non-pirated) Hollywood movies are on DVD format. Even if piracy is relatively low in the U.S and other industrial countries, the volume of DVD and DVD player demand in high-piracy countries will continue to give DVD an edge over less pirateable alternatives.
Likely DVDs will only be replaced by a more pirateable alternative, like media-free files over the internet (as with music).
That doesn't mean that piracy will swamp the commercial aspect. It will curtail corporate price gouging (hence current record companies' pain), but obviously if it's absolutely impossible to make money off the new media, production will be curtailed to the point that the popularity just won't be there anymore - people will go where the entertainment is. I think it's possible that this can be accomplished with little or no digital restrictions, by social convention, in the same way that people accept and don't abuse the "self service check-outs" that are growing in popularity (in the U.S at least) despite the absolute ease which it could be defrauded (shoplifting in general could happen far more than it does, but is prevented more by social convention than store security - store security works only because so few shoppers need attention paid to them).
A media being pirateable doesn't mean it will be pirated, but it means that consumers have a flexibility to creatively use their purchases in ways the industry may be completely ignorant of, let alone would permit. If CDs had been successfully copy restricted somehow when MP3 players started becoming popular, sales would have plummeted as people started buying cassettes and digitizing them for their computers and digital audio players (obviously sales of audio digitizers would also have taken off, or MP3 players would have included analog-to-digital input). Similarly people will gravitate to whatever conveniently lets them do more things. I'm certain that as the web of digital restriction technologies start interacting in unpleasant ways and tech support costs rise, the most damaging DRM will be disabled or removed (as with DRM-free music now available from online stores, and some recent DVDs which don't even bother setting the bit to enable Macrovision VCR copy prevention).
That includes consumers choosing a marginally reduced picture quality, which most consumers don't care about anyway, given that:
Most HD TVs are only bought as replacements when the old ones stop working.
The new TVs are rarely hooked up to HD video sources anyway.
So many of them are configured so that the 4:3 video picture is distorted into a wide-stretched parody of what it originally was, looking far worse than it ever did on even a bad analog CRT screen.
If consumers really cared about HD picture quality in any way other than buzzword reputation, none of these would be the case.
So, in summary, I don't expect any highly restricted, piracy resistant HD media, whether BluRay or HD-DVD or some multilayer replacement to replace ordinary DVDs until the content can be handled just as easily and conveniently. And if it doesn't for too long, while technology continues to advance, then a replacement media will come along which can.
My understanding is that Maple Leaf Foods actually has above average quality control and sanitation, based on comments I read from a retired inspector. The problem is facility consolidation - when food processing is consolidated in a small number of giant factories, even a small mistake has effects which spread out far beyond what would have happened in the past, with smaller localised facilities (it would have been fewer people, and not nationwide).
A similar situation happened with Menu Foods, where a single contaminated shipment from China was used in hundreds of products sold by dozens of companies, sent across three separate countries.
At some point mistakes will happen, despite competent and careful operations. The problem is that mistakes are magnified greatly these days.
It's not overtly political, but "King of the Hill" has a lot of fun skewering "liberal" positions - it's probably one of the most "conservative" comedies out there, and successful at it too.
Still, it's not dogmatic about who it goes after, and conservative absurdities take a licking on the show too.
When it comes down to it, the show's creator Ed Judge is against stupidity more than anything else (as shown in his recent film Idiocracy), but he seems to like going after the more subtle stupidities, like well-meaning but simple-minded positions not thought through well enough to notice the consequences being worse than the problem they're trying to solve. This is the kind of stupidity "liberals" are prone too, and it's a bit more work to figure out than the "conservative" stupidies which tend to be stupid on the face of it.
Because it's more work to understand, people tend to think "liberal" positions are simply inherently "less stupid", rather than stupid in a more complex way. So it's true that Republicans are easier to make fun of - Democrat politicians just look like stupid people, Republican politicians look like stupid people with stupid positions. It's both harder to reveal "liberal" stupidity and harder to understand it, so there's less making fun of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you can bring it back to life for sixty seconds.
But no longer, or Scrubs will die.
These are real children being abused. Their abusers are handing the police evidence. Why the rush to ignore it? Why not just monitor them? Keep track of who visits www.kiddieporn.com or whatever.
Actually, this is what Canada does. It doesn't make me happy not knowing what they consider to be "suspect" and whether I'm being logged for some reason, but at least they don't stop me. Based on the prosecutions that have happened, they are only going after the actual abusers or very heavy distributers, leaving the accidental or casual users alone.
For now.
I don't think a liquid air collection engine (LACE) was ever successful, but there were preliminary designs for some (don't know about prototypes). Here's a short article on the subject:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/aerplane.htm
By keeping the air a gas, it simplifies the plumbing while still letting you use essentially a rocket engine design (liquid fuel is vapourised before burning anyway, usually by using it to cool the nozzle).
The downside to this is that water vapour will freeze on the cooling fins/surface of the intake, and cause ice buildup. For the length of time this engine is expected to operate that's not a big deal, but in humid air or for longer operation, ice could clog the air intake.
If you mean "we" humans, there were ten Soviet landers - 8 Venera, 2 Vega. Most lasted at least half an hour, some almost 2 hours.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/chronology_venus.html
The Unites States never attempted a landing, though one mission did send several probes into the atmosphere (they landed in the sense that a meteorite lands, but that's not what you meant).
Oh, someone re-processed the images, using modern computer technology. A great improvement over the very limited techniques of the time, they're pretty amazing:
http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm
I'm reminded of a study over a decade ago which linked bras to breast cancer. It was published in a book with complete data on about 4700 women, roughly half with breast cancer and half without. What it found, in brief, is that women who wore bras rarely or for very short periods had about the same breast cancer rates as men (who also don't wear bras). Here's an article about it:
http://www.007b.com/bras_breast_cancer.php
It is not a strict, peer reviewed study. There's a criticism of it here:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-underwire-bras-cause-cancer
However, notice that there's no evidence presented against the idea, only vague dismissals of "unlikely" or "far-fetched". The book's original authors admit that it's not definitive, but meant to be a basis for further investigation.
http://www.selfstudycenter.org/doctor.htm
What strikes me as odd is that there's been no followup studies at all. Even if the idea of bras causing cancer is wrong, that study stumbled across something which may be the cause of over 99% of breast cancers, and I would be very interested to find out what it was. And I'm sure a lot of women who's lives have been devastated because of it would like to know that too (those who died from it probably would have also been interested).
But not only is preventing breast cancer not profitable, the prevention itself could cost a fortune, if it's that simple. Much like the fight to prevent the prevention of lung cancer has been fought to absurd lengths by the tobacco industry. Here's an article by one of the original authors of the bra/cancer study on the opposition to even presenting the idea and (scant, but growing) evidence to the public.
http://ezinearticles.com/?Bras-and-the-Breast-Cancer-Cover-Up&id=795041
This certainly supports the view that the money is all in the treatment after the fact, not in the prevention, so prevention will never get the same effort put into it as both promoting the disease (McDonalds) and treating it (cholesterol reducing drugs). Billions of dollars are deafening even when they whisper.
"Elected" (or "referendum") does not mean "democratic" in all places, least of which is Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was often "elected" with 100% of the vote.
Hamas was also "elected". And also shot all opposition in Gaza.
What the people of Iraq voted for, in all likelihood, was "It's getting worse, God make it stop, I'll do anything - sacrifice a chicken, donate to the mosque, vote 'yes' to this complex political document which I, who have never read it, am probably not literate enough to understand if I saw it". In that situation, I bet they could have been convinced to vote for anything or anyone.
Iraq was terrible under Saddam Hussein, and it's terrible now. Those were not the only two choices, and I'm sick of those who act like they are. The Russian plan sounded better, for example.
Isn't it more likely that the manufacturing drawings, supplier rumours, etc. are for a "iPod Touch Nano" rather than a nano iPhone? That would explain the lack of reported phone testing.
And where does the money to pay the interest come from? It was never created, and when credit pays off debt, there is nothing left over. You call the grantparent uneducated but clearly either don't understand how banking works or are deliberately misrepresenting the process.
In brief, interest is accounted for in two ways:
Lenders also use some interest for profits, but they are like any other business. All this is also subject to government intervention (taxes, fees, subsidies, etc.).
The simple solution, IMO, is to have a bill make a quick side trip to the SCOTUS before going on to the President. Glaringly unconstitutional items could be stripped out well in advance of them causing any problems. It means all three branches have a say in the creation of the laws, as opposed to two doing so and the third being left to clean up the mess.
This is actually the role an appointed senate is supposed to have. Basically, elected legislators are usually amateurs, and partisan. Appointed-for-life (or at least longer terms than elected legislators) senators have the luxury of building up experience of what things are most likely legal, as well as identifying unintended consequences of badly written legislation. Plus they no longer have to pander for re-election to the masses who may be emotional, uninformed, or inattentive, so the senators can point out flaws in the intent of legislation as well. Basically, they act as editors, ensuring that the lower house legislation actually does what it is intended to.
Unfortunately, in many countries that is seen as undemocratic.
Actually that reminds me of the book Beggars Ride, by Nancy Kress. Disappointing compared to the previous in the series, but interesting.
Would that mean that I'd have to go outside once in a while? Dangit!
Naked.
So bees can get at your stamen.
A quick web search found this: http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/spring96/0113.html
Probably little chance of success, since it would not be interoperable with established tools (primitive though they weree) and more importantly, wouldn't be "hackable" by random geniuses who created all the web applications that succeeded as well as failed. With all useful applications in the HTMP/CGI domain, a proprietary project wouldn't have had a chance.
Except for Microsoft's tradition of making a large number of pale imitations of successful products after the fact, most of which fail. True, a few succeed enough to gain traction and are wildly successful (Office, Visual Studio, XBox) enough to support all the other me-too development, but when you are fighting network effects, even a very good execution is useless (Zune vs. iPod). Web development has happened faster than any single entity could keep up with (in the same way that microcomputer development far exceeded even giant IBM's ability to make comparable mainframe applications when PCs hit the world).
I've thought about what it is that makes me fear spiders, since they're really fascinating creatures that I'd like to be able to enjoy.
For me, there are specific aspects of spiders that spook me:
The common thing of all of these is the unpredictability. As babies grow up, they learn how the world behaves, and start predicting it. For me, unpredictable unpleasantness leads to a fear reflex. On a related note, the fact that spiders have eight legs means they have more movement options than six-legged insects, which again leads to unpredictability. In that case it's not fear-inducing, just gives a creepy feeling, which doesn't help.
I hope that gives you some insight.
You can't carbon date rocks. Carbon dating compares the ratio of carbon 12 and carbon 14 in the atmosphere to that in life forms that once consumed carbon from the atmosphere (plants) or from other life forms (those same plants, or animals that ate the plants, etc.). Since carbon 14 is radioactive and slowly transforms into non-radioactive carbon 12, that ratio changes, while the ratio in the air is mostly constant (cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere at a roughly constant rate transform carbon 12 to carbon 14 at the same rate carbon 14 decays to carbon 12).
Trying to date volcanic rocks is trickier, and you have to be careful what you're measuring or you could be measuring the date when the components were smooshed together under the Earth's crust, hundreds or thousands of years ago.
I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Chewans are mined near here. The province is named after them.
Every major ISP in Canada logs all web site access, using software developed for the Totonto Police Service and the RCMP by Microsoft. It is freely available to anyone who wants to use it, and used around the world:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/apr05/04-07CETS.mspx
A friend of mine works at a major ISP, and claims that "tens of thousands" of IP addresses (out of maybe a quarter million) are captured for accessing "child pornography" web sites.
So far, prosecutors and police have limited the use to go after producers of child porn, who are the ones really victimizing children, and not the viewers, but rest assured everyone is monitored across Canada.
It probably is illegal under Canadian law, but nobody is looking at it too closely. I don't know if it will be abused in the future - Canada is ranked as one of the least corrupt nations in the world. But given time, I wouldn't be surprised.
We could go ahead and establish a standard for this pull model.
I vote for RSS or Atom, modified for email support. Already working, already deployed, a good start.
It depends on how the pull model is implemented. For example, an RSS feed can't get spammed, because it's polling based - you know where it's coming from and you decide when to get something. It could be extended to add email functionality. For example, getting email from someone you don't know could be supported by allowing a notification message to be propagated through an intermediary known by both, or several intermediaries, all of who are essentially "vouching" for the trustworthiness of the sender.
Spam wouldn't be absolutely impossible in a system like that, but each instance would get shut down so fast (e.g. if someone's machine is infected, you can stop polling their feed, yet you can still send email to them telling them their machine is a bot now because they could still poll you), and the spread would be so limited, that spam would probably not be worthwhile anymore.
Has everyone overlooked threats other than RIAA/MPAA? Such as: What will Scientology do, once they are able to have critics arrested and all materials taken by armed police, not just harassed?
To the fan, I don't think it matters much what they get, the attention of someone they admire even for a moment is reward enough.
Send a joke - on topic or personalised if possible. Or do what the performers do and talk about where the fan is from.
My mother in law was meeting the band after an Arrogant Worms concert once. She said to the member signing her new CD "You're my favorite", to which he replied "You're my favourite too". Still makes her happy.
This poster is allowed to dislike something and say so. Plus it was a clever phrase he used, and I appreciate it. Give him a +1 Funny at least, please.
Eventually, BluRay will be as cheap or cheaper than DVD's, and at that point it will make no sense NOT to upgrade.
There are other considerations. BlueRay discs are harder to pirate than DVDs. Remember that China introduced a rival format to DVD (to avoid license fees) which has flopped almost entirely due to the fact that all pirated (as well as non-pirated) Hollywood movies are on DVD format. Even if piracy is relatively low in the U.S and other industrial countries, the volume of DVD and DVD player demand in high-piracy countries will continue to give DVD an edge over less pirateable alternatives.
Likely DVDs will only be replaced by a more pirateable alternative, like media-free files over the internet (as with music).
That doesn't mean that piracy will swamp the commercial aspect. It will curtail corporate price gouging (hence current record companies' pain), but obviously if it's absolutely impossible to make money off the new media, production will be curtailed to the point that the popularity just won't be there anymore - people will go where the entertainment is. I think it's possible that this can be accomplished with little or no digital restrictions, by social convention, in the same way that people accept and don't abuse the "self service check-outs" that are growing in popularity (in the U.S at least) despite the absolute ease which it could be defrauded (shoplifting in general could happen far more than it does, but is prevented more by social convention than store security - store security works only because so few shoppers need attention paid to them).
A media being pirateable doesn't mean it will be pirated, but it means that consumers have a flexibility to creatively use their purchases in ways the industry may be completely ignorant of, let alone would permit. If CDs had been successfully copy restricted somehow when MP3 players started becoming popular, sales would have plummeted as people started buying cassettes and digitizing them for their computers and digital audio players (obviously sales of audio digitizers would also have taken off, or MP3 players would have included analog-to-digital input). Similarly people will gravitate to whatever conveniently lets them do more things. I'm certain that as the web of digital restriction technologies start interacting in unpleasant ways and tech support costs rise, the most damaging DRM will be disabled or removed (as with DRM-free music now available from online stores, and some recent DVDs which don't even bother setting the bit to enable Macrovision VCR copy prevention).
That includes consumers choosing a marginally reduced picture quality, which most consumers don't care about anyway, given that:
If consumers really cared about HD picture quality in any way other than buzzword reputation, none of these would be the case.
So, in summary, I don't expect any highly restricted, piracy resistant HD media, whether BluRay or HD-DVD or some multilayer replacement to replace ordinary DVDs until the content can be handled just as easily and conveniently. And if it doesn't for too long, while technology continues to advance, then a replacement media will come along which can.
My understanding is that Maple Leaf Foods actually has above average quality control and sanitation, based on comments I read from a retired inspector. The problem is facility consolidation - when food processing is consolidated in a small number of giant factories, even a small mistake has effects which spread out far beyond what would have happened in the past, with smaller localised facilities (it would have been fewer people, and not nationwide).
A similar situation happened with Menu Foods, where a single contaminated shipment from China was used in hundreds of products sold by dozens of companies, sent across three separate countries.
At some point mistakes will happen, despite competent and careful operations. The problem is that mistakes are magnified greatly these days.
Back then, you needed Lisas to develop Macintosh software - the Macintosh wasn't self-hosting.
It's not overtly political, but "King of the Hill" has a lot of fun skewering "liberal" positions - it's probably one of the most "conservative" comedies out there, and successful at it too.
Still, it's not dogmatic about who it goes after, and conservative absurdities take a licking on the show too.
When it comes down to it, the show's creator Ed Judge is against stupidity more than anything else (as shown in his recent film Idiocracy), but he seems to like going after the more subtle stupidities, like well-meaning but simple-minded positions not thought through well enough to notice the consequences being worse than the problem they're trying to solve. This is the kind of stupidity "liberals" are prone too, and it's a bit more work to figure out than the "conservative" stupidies which tend to be stupid on the face of it.
Because it's more work to understand, people tend to think "liberal" positions are simply inherently "less stupid", rather than stupid in a more complex way. So it's true that Republicans are easier to make fun of - Democrat politicians just look like stupid people, Republican politicians look like stupid people with stupid positions. It's both harder to reveal "liberal" stupidity and harder to understand it, so there's less making fun of it.