Man, I hesitate to reply to ACs but I see this meme a lot. The simple truth is that truth isn't simple: Some regulations are good and useful, like the ones that say food distributors can't poop in the food; others are anti-competitive or purely fee-driven, like requiring licensing to practice interior decoration; and some are both, like requiring banks to have a certain amount of cash on hand.
The only way to avoid the bad and keep the good is to elect honest, thoughtful representatives instead of demagogues and fools. Which is t'say, it can't be done.
Affect and effect are not the same. Affect is a verb, while effect is a noun.
Except, of course, for the times when "affect" is a noun and "effect" is a verb. You might effect to have less affect, if you were so inclined. The actual reason they aren't the same word is the same reason "now" and "new" aren't the same word.
If you eliminate income tax, sales tax will have to increase considerably.
You. . . you understand that Washington has no personal income tax, right? It does have a fairly steep sales tax, but not as high as the number you pulled out of your ass. Taxes on businesses and property are where the difference gets made up. You're right in that people often slip down to Oregon, which has no sales tax, to do shopping, especially if they live near the line. But I want to make it clear that nobody's talking about eliminating income tax in Washington, they're talking about creating it, so you can skip arguments about why eliminating it won't work.
That's reminiscent of a Mexican mayor who required his officers to regularly read books (and write short reports) in order to be eligible for promotion. I've been curious for some time how well that worked out. The LA Times story is archived here (behind a paywall but there's an abstract).
Every time we hear the police complain that "Civilians don't understand what it's like, it's a lonely dangerous job, you could never do it, you could never understand"
This is no dig on you, but it's worth pointing out at this point that cops are civilians. And likewise worth pointing out while I'm here that cops are citizens. Folks on both sides of the badge have a nasty tendency to forget that. I'm not sure why.
Even after accounting for their profit margin and your time spent re-imaging the machines with a clean version of Windows, the cost from Dell compared to DIY for standard beige-box business machines should be somewhere between slightly cheaper and slightly more expensive; if it's the latter, a single point of contact for warranty issues is still perhaps worth the money.
I hate to admit it (because I despise Dell's business practices), but this is true 'nuff. In addition, if you're getting any kind of bulk discount from Dell, you'd lose the ability to use that, which will raise your costs for notebooks and peripherals even if you can assemble desktop boxen more cheaply. At a thousand machines every couple of years, you should be getting a discount; if not, shop around.
Even better, shop around anyway and be willing t'pay a little extra to a company that isn't quite so abjectly evil.
There's a simple explanation to that: In the 90ies it was discovered that the maximum carrier frequency of fiber optics is around 1-2 GHz, while there's new milestones been reached over copper wire every couple of years.
This may surprise you, but some time has passed since the 90s. DWDM has been demoed to carry 400Gb/s on one fiber and Lucent's making noises about raising the bar to 600 Gb/s. 20 Gb/s multiplexers for fiber are relatively cheap and are becoming ubiquitous.
Please see the Laws of Thermodynamics (specifically the 2nd law).
That's the least sane thing posted in this thread so far, and the competition for that honor is stiff. The second law of thermodynamics addresses the distribution of energy in a closed system. It only implies determinism if you apply it to a system consisting of you and the voices in your head, given a value for "entropy" that is equal to "crazy".
On another note, determinism and free will aren't the only choices any more, because of the possibility of non-deterministic but random events.
companies will spend 90% of their revenue filing or defending dozens of lawsuits, get nothing done anymore
Except that giant corporations love time- and money-wasting processes, as long as everyone has to play. It limits competition by forcing startups to have years and millions of dollars handy just for idiot patent suits before they can even think about revenue.
Same story with "price gouging" laws. Here's a hint: there's no such thing as price gouging.
Yes, raising the price of food or medicine a hundredfold following a disaster that limits supply and access to alternatives is exactly the same as reselling an iPhone for profit. Because in both cases lives are at stake.
While I would never hope there will be a disaster, they happen from time to time, and I truly hope you find yourself in a position in which you must give up your car, home, and life savings to get a few days' clean water for your kids. Maybe then you'll see the difference between that and paying fifty bucks over retail for a toy.
In the US, SCOTUS was apparently fine with municipalities using eminent domain for the benefit of developers. Had Apple decided to be evil, they probably could've gotten it for a small fraction of what the property was really worth.
The first part of what you said is true, but the Kato ruling doesn't prevent state and local governments from restricting eminent domain from benefiting private development. Many places did so after the fallout from that case.
Assuming the GP is correct and NC did that thing, Apple would have to take the time and money for a massive lobbying campaign to change the law, then ask for the land to be force-bought. It would've been much more expensive than the price they paid, very time-consuming, and very risky. There would've almost certainly been some degree of public backlash as well. Since Apple isn't in the property development business, there'd be no future benefit to them. Buying the land for a couple of million made a lot more sense.
Apple doesn't get any not-evil points for this, sorry; it was easily the more pragmatic choice. In the "corporations not being as evil as they could be" race, they're still pretty much in the middle of the pack, but losing a bit of ground each time a factory worker producing iStuff components jumps off a building because his death benefits will feed his family but his paycheck won't.
If you do what you want based on what you feel is right, we might just not have any laws at all. There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest.
So, just as an analogy, if the police decided to stop enforcing laws against auto theft, you believe it would be wrong for others to do so. I don't think that holds water. What this guys is doing is indeed illegal, but not immoral; when our government is unwilling or unable to enforce or prosecute laws it becomes incumbent upon non-sanctioned individuals to protect society by doing so. The simple fact is that the government is not able to even begin to scratch the sheer volume of spam, nor is it interested in going after spammers unless it can wrench a large settlement and some headlines out of the deal. If we wish to preserve the Internet as a medium for the exchange of ideas, some of us must take action to protect it from those who exploit it at a very real, monetary cost to innocent people.
As much as Apple annoys me, this is one case in which I actually have gained a skosh of respect for the company. Good for Apple for limiting the placement and visibility of ads! If left to themselves, ad companies would essentially reinvent the screaming, flashing pop-up ad at every opportunity. I frankly have no idea what an iAd is supposed to be, but it's nice to hear that Apple's trying not to let 'em take over whatever it is they subsidize.
If advertisers are gonna be whiny babies and complain to the media because Apple won't let 'em have everything their own way, then this should be a rare positive story for Apple.
Shoeprints being part of a future police investigation is about as hypothetical as my claim that should I throw a rock in the air it will fall back down.
I think you're misunderstanding the point. Jurisprudence does not, in general, recognize a future hypothetical case as being equal to a current actual case, regardless of the likelihood (the exception, it seems, being American 9th Circuit lawsuits against future John Doe copyright violators, but that's not jurisprudence so much as an unholy cross between corruption, politics, and insanity). To permit otherwise would be akin to allowing police to use investigative powers for any imaginary future purpose, and nobody wants that, except police.
The correct answer is for the police to ask nicely. I honestly can't imagine more than a bare handful of shoemakers would deny them a limited license to make use of the prints for internal investigative purposes. I'm not sure about Swedish law, but in most places fancy-pants lawyerese isn't even needed; just a "sure, use our prints for that purpose, signed, authority person" letter on record. No need to adjust the laws when any decent administrator armed with Internet access, a handful of stamps, and a printer can solve the problem.
It's more a store fighting shoplifting by tracking down people they think might be shoplifters and setting fire to their cars.
If I can stretch that analogy much too far, it's more like a store sending out hundreds of cars to block and harass people who may be shoplifters on the road without regard to the impact on other traffic. DOS attacks use the same infrastructure you're trying t'use to work, play games, read the news, post on/., and such. So in essence they're attacking everyone on the Internet as retaliation for one site ignoring an accusation of piracy.
Given that some, admittedly few, DCMA notices are sent out improperly formatted, in bad faith, or to the wrong people, this becomes particularly irksome. One hopes it opens up all kinds of crazy liability issues for both Kumar and whomever pays him, but we all know that big filmmakers, both in Bollywood and Hollywood, have a war chest larger than some nations' GNPs.
Now from the summary I don't even know what a personal identification number code is. Unless you have a secret code to unlock a little brief case that contains your PIN.
Obviously it's the code you'd use to decrypt the DAT tape on which your PINs are stored, including this one, the one for ATM machines, the one for EBT benefits, and so forth.
My memory from law class is rusty and it was Canadian law class but Citizen's Arrest is just the right to detain someone you witness in the act of committing a felony for the shortest amount of time possible until you can get an officer of the law there. It's not the actual right to arrest someone.
Au contraire, like: In the US, private citizens who are not law enforcement officers generally have no right to detain another citizen, only to arrest. TSA officers and other rent-a-cop types have a little more leeway on detention. Remember, to "detain" someone is to briefly stop that person for the purpose of asking questions under the implication that they are required to remain, although they may simply walk away. To "arrest" a person is to stop that person from leaving, and walking away becomes resistance.
When a cop asks you where you're going at 3 a.m., you're being detained, and you need only stop long enough to ask if you're free to go to ensure that you aren't under arrest. When a cop pulls you over for speeding, you're being briefly arrested.
There are special laws that may require you to remain in certain general vicinities at times (the scene of an accident or crime, for example), and courts may compel a person to be somewhere without arrest, but whenever one citizen prevents another from going somewhere else, it's an arrest.
Legislators are largely NOT lawyers, and of the few who are lawyers, most have never practiced.
54% of the US Senate is comprised of lawyers, as is about 36% of the House. At the state level, it thins out a bit; 15% overall, with a significantly stronger showing in the state Senates (see the National Conference of State Legislatures website for more detailed details, if you care for 'em). While a lawyer might agree that fits with your "largely not" statement, there's an implication that only a handful of legislators are lawyers, and that's misleading. It's also worth noting that these figures are the lowest seen in quite a few decades.
Lawyers, as a group, have a -very- strong hand in shaping the law today, in recent memory have had an even stronger voice, and have never been left out of the game. It's just fortunate that lawyers disagree as much--or more--as anyone else does.
I agree that we can't (entirely, or mostly) blame "the lawyers" for bad laws, not even the lobbydroids. Ultimately, public apathy, indifference, and plain stupid are the root causes of bad lawmaking. I -can- blame lawyers for perverting the courts into an overly-formalized, inaccessible, and almost incestuous haven for billable hours. I can also blame lawyers for not policing themselves well. The rules are made by and enforced by colleagues who're likely to be sympathetic, and that's a problem.
Crete's highest peak is visible from about 100 nm.
It took me about thirty seconds to shake nanometers out of my head and come up with nautical miles. "Gosh," thought I, "that's even flatter than Kansas, where the highest peak can be seen from several microns' distance."
Again, I agree their pay is abysmal when compared to their responsibilities and the qualifications we need from them. I can't help but feel our schools'd be in far better shape if we fired, say, 80% or so of the administration and gave their salaries to the teachers.
A deer is not going to cross in the MIDDLE of a train.
Well, sure, but let's give Schnickies the courtesy of treating it as shorthand for a class of accidents. The overpass suicide, the drunk driver swerving in from another lane, the giant tumbleweed, the falling rock, and so forth. A deer in mid-train is a bit of a stretch, but there's any number of obstacles that could appear behind the lead car. It's a reasonable enough issue, if a poor choice for the specific case.
TFA mentions that the exercise intensity was set at 55% of the aerobic capacity for each individual. Since the larger subjects are presumably less fit and less capable of conducting strenuous exercise their capacity is lower and the amount of work they were doing was less than the fit subjects with a higher capacity.
TFA is mistaken. The abstract says they were at 70%, which is fairly intense for an obese, sedentary person. The regimen was designed to burn 500 calories a pop.
The thing about exercise is, until you get to the point where you are pushing yourself to the limits you wont see drastic results. Most of the obese people I see in my gym spend half their time sitting around, or cycling on the lowest level while reading a magazine.
The folks in this study were under close supervision, exercising fairly intensely. It's fun to trot out your favorite lines about exercise but that's not really applicable here.
Good point. Also some studies have shown that those who exercise don't lose as much weight because they perceive exercise as this great calorie burning activity, then they go and eat more to reward themselves for the 'great job' they've done.
While it's fun to trot out pet peeves, the study in this article controlled for that.
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Man, I hesitate to reply to ACs but I see this meme a lot. The simple truth is that truth isn't simple: Some regulations are good and useful, like the ones that say food distributors can't poop in the food; others are anti-competitive or purely fee-driven, like requiring licensing to practice interior decoration; and some are both, like requiring banks to have a certain amount of cash on hand. The only way to avoid the bad and keep the good is to elect honest, thoughtful representatives instead of demagogues and fools. Which is t'say, it can't be done.
Affect and effect are not the same. Affect is a verb, while effect is a noun.
Except, of course, for the times when "affect" is a noun and "effect" is a verb. You might effect to have less affect, if you were so inclined. The actual reason they aren't the same word is the same reason "now" and "new" aren't the same word.
If you eliminate income tax, sales tax will have to increase considerably.
You. . . you understand that Washington has no personal income tax, right? It does have a fairly steep sales tax, but not as high as the number you pulled out of your ass. Taxes on businesses and property are where the difference gets made up. You're right in that people often slip down to Oregon, which has no sales tax, to do shopping, especially if they live near the line. But I want to make it clear that nobody's talking about eliminating income tax in Washington, they're talking about creating it, so you can skip arguments about why eliminating it won't work.
That's reminiscent of a Mexican mayor who required his officers to regularly read books (and write short reports) in order to be eligible for promotion. I've been curious for some time how well that worked out. The LA Times story is archived here (behind a paywall but there's an abstract).
Every time we hear the police complain that "Civilians don't understand what it's like, it's a lonely dangerous job, you could never do it, you could never understand"
This is no dig on you, but it's worth pointing out at this point that cops are civilians. And likewise worth pointing out while I'm here that cops are citizens. Folks on both sides of the badge have a nasty tendency to forget that. I'm not sure why.
Even after accounting for their profit margin and your time spent re-imaging the machines with a clean version of Windows, the cost from Dell compared to DIY for standard beige-box business machines should be somewhere between slightly cheaper and slightly more expensive; if it's the latter, a single point of contact for warranty issues is still perhaps worth the money.
I hate to admit it (because I despise Dell's business practices), but this is true 'nuff. In addition, if you're getting any kind of bulk discount from Dell, you'd lose the ability to use that, which will raise your costs for notebooks and peripherals even if you can assemble desktop boxen more cheaply. At a thousand machines every couple of years, you should be getting a discount; if not, shop around.
Even better, shop around anyway and be willing t'pay a little extra to a company that isn't quite so abjectly evil.
There's a simple explanation to that: In the 90ies it was discovered that the maximum carrier frequency of fiber optics is around 1-2 GHz, while there's new milestones been reached over copper wire every couple of years.
This may surprise you, but some time has passed since the 90s. DWDM has been demoed to carry 400Gb/s on one fiber and Lucent's making noises about raising the bar to 600 Gb/s. 20 Gb/s multiplexers for fiber are relatively cheap and are becoming ubiquitous.
Please see the Laws of Thermodynamics (specifically the 2nd law).
That's the least sane thing posted in this thread so far, and the competition for that honor is stiff. The second law of thermodynamics addresses the distribution of energy in a closed system. It only implies determinism if you apply it to a system consisting of you and the voices in your head, given a value for "entropy" that is equal to "crazy".
On another note, determinism and free will aren't the only choices any more, because of the possibility of non-deterministic but random events.
companies will spend 90% of their revenue filing or defending dozens of lawsuits, get nothing done anymore
Except that giant corporations love time- and money-wasting processes, as long as everyone has to play. It limits competition by forcing startups to have years and millions of dollars handy just for idiot patent suits before they can even think about revenue.
Same story with "price gouging" laws. Here's a hint: there's no such thing as price gouging.
Yes, raising the price of food or medicine a hundredfold following a disaster that limits supply and access to alternatives is exactly the same as reselling an iPhone for profit. Because in both cases lives are at stake.
While I would never hope there will be a disaster, they happen from time to time, and I truly hope you find yourself in a position in which you must give up your car, home, and life savings to get a few days' clean water for your kids. Maybe then you'll see the difference between that and paying fifty bucks over retail for a toy.
In the US, SCOTUS was apparently fine with municipalities using eminent domain for the benefit of developers. Had Apple decided to be evil, they probably could've gotten it for a small fraction of what the property was really worth.
The first part of what you said is true, but the Kato ruling doesn't prevent state and local governments from restricting eminent domain from benefiting private development. Many places did so after the fallout from that case.
Assuming the GP is correct and NC did that thing, Apple would have to take the time and money for a massive lobbying campaign to change the law, then ask for the land to be force-bought. It would've been much more expensive than the price they paid, very time-consuming, and very risky. There would've almost certainly been some degree of public backlash as well. Since Apple isn't in the property development business, there'd be no future benefit to them. Buying the land for a couple of million made a lot more sense.
Apple doesn't get any not-evil points for this, sorry; it was easily the more pragmatic choice. In the "corporations not being as evil as they could be" race, they're still pretty much in the middle of the pack, but losing a bit of ground each time a factory worker producing iStuff components jumps off a building because his death benefits will feed his family but his paycheck won't.
If you do what you want based on what you feel is right, we might just not have any laws at all. There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest.
So, just as an analogy, if the police decided to stop enforcing laws against auto theft, you believe it would be wrong for others to do so. I don't think that holds water. What this guys is doing is indeed illegal, but not immoral; when our government is unwilling or unable to enforce or prosecute laws it becomes incumbent upon non-sanctioned individuals to protect society by doing so. The simple fact is that the government is not able to even begin to scratch the sheer volume of spam, nor is it interested in going after spammers unless it can wrench a large settlement and some headlines out of the deal. If we wish to preserve the Internet as a medium for the exchange of ideas, some of us must take action to protect it from those who exploit it at a very real, monetary cost to innocent people.
As much as Apple annoys me, this is one case in which I actually have gained a skosh of respect for the company. Good for Apple for limiting the placement and visibility of ads! If left to themselves, ad companies would essentially reinvent the screaming, flashing pop-up ad at every opportunity. I frankly have no idea what an iAd is supposed to be, but it's nice to hear that Apple's trying not to let 'em take over whatever it is they subsidize. If advertisers are gonna be whiny babies and complain to the media because Apple won't let 'em have everything their own way, then this should be a rare positive story for Apple.
Shoeprints being part of a future police investigation is about as hypothetical as my claim that should I throw a rock in the air it will fall back down.
I think you're misunderstanding the point. Jurisprudence does not, in general, recognize a future hypothetical case as being equal to a current actual case, regardless of the likelihood (the exception, it seems, being American 9th Circuit lawsuits against future John Doe copyright violators, but that's not jurisprudence so much as an unholy cross between corruption, politics, and insanity). To permit otherwise would be akin to allowing police to use investigative powers for any imaginary future purpose, and nobody wants that, except police.
The correct answer is for the police to ask nicely. I honestly can't imagine more than a bare handful of shoemakers would deny them a limited license to make use of the prints for internal investigative purposes. I'm not sure about Swedish law, but in most places fancy-pants lawyerese isn't even needed; just a "sure, use our prints for that purpose, signed, authority person" letter on record. No need to adjust the laws when any decent administrator armed with Internet access, a handful of stamps, and a printer can solve the problem.
It's more a store fighting shoplifting by tracking down people they think might be shoplifters and setting fire to their cars.
If I can stretch that analogy much too far, it's more like a store sending out hundreds of cars to block and harass people who may be shoplifters on the road without regard to the impact on other traffic. DOS attacks use the same infrastructure you're trying t'use to work, play games, read the news, post on /., and such. So in essence they're attacking everyone on the Internet as retaliation for one site ignoring an accusation of piracy.
Given that some, admittedly few, DCMA notices are sent out improperly formatted, in bad faith, or to the wrong people, this becomes particularly irksome. One hopes it opens up all kinds of crazy liability issues for both Kumar and whomever pays him, but we all know that big filmmakers, both in Bollywood and Hollywood, have a war chest larger than some nations' GNPs.
Now from the summary I don't even know what a personal identification number code is. Unless you have a secret code to unlock a little brief case that contains your PIN.
Obviously it's the code you'd use to decrypt the DAT tape on which your PINs are stored, including this one, the one for ATM machines, the one for EBT benefits, and so forth.
My memory from law class is rusty and it was Canadian law class but Citizen's Arrest is just the right to detain someone you witness in the act of committing a felony for the shortest amount of time possible until you can get an officer of the law there. It's not the actual right to arrest someone.
Au contraire, like: In the US, private citizens who are not law enforcement officers generally have no right to detain another citizen, only to arrest. TSA officers and other rent-a-cop types have a little more leeway on detention. Remember, to "detain" someone is to briefly stop that person for the purpose of asking questions under the implication that they are required to remain, although they may simply walk away. To "arrest" a person is to stop that person from leaving, and walking away becomes resistance.
When a cop asks you where you're going at 3 a.m., you're being detained, and you need only stop long enough to ask if you're free to go to ensure that you aren't under arrest. When a cop pulls you over for speeding, you're being briefly arrested.
There are special laws that may require you to remain in certain general vicinities at times (the scene of an accident or crime, for example), and courts may compel a person to be somewhere without arrest, but whenever one citizen prevents another from going somewhere else, it's an arrest.
Legislators are largely NOT lawyers, and of the few who are lawyers, most have never practiced.
54% of the US Senate is comprised of lawyers, as is about 36% of the House. At the state level, it thins out a bit; 15% overall, with a significantly stronger showing in the state Senates (see the National Conference of State Legislatures website for more detailed details, if you care for 'em). While a lawyer might agree that fits with your "largely not" statement, there's an implication that only a handful of legislators are lawyers, and that's misleading. It's also worth noting that these figures are the lowest seen in quite a few decades.
Lawyers, as a group, have a -very- strong hand in shaping the law today, in recent memory have had an even stronger voice, and have never been left out of the game. It's just fortunate that lawyers disagree as much--or more--as anyone else does.
I agree that we can't (entirely, or mostly) blame "the lawyers" for bad laws, not even the lobbydroids. Ultimately, public apathy, indifference, and plain stupid are the root causes of bad lawmaking. I -can- blame lawyers for perverting the courts into an overly-formalized, inaccessible, and almost incestuous haven for billable hours. I can also blame lawyers for not policing themselves well. The rules are made by and enforced by colleagues who're likely to be sympathetic, and that's a problem.
Crete's highest peak is visible from about 100 nm.
It took me about thirty seconds to shake nanometers out of my head and come up with nautical miles. "Gosh," thought I, "that's even flatter than Kansas, where the highest peak can be seen from several microns' distance."
Teachers on average make less than $50,000/year doing one of the most publicly scrutinized, emotionally demanding jobs in the USA.
Wrong link. You meant to point to this page, I think. (Your page addresses the salaries of probation officers, agricultural inspectors, and lots of other jobs, but not teachers.) The AFT's numbers show that schoolteachers, on average, make -slightly more- than $50,000/year. While I agree they're badly underpaid, one should also bear in mind that they don't work year-round and get much more vacation than most workers. They do work long hours, but so does everyone else.
Again, I agree their pay is abysmal when compared to their responsibilities and the qualifications we need from them. I can't help but feel our schools'd be in far better shape if we fired, say, 80% or so of the administration and gave their salaries to the teachers.
Why? Isn't Google doing all the work here?
I daresay the authors helped a little.
A deer is not going to cross in the MIDDLE of a train.
Well, sure, but let's give Schnickies the courtesy of treating it as shorthand for a class of accidents. The overpass suicide, the drunk driver swerving in from another lane, the giant tumbleweed, the falling rock, and so forth. A deer in mid-train is a bit of a stretch, but there's any number of obstacles that could appear behind the lead car. It's a reasonable enough issue, if a poor choice for the specific case.
TFA mentions that the exercise intensity was set at 55% of the aerobic capacity for each individual. Since the larger subjects are presumably less fit and less capable of conducting strenuous exercise their capacity is lower and the amount of work they were doing was less than the fit subjects with a higher capacity.
TFA is mistaken. The abstract says they were at 70%, which is fairly intense for an obese, sedentary person. The regimen was designed to burn 500 calories a pop.
The thing about exercise is, until you get to the point where you are pushing yourself to the limits you wont see drastic results. Most of the obese people I see in my gym spend half their time sitting around, or cycling on the lowest level while reading a magazine.
The folks in this study were under close supervision, exercising fairly intensely. It's fun to trot out your favorite lines about exercise but that's not really applicable here.
Good point. Also some studies have shown that those who exercise don't lose as much weight because they perceive exercise as this great calorie burning activity, then they go and eat more to reward themselves for the 'great job' they've done.
While it's fun to trot out pet peeves, the study in this article controlled for that.