Right. If it's porn, you're fueling the demand for the commercial stuff. If it's music or (non-porn)movies, you're lowering the profits that people can make selling it. Got it...
That was my first thought upon reading the actual wording of the statute as well. If taken at face value, this appears to mean that you could be punished for doing things with your adult girlfriend simply because she looks young.
Most grad students make something like $20k/year. A few hundred dollars is certain non-trivial on that sort of salary, but it's not an impossible crushing expense either. Given the potential long-lasting effects of such a contract, paying a lawyer a few hundred dollars to look it over seems worth it.
Exactly. All these people saying "OF COURSE you don't need a degree!!!" and posting stories about how they were able to break into IT and get a six-figure salary after dropping out of the 4th grade need to realize that it isn't the 1990s any more. Back then every company suddenly needed IT workers, and there was a terrible shortage; companies would hire anyone breathing if they knew how to set up a web site, regardless of formal training. Now every job posting will usually get multiple applications from people with degrees, and companies are able to be choosy.
The "unregulated market" in the financial industry was hardly unregulated. Just ask Martha Stewart who spent time in prison for her "unregulated" actions.
Martha Stewart went to jail for lying to federal investigators. Ironically, they never actually convicted her on anything relating to securities.
It sounds like your career really took off (the jobs at Nortel and Bellsouth) at the height of the.com bubble. I suspect that it would be much more difficult for you to pull that sort of thing off in today's job market.
I think it has more to do with how bureaucratic the company is than with how "snobby" it is. Often in larger companies the job requirements will be made up by someone from HR who doesn't really have anything to do with the position that they're hiring for, and "must have a degree" gets tacked on to the job listing more or less arbitrarily.
If many businesses are still using XP, Microsoft isn't going to suddenly stop supporting it - for precisely the reason you mention, they won't want to push people toward some other OS. Over the coming years the "holdouts" will gradually switch over to Vista, until eventually only a few percent of businesses are still using XP, at which pont MS will quietly dump it.
People have been complaining about "teaching for the test" and "studying for the test" for years. But if you're talking about quantitative, math-based questions, then what's the problem? The only way to correctly answer a math question is to know how to solve it. If your are "teaching for the test," that means you are teaching the students how to solve math problems. If the student is "studying for the test," that means the student is studying how to solve math problems. So the teacher is teaching how to solve math problems, the students are studying how to solve math problems, and the test is testing to make sure that at the end of the day the students really are able to solve math problems. What the hell is everyone complaining about? "Teaching for the test" and "studying for the test" are only problems if you have somehow created a math test where it's possible to get the right answer without knowing how to solve the problems.
Re-read my post. The "shockwave" doesn't have anything to do with it. Nuclear bombs throw out a HUGE amount of energy in the form of xrays and hard UV, easily enough to vaporize the outer surface of the asteroid and radically change its course. I even included some exact numbers on how much energy would be deposited on the asteroid based on a certain bomb size detonating at a certain distance, which of course you ignored.
A gravity tug is MUCH more complicated than simply nuking the asteroid, because it requires you to match velocities with the asteroid and then maintain your position for months or years. So not only are you having to perform a much more complicated set of navigational maneuvers, but your probe now has to continue to function properly for YEARS longer without breaking down. Additionally, with a nuke you get immediate results and can immediately determine whether or not you successfully diverted the asteroid. With a gravity tug it could take you months or years for any errors to become apparent, which will leave you with less time to correct your mistake.
Simply getting a nuclear bomb reasonably close to the asteroid and then detonating it is much simpler.
Iraq became a police action needing law enforcement, not military force, from the moment President Bush stood on the carrier deck saying "Mission Accomplished". From that moment forward using military troops in Iraq became the wrong approach. You don't use the Army as a police force. Any information derived from soldiers misused as policemen is irrelevent.
That would only be true if there hadn't still been large, organized, and heavily-armed groups operating in Iraq in opposition to the U.S. Yeah, the military doesn't make a good police force, but the police usually don't do very well when their police stations are attacked by "criminals" with rockets, mortars, and machine guns.
It would be completely inhumane (haha) and tilt the outcome of a war towards those who can afford to develop such technology. That is, if one country can afford killer robots and another can't, then the former has no deterrent to invading the latter.
As opposed to when one side can afford to put its soldiers in tanks, and the other can't?
The usual point of the "missile idea" isn't to destroy the asteroid, but merely to alter its course. A 1 megaton bomb detonated 1 km from an asteroid will impart about 300 megajoules/square meter of asteroid. That should be more than enough to vaporize a layer along the outer surface, which will dramatically later its course. In terms of simplicity, nothing competes with nuking the asteroid. A gravity tug is clever and all, but it assumes that you can match velocities with the asteroid and then maintain your position relative to it. That's a lot more complicated than simply getting your asteroid-diverting probe "within a km or so". Actually landing some sort of engine on it would be even more difficult.
True, but my 1 TB harddrive has been less than 1/3 full for months, and I don't really anticipate filling it any time in the next few years. I mean, I could copy 100 DVDs to the thing and still have hundreds of gigs worth of free. Assuming my storage needs don't grow enormously, I would probably rather have a SSD with a few hundred GB of space than a regular hard drive with TBs of space that I'm not likely to ever fill.
You can get 800 GB LTO4 tapes for about $65, still better than hard drives in bytes/dollar. In addition to being about 20-30% cheaper than hard drives in terms of space/dollar, no one will care if you drop the backup tape cartridge; the shock isn't going to scratch a platter or break some electronic part.
Nuclear weapons are not nearly as "unsurvivable" as many people apparently believe. You might be interested to know that about 7% of the people at Hiroshima who were within 1000 feet of the blast site survived. I'm sure Indy has beaten worse odds before:)
I certainly don't know about Canadian copyright law, but are you sure that your laws really say it's legal for you to copy things for personal use? Or does some specific law merely have an exception for personal copying?
I ask because many, many people in the U.S. are under the mistaken impression that they have some sort of inalienable right to fair use, when in fact fair use is merely a defense against charges that you have violated the copyright act. It doesn't give you permission to violate any other laws in your pursuit of fair use.
It is an advantage, actually. If you read the article, it appears that they are simply adding HDCP support to their MacBooks. More compatibility=good thing. You can still play all the non-HDCP media that you could before. But now you can also play your stupid HDCP media, should you choose to do so. At worst, you could argue that this is bad because it encourages people to publish more crappy HDCP stuff since now more people will be able to watch it.
It always amazes me when people make an ultra-literal interpretation of someone's analogy, then try to attack the analogy because it doesn't conform perfectly to their ultra-literal interpretation. Parent's point, obviously, is that sometime we do things that we don't like because the consequences of not doing them are even more unpleasant. In the case of taxes, the alternative of going to jail is more unpleasant than paying. In the case of Apple, damaging their relationship with content-providers like NBC is more unpleasant than adding DRM. This seems pretty obvious. Your point that there are no laws forcing Apple to add DRM would only be relevant if parent was trying to argue that Apple had no choice but to add DRM; and there's nothing in his post to indicate that he's trying to argue that. He's simply pointing out that sometimes people do things that they don't like, so Apple adding DRM doesn't prove that Jobs was lying when he said that he doesn't like DRM.
Your comment about peanuts isn't true. The FDA considers the seriousness of the disease or condition that a prospective new drug is intended to treat, as well as what treatments are currently available, when evaluating a drug. A new drug for treating something very serious that has a high probability of killing you (like cancer) can get away with having much worse side effects than a drug intended to treat something more trivial. Similarly, if your drug treats something that doesn't currently have any good treatment options you can get away with much worse side effects than if there are already other competing drugs that treat the same problem. So if your peanuts can cure a form of cancer that is both dangerous and difficult to treat with current drugs, it would almost certainly be approved.
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Right. If it's porn, you're fueling the demand for the commercial stuff. If it's music or (non-porn)movies, you're lowering the profits that people can make selling it. Got it...
That's why I always draw large boobs on my stick figures, to avoid any confusion.
That was my first thought upon reading the actual wording of the statute as well. If taken at face value, this appears to mean that you could be punished for doing things with your adult girlfriend simply because she looks young.
They're labeling it a medical device so that medicare will pay for it.
Most grad students make something like $20k/year. A few hundred dollars is certain non-trivial on that sort of salary, but it's not an impossible crushing expense either. Given the potential long-lasting effects of such a contract, paying a lawyer a few hundred dollars to look it over seems worth it.
Police in Germany are most enthusiastic about pushing this tactic, the sort of approach even Vic Mackey from The Shield might baulk at...
Off-topic and all, but didn't Vic Mackey routinely murder people? I somehow doubt that this would bother him...
Exactly. All these people saying "OF COURSE you don't need a degree!!!" and posting stories about how they were able to break into IT and get a six-figure salary after dropping out of the 4th grade need to realize that it isn't the 1990s any more. Back then every company suddenly needed IT workers, and there was a terrible shortage; companies would hire anyone breathing if they knew how to set up a web site, regardless of formal training. Now every job posting will usually get multiple applications from people with degrees, and companies are able to be choosy.
The "unregulated market" in the financial industry was hardly unregulated. Just ask Martha Stewart who spent time in prison for her "unregulated" actions.
Martha Stewart went to jail for lying to federal investigators. Ironically, they never actually convicted her on anything relating to securities.
It sounds like your career really took off (the jobs at Nortel and Bellsouth) at the height of the .com bubble. I suspect that it would be much more difficult for you to pull that sort of thing off in today's job market.
I think it has more to do with how bureaucratic the company is than with how "snobby" it is. Often in larger companies the job requirements will be made up by someone from HR who doesn't really have anything to do with the position that they're hiring for, and "must have a degree" gets tacked on to the job listing more or less arbitrarily.
If many businesses are still using XP, Microsoft isn't going to suddenly stop supporting it - for precisely the reason you mention, they won't want to push people toward some other OS. Over the coming years the "holdouts" will gradually switch over to Vista, until eventually only a few percent of businesses are still using XP, at which pont MS will quietly dump it.
People have been complaining about "teaching for the test" and "studying for the test" for years. But if you're talking about quantitative, math-based questions, then what's the problem? The only way to correctly answer a math question is to know how to solve it. If your are "teaching for the test," that means you are teaching the students how to solve math problems. If the student is "studying for the test," that means the student is studying how to solve math problems. So the teacher is teaching how to solve math problems, the students are studying how to solve math problems, and the test is testing to make sure that at the end of the day the students really are able to solve math problems. What the hell is everyone complaining about? "Teaching for the test" and "studying for the test" are only problems if you have somehow created a math test where it's possible to get the right answer without knowing how to solve the problems.
This is about an ethical question, which most of us care about rather than "is this illegal".
Especially when your odds of getting caught and prosecuted for breaking the law are virtually zero.
Re-read my post. The "shockwave" doesn't have anything to do with it. Nuclear bombs throw out a HUGE amount of energy in the form of xrays and hard UV, easily enough to vaporize the outer surface of the asteroid and radically change its course. I even included some exact numbers on how much energy would be deposited on the asteroid based on a certain bomb size detonating at a certain distance, which of course you ignored.
A gravity tug is MUCH more complicated than simply nuking the asteroid, because it requires you to match velocities with the asteroid and then maintain your position for months or years. So not only are you having to perform a much more complicated set of navigational maneuvers, but your probe now has to continue to function properly for YEARS longer without breaking down. Additionally, with a nuke you get immediate results and can immediately determine whether or not you successfully diverted the asteroid. With a gravity tug it could take you months or years for any errors to become apparent, which will leave you with less time to correct your mistake.
Simply getting a nuclear bomb reasonably close to the asteroid and then detonating it is much simpler.
Iraq became a police action needing law enforcement, not military force, from the moment President Bush stood on the carrier deck saying "Mission Accomplished". From that moment forward using military troops in Iraq became the wrong approach. You don't use the Army as a police force. Any information derived from soldiers misused as policemen is irrelevent.
That would only be true if there hadn't still been large, organized, and heavily-armed groups operating in Iraq in opposition to the U.S. Yeah, the military doesn't make a good police force, but the police usually don't do very well when their police stations are attacked by "criminals" with rockets, mortars, and machine guns.
It would be completely inhumane (haha) and tilt the outcome of a war towards those who can afford to develop such technology. That is, if one country can afford killer robots and another can't, then the former has no deterrent to invading the latter.
As opposed to when one side can afford to put its soldiers in tanks, and the other can't?
The usual point of the "missile idea" isn't to destroy the asteroid, but merely to alter its course. A 1 megaton bomb detonated 1 km from an asteroid will impart about 300 megajoules/square meter of asteroid. That should be more than enough to vaporize a layer along the outer surface, which will dramatically later its course. In terms of simplicity, nothing competes with nuking the asteroid. A gravity tug is clever and all, but it assumes that you can match velocities with the asteroid and then maintain your position relative to it. That's a lot more complicated than simply getting your asteroid-diverting probe "within a km or so". Actually landing some sort of engine on it would be even more difficult.
True, but my 1 TB harddrive has been less than 1/3 full for months, and I don't really anticipate filling it any time in the next few years. I mean, I could copy 100 DVDs to the thing and still have hundreds of gigs worth of free. Assuming my storage needs don't grow enormously, I would probably rather have a SSD with a few hundred GB of space than a regular hard drive with TBs of space that I'm not likely to ever fill.
You can get 800 GB LTO4 tapes for about $65, still better than hard drives in bytes/dollar. In addition to being about 20-30% cheaper than hard drives in terms of space/dollar, no one will care if you drop the backup tape cartridge; the shock isn't going to scratch a platter or break some electronic part.
People probably wouldn't survive the acceleration. Maybe you could launch cargo though.
Nuclear weapons are not nearly as "unsurvivable" as many people apparently believe. You might be interested to know that about 7% of the people at Hiroshima who were within 1000 feet of the blast site survived. I'm sure Indy has beaten worse odds before :)
I certainly don't know about Canadian copyright law, but are you sure that your laws really say it's legal for you to copy things for personal use? Or does some specific law merely have an exception for personal copying?
I ask because many, many people in the U.S. are under the mistaken impression that they have some sort of inalienable right to fair use, when in fact fair use is merely a defense against charges that you have violated the copyright act. It doesn't give you permission to violate any other laws in your pursuit of fair use.
It is an advantage, actually. If you read the article, it appears that they are simply adding HDCP support to their MacBooks. More compatibility=good thing. You can still play all the non-HDCP media that you could before. But now you can also play your stupid HDCP media, should you choose to do so. At worst, you could argue that this is bad because it encourages people to publish more crappy HDCP stuff since now more people will be able to watch it.
It always amazes me when people make an ultra-literal interpretation of someone's analogy, then try to attack the analogy because it doesn't conform perfectly to their ultra-literal interpretation. Parent's point, obviously, is that sometime we do things that we don't like because the consequences of not doing them are even more unpleasant. In the case of taxes, the alternative of going to jail is more unpleasant than paying. In the case of Apple, damaging their relationship with content-providers like NBC is more unpleasant than adding DRM. This seems pretty obvious. Your point that there are no laws forcing Apple to add DRM would only be relevant if parent was trying to argue that Apple had no choice but to add DRM; and there's nothing in his post to indicate that he's trying to argue that. He's simply pointing out that sometimes people do things that they don't like, so Apple adding DRM doesn't prove that Jobs was lying when he said that he doesn't like DRM.
Your comment about peanuts isn't true. The FDA considers the seriousness of the disease or condition that a prospective new drug is intended to treat, as well as what treatments are currently available, when evaluating a drug. A new drug for treating something very serious that has a high probability of killing you (like cancer) can get away with having much worse side effects than a drug intended to treat something more trivial. Similarly, if your drug treats something that doesn't currently have any good treatment options you can get away with much worse side effects than if there are already other competing drugs that treat the same problem. So if your peanuts can cure a form of cancer that is both dangerous and difficult to treat with current drugs, it would almost certainly be approved.