Look at Steam. I hate Steam with a passion on principle, because Valve forced people to install it, and it always ran on the computer even when Valve's games did not. To this day, I still have not installed HL2 or the Orange Box on my system, and I have remained very vocal about the forced installation of background tasks. Other people complained at first, but now, all I hear from people is how awesome Steam is and how they love buying things off it, and I should shut up about it. The fact that it is there all the time, constantly doing things in the background just doesn't phase them. After all, they can simply blame their 3-minute boot times on Microsoft.
There are some hacks that you can use to keep Steam from starting automatically. For example, you could click the "don't start automatically at bootup" option in Steam. But since you apparently haven't actually ever used it, I wouldn't expect you to know about 1337 hacks like that.
It's true that there's no moral reason why she should have to change her phone number, but that doesn't mean that changing her number isn't the best course of action for her. One can be outraged about the people who have actually done wrong but still recognize that changing her number is the best solution.
I'm pretty sure that Science and Nature both ask the author to include a list of potential reviewers, with only a few restrictions (you're not supposed to suggest one of your former grad students, for example).
1. The actual peer review is done by other scientists for free, not by the publishers.
2. Most publications actually require the author to suggest who should peer review it, so the publisher usually doesn't even have to work to figure out who should review what.
Obviously you can also make money from dividends, but at some point most people will want to sell their stock to recover all (or at least a large chunk) of their initial investment value.
And yet the number of deaths from car crashes per mile (or km) traveled in the U.S. is lower than that of Finland. Apparently all that extra training for new drivers doesn't actually help that much...
Private investment would do the job just fine, without being nearly as susceptible to fraud.
And what happens when I want to sell some of my "privately invested" stock? Perhaps, say, because I have been accumulating a stock portfolio over my working life and am now planning to slowly sell it off to support myself during my retirement?
But today, with instantaneous communication and information availability, there is no need for a trading market for those who simply wish to invest and divest capital in companies they believe to have strong prospects for profitability.
Sure, there's no need for a stock market if people simply want to invest some money in a company - but without a secondary market for the stocks there would be no way to get any of the invested money back if you think the company is failing, or you simply decide you want to money for something else. You would essentially be locked into an investment forever, with no one to sell your stocks to when you decide you don't want them any more. Note that wanting to re-sell stocks that you purchased from a company is necessarily a sign of greed or that you are trying to "game the system." Many people, for example, will invest in stocks for a few decades while they work and then sell the stocks off gradually to support themselves during retirement. Without a secondary market for the stocks, their money would be locked into the company forever with no way to get it back.
I don't think people care so much about the stock brokers who stupidly sold because they believe what they read on the internet. The problem is everyone else who is losing money for no reason other then owning the same stock a small group of idiotic investors.
It depends on whether you're trying to invest long-term by owning pieces of successful companies or just trying to use the random weekly/daily/hourly/minutely fluxuations in stock prices as a roulette wheel.
If you thought that owning some percentage of a company was worth X dollars when you bought the stock, then how are you being harmed when the price goes down? That's like arguing that a store is "harming" me by putting a shirt on sale the day after I bought it. It's only harmful if I was planning to stand around outside the store the next day trying to sell my day-old sweater for more than I paid for it.
Also, it's worth pointing out that the airline stock that you mentioned took all of nine minutes to correct itself. You could have checked the value of your stock portfolio, gone to lunch, and checked it again half an hour later and not noticed the blip.
This would do relatively little. The illegal drug trade in the U.S. is in the tens of billion of dollars/year. It's not really clear how accurate the estimates are or how the price and/or demand would change if they were legal, but the few billion or tens of billions of dollars in taxes that might be collected from it would be a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the federal government's $2.7 trillion in spending. Similarly, churches in the U.S. bring in a combined revenue of around $250 billion/year. If we taxed them at around 30% like we do corporations, that would only be about an extra $75 billion/year. While the taxes that could be collected from drugs and churches are considerable, it would almost certainly amount to less than 5% of the annual federal budget. So while it would help, taxing these things isn't going to magically fix budget problems like many people want to imagine.
That's the sort of grading system that many college professors use, especially in science and engineering. I tend to think that it's better, but it's also rather traumatic for students who are accustomed to getting almost everything right. Suddenly they are faced with tests where a good B student who has worked reasonably hard in the class is only expected to be able to answer 60-80% of the questions, and they feel like failures. Of course, most of them get over it.
The idea, and whether it works or not is debatable, is to not discourage kids from trying....
If you're going to fail anyway, then anyone who isn't a total idiot is going to realize that putting any sort of effort in whatsoever is a big fat waste of time. There's no reward for that effort.
The problem with this "solution" is that it now provides an incentive for the poor students who were actually putting in effort and getting C or D grads to stop trying. A student might have to work quite hard to get a low C at 70% for the first semester. They are now faced with the choice of either continuing to work hard for a C, or doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for the second half of the grading period and getting a D. Before this C student would still have to work hard to pass the class, because if they started simply not doing any work at all they would fail. Now that failure is a mathematical impossibility, it would be entirely reasonable for a student to conclude that it raising his final grade from a D to an F wasn't worth the trouble.
You are correct, and a key difference between CC companies and paypal is that for CC companies that customers are the cardholders. Sure, the CC companies also manage to skim a nice amount of profit from merchant fees, but the majority of their profits come from interest that their card users pay. Their incentive is to do everything they can to protect the card users so that they can attract more customers. In disputed between merchants and card holder, the CC policies are VERY lopsided toward the card holder. A dishonest customer can usually simply say "they lied about the product" or something similar are get out of paying.
With ebay, on the other hand, the true customers - the people who give them their profit - are the sellers who pay auction fees. ebay buyers don't actually give ebay any money. Of course there wouldn't be any seller fees without buyers, but since on ebay the sellers are the true customers ebay does whatever it can to protect the seller. In disputes the policies are lopsided toward the seller; a seller can simply ship an empty box, and paypal will accept that as "proof" that the merchant delivered the advertised product.
The critical differences is are that 1) paypal does not loan out deposited money and 2) the account holder is still the owner of record for any money markets accounts (or whatever) that paypal sets up for you with your deposited money. They can't create "new money" in the form of new demand deposits. Most people don't have any real idea how money works or a bank operates, but there's a lot more to it than the general perception of "a bank is a place that stores your money for you." If that were all that banks did, there wouldn't be that much regulation necessary (certainly some, but not a lot) and we wouldn't have lawyers who specialize in banking law.
Very true. The move rental place near my house always asks me if I want "rental insurance" for an extra 25 cents to protect me in case I accidentally break the disk. I always turn it down, because in my many years of renting DVDs I have never broken a single disk. Eventually I asked one of the clerks if anyone ever busy the insurance, and he replied that families with young children almost always buy it. Apparently the halflife for disks in their young children section in startlingly short.
Companies interviewing PhDs for research positions almost always grill people like this. There isn't usually a written test, but the interviewer(s) will ask probing questions about fundamental things just to see if you actually know what you're talking about.
The key to passing a lie detector test is to bring yourself to believe the lies you are telling.
Not really. Most experts will tell you that the key to passing a lie detector test is to just stay relaxed and not get worked up. There's no need to "believe the lie," you just need to be confident that the lie detector isn't going to catch you (and resistant to the examiners attempts to fluster you).
It seems to me that the state is simply trying to use the courts to escape its own incompetence and screw over the company. If this company wants to sell devices and not disclose the source code, that's fine. The problem is that the state never should have purchased the devices in the first place. The state screwed up by buying devices that aren't appropriate for providing evidence in court, and now rather than admit that they purchased and used the wrong product, they're trying to force this company to disclose their code.
When parent said "over escape velocity" and used 12 km/sec as his figure, he was talking about the escape velocity of earth, not the moon. The escape velocity of the earth is the same as the velocity that an object falling toward the earth from far away would accumulate before it hit. Although he was off by an order of magnitude in his calculations anyway.
Cars are a completely different matter, as the auto manufacturers have lobbied to make sure it's illegal for you to make your own car.
Most states have procedures for licensing home-built vehicles. Usually it just involves having the vehicle inspected by the state police, who give you a certificate that you take to the DMV, who will create a VIN and title for you. The DMV will usually even issue you a temporary tag for your home-built car so that you can drive it to wherever the state police do their inspections. You generally need to show a receipt for the engine that you put in the car or a bill of sale/title for the car that you took it out of, unless your car is powered by an electric motor or something more exotic that has never had a VIN associated with it.
Considering the tiny number of people who would be interested in building their own car from scratch (much less actually willing and able to do it) it would make little sense for car companies to bother stopping them. We're probably only talking about dozens of vehicles/year.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at Steam. I hate Steam with a passion on principle, because Valve forced people to install it, and it always ran on the computer even when Valve's games did not. To this day, I still have not installed HL2 or the Orange Box on my system, and I have remained very vocal about the forced installation of background tasks. Other people complained at first, but now, all I hear from people is how awesome Steam is and how they love buying things off it, and I should shut up about it. The fact that it is there all the time, constantly doing things in the background just doesn't phase them. After all, they can simply blame their 3-minute boot times on Microsoft.
There are some hacks that you can use to keep Steam from starting automatically. For example, you could click the "don't start automatically at bootup" option in Steam. But since you apparently haven't actually ever used it, I wouldn't expect you to know about 1337 hacks like that.
It's true that there's no moral reason why she should have to change her phone number, but that doesn't mean that changing her number isn't the best course of action for her. One can be outraged about the people who have actually done wrong but still recognize that changing her number is the best solution.
I'm pretty sure that Science and Nature both ask the author to include a list of potential reviewers, with only a few restrictions (you're not supposed to suggest one of your former grad students, for example).
1. The actual peer review is done by other scientists for free, not by the publishers.
2. Most publications actually require the author to suggest who should peer review it, so the publisher usually doesn't even have to work to figure out who should review what.
Obviously you can also make money from dividends, but at some point most people will want to sell their stock to recover all (or at least a large chunk) of their initial investment value.
Are you planning to bill someone for the time that you would have spent watching the commercials?
And yet the number of deaths from car crashes per mile (or km) traveled in the U.S. is lower than that of Finland. Apparently all that extra training for new drivers doesn't actually help that much...
Nicholas Money has taken some video "shots" of these fungi firing their spores everywhere?
Private investment would do the job just fine, without being nearly as susceptible to fraud.
And what happens when I want to sell some of my "privately invested" stock? Perhaps, say, because I have been accumulating a stock portfolio over my working life and am now planning to slowly sell it off to support myself during my retirement?
But today, with instantaneous communication and information availability, there is no need for a trading market for those who simply wish to invest and divest capital in companies they believe to have strong prospects for profitability.
Sure, there's no need for a stock market if people simply want to invest some money in a company - but without a secondary market for the stocks there would be no way to get any of the invested money back if you think the company is failing, or you simply decide you want to money for something else. You would essentially be locked into an investment forever, with no one to sell your stocks to when you decide you don't want them any more. Note that wanting to re-sell stocks that you purchased from a company is necessarily a sign of greed or that you are trying to "game the system." Many people, for example, will invest in stocks for a few decades while they work and then sell the stocks off gradually to support themselves during retirement. Without a secondary market for the stocks, their money would be locked into the company forever with no way to get it back.
I don't think people care so much about the stock brokers who stupidly sold because they believe what they read on the internet. The problem is everyone else who is losing money for no reason other then owning the same stock a small group of idiotic investors.
It depends on whether you're trying to invest long-term by owning pieces of successful companies or just trying to use the random weekly/daily/hourly/minutely fluxuations in stock prices as a roulette wheel.
If you thought that owning some percentage of a company was worth X dollars when you bought the stock, then how are you being harmed when the price goes down? That's like arguing that a store is "harming" me by putting a shirt on sale the day after I bought it. It's only harmful if I was planning to stand around outside the store the next day trying to sell my day-old sweater for more than I paid for it.
Also, it's worth pointing out that the airline stock that you mentioned took all of nine minutes to correct itself. You could have checked the value of your stock portfolio, gone to lunch, and checked it again half an hour later and not noticed the blip.
This would do relatively little. The illegal drug trade in the U.S. is in the tens of billion of dollars/year. It's not really clear how accurate the estimates are or how the price and/or demand would change if they were legal, but the few billion or tens of billions of dollars in taxes that might be collected from it would be a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the federal government's $2.7 trillion in spending. Similarly, churches in the U.S. bring in a combined revenue of around $250 billion/year. If we taxed them at around 30% like we do corporations, that would only be about an extra $75 billion/year. While the taxes that could be collected from drugs and churches are considerable, it would almost certainly amount to less than 5% of the annual federal budget. So while it would help, taxing these things isn't going to magically fix budget problems like many people want to imagine.
That's the sort of grading system that many college professors use, especially in science and engineering. I tend to think that it's better, but it's also rather traumatic for students who are accustomed to getting almost everything right. Suddenly they are faced with tests where a good B student who has worked reasonably hard in the class is only expected to be able to answer 60-80% of the questions, and they feel like failures. Of course, most of them get over it.
The idea, and whether it works or not is debatable, is to not discourage kids from trying.... If you're going to fail anyway, then anyone who isn't a total idiot is going to realize that putting any sort of effort in whatsoever is a big fat waste of time. There's no reward for that effort.
The problem with this "solution" is that it now provides an incentive for the poor students who were actually putting in effort and getting C or D grads to stop trying. A student might have to work quite hard to get a low C at 70% for the first semester. They are now faced with the choice of either continuing to work hard for a C, or doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for the second half of the grading period and getting a D. Before this C student would still have to work hard to pass the class, because if they started simply not doing any work at all they would fail. Now that failure is a mathematical impossibility, it would be entirely reasonable for a student to conclude that it raising his final grade from a D to an F wasn't worth the trouble.
You are correct, and a key difference between CC companies and paypal is that for CC companies that customers are the cardholders. Sure, the CC companies also manage to skim a nice amount of profit from merchant fees, but the majority of their profits come from interest that their card users pay. Their incentive is to do everything they can to protect the card users so that they can attract more customers. In disputed between merchants and card holder, the CC policies are VERY lopsided toward the card holder. A dishonest customer can usually simply say "they lied about the product" or something similar are get out of paying. With ebay, on the other hand, the true customers - the people who give them their profit - are the sellers who pay auction fees. ebay buyers don't actually give ebay any money. Of course there wouldn't be any seller fees without buyers, but since on ebay the sellers are the true customers ebay does whatever it can to protect the seller. In disputes the policies are lopsided toward the seller; a seller can simply ship an empty box, and paypal will accept that as "proof" that the merchant delivered the advertised product.
The critical differences is are that 1) paypal does not loan out deposited money and 2) the account holder is still the owner of record for any money markets accounts (or whatever) that paypal sets up for you with your deposited money. They can't create "new money" in the form of new demand deposits. Most people don't have any real idea how money works or a bank operates, but there's a lot more to it than the general perception of "a bank is a place that stores your money for you." If that were all that banks did, there wouldn't be that much regulation necessary (certainly some, but not a lot) and we wouldn't have lawyers who specialize in banking law.
Very true. The move rental place near my house always asks me if I want "rental insurance" for an extra 25 cents to protect me in case I accidentally break the disk. I always turn it down, because in my many years of renting DVDs I have never broken a single disk. Eventually I asked one of the clerks if anyone ever busy the insurance, and he replied that families with young children almost always buy it. Apparently the halflife for disks in their young children section in startlingly short.
Also, if I run a cafe or something and want to provide free wifi to attract customers, then aren't all those people "authorized users"?
Companies interviewing PhDs for research positions almost always grill people like this. There isn't usually a written test, but the interviewer(s) will ask probing questions about fundamental things just to see if you actually know what you're talking about.
The key to passing a lie detector test is to bring yourself to believe the lies you are telling.
Not really. Most experts will tell you that the key to passing a lie detector test is to just stay relaxed and not get worked up. There's no need to "believe the lie," you just need to be confident that the lie detector isn't going to catch you (and resistant to the examiners attempts to fluster you).
It seems to me that the state is simply trying to use the courts to escape its own incompetence and screw over the company. If this company wants to sell devices and not disclose the source code, that's fine. The problem is that the state never should have purchased the devices in the first place. The state screwed up by buying devices that aren't appropriate for providing evidence in court, and now rather than admit that they purchased and used the wrong product, they're trying to force this company to disclose their code.
When parent said "over escape velocity" and used 12 km/sec as his figure, he was talking about the escape velocity of earth, not the moon. The escape velocity of the earth is the same as the velocity that an object falling toward the earth from far away would accumulate before it hit. Although he was off by an order of magnitude in his calculations anyway.
So it's a faulty reassurance about a non-existent problem. Sounds fair.
Cars are a completely different matter, as the auto manufacturers have lobbied to make sure it's illegal for you to make your own car.
Most states have procedures for licensing home-built vehicles. Usually it just involves having the vehicle inspected by the state police, who give you a certificate that you take to the DMV, who will create a VIN and title for you. The DMV will usually even issue you a temporary tag for your home-built car so that you can drive it to wherever the state police do their inspections. You generally need to show a receipt for the engine that you put in the car or a bill of sale/title for the car that you took it out of, unless your car is powered by an electric motor or something more exotic that has never had a VIN associated with it.
Considering the tiny number of people who would be interested in building their own car from scratch (much less actually willing and able to do it) it would make little sense for car companies to bother stopping them. We're probably only talking about dozens of vehicles/year.
More likely the organisms would be optimized to survive in space, and so would have a much harder time surviving when they reach a planet.