The cadmium WILL get out. The several thousand degree temperature of an incerator or waste-to-energy plant will swiftly liberate the cadmium and put it into water-soluble fly ash or directly into the atmosphere.
And all this just to color a piece of plastic that you don't see in ordinary usage and that to colorblind people like myself looks identical to cyan (no cadmium there, every inkjet uses cyan die).
In this case it probably is true. Trans-fat is not a naturally occuring substance and only exists when oil is hydrogenated. If there isn't hydrogenated oil (generally soybean) in the product, then it is very unlikely to have trans-fats. Even natural butter has no trans-fats (all natural unsaturated fats are cis-fats, and saturated fats are neither).
The lie is that they're hiding other things that have been done, like bleaching the flour, using corn syrup or other sweeteners, and using GM crops laden with pesticides (after all, what good is a patented Roundup-Ready(TM) crop without a heavy application of Monsanto-patented pesticides). Marketing 101 is to trumpet the good stuff (regardless of whether you are responsible for them) and hide the bad stuff.
Liberally dishing of spankings isn't without its drawbacks either. Plenty of psychological studies have shown that it can lead to serious issues (self esteem, depression, socialability) later in life.
Artificially creating conflict like marketing does should not be allowed. If it wasn't for the marketing, you (as a parent) wouldn't have to be forced to decide between spoiling the brat (which is even worse for his/her long term social and mental health, no less your pocketbook) and having to be the 'no' and punitive person (which leads to another set of problems mostly manifesting in teenagers/young adults).
Personally, I will not allow my kids to come with me food shopping if I ever have any, and cold cereals (or other crap) will not be on my list. Combined with strict commercial filtering I hope to keep the temptation to a minimum. This would mean no live TV, but my experience with kids is that recorded or P2P'ed material is far prefered by them anyway, and recorded material offers me more control over their viewing habits with far less intrusiveness than having to ban TV channels or TV altogether - and the wider selection available on P2P generally balances out the crap unavailable due to censorship. (I don't intend on buying stuff in stores as finding anything that isn't mainstream is extremely hard, and even the stuff that I can find will have to be ripped [since backups are a must for kids] and generally comes as a handful of assorted episodes instead of the full 65 episodes])
Wheat sells for about $.05 a pound. Energy is about $.02/pound of coal (a record high I might add). Water is essentially free. Cereal is extremely cheap to manufacture. The marketing budget, packaging, retail margins, etc, are what cost money.
This is an aside, but how can anyone with a shred of moral conscience use PVC (polyvinyl chloride) for a thing like a smart card. 1 part per million of PVC mixed with other recyclable plastics can render a batch useless (PVC is nearly impossible to sort out of a plastic stream and when heated it releases chlorine compounds which destroy the steel used in the recycling machinery). Little bits of plastic like smart cards are likely to wind up in all waste streams by overeager or careless recyclers.
For a few hundred dollars per ton (a fraction of a cent per card) polycarbonate or HDPE could be used. The former is quite rigid and the latter is quite wear resistant. Both don't ruin recycling batches in small amounts and are not nearly as toxic (HDPE is completely non-toxic if no additives are used).
If the steam engine is using exhaust heat, it is going to be very bulky for its power output. Rankine cycle efficiency drops precipitously as temperature and pressure decrease, as does the density of the water vapor, meaning that the steam engine/turbine is larger yet produces less power.
Why not dump the internal combustion engine and run the car off a steam turbine? (such a system will be less bulky, complex, and more energy efficient)
My guess is that this system is not practical. A condensing steam engine/turbine must be employed unless you wish to use a water tower every few hundred miles like the steam trains of old and condensing steam engines are both bulky and high maintainance. The entire heat exhaust (as much as about 1MW) must be passed through the radiator, and the inside of the radiator must be kept a vacuum around 150 mbar (assuming turbine exhaust of 50C). If a turbine is used, the car must be able to handle applying torque on a vibration-sensitive machine that is spinning around 15,000-30,000 rpm. Steam turbines require maintainance, particularly replacing turbine blades. Steam engines must be taken apart, overhauled, and have the cylinders rebored every few thousand to ten thousand hours of operation or so much like an ICE (though ICEs are cheap enough that people generally just junk the motor at that point). Since turbines and steam engines are expensive pieces of equipment with service lives of up to 100 years (judging by industrial equipment, autos might be different), the car owner either will be wasting expensive machinery or be stuck with a decades or century old but still functional car.
I think there's a reason steam turbines/engines (mostly turbines due to manufacturing cost and efficiency) are mostly used in power plants, factories, ships, and tanks and NOT consumer appliances.
Lastly, even immobile steam engines are very expensive. They run around $5/watt of capacity, and this does not include the boiler, condensor, or pumps. Turbines are only cost competitive above around 25kW of power output and are still quite pricey until you reach the MW range.
To make bit for bit copies, you need very expensive DVD presses or specialty-made (and patent infringing) DVD blanks and burners, as the DVD-R format does not allow for storing an encryption key.
That, along with compacting the DVD to 4.3GiB to fit on 1 diskette, is why ordinary people (but not mass scale bootleggers) break the encryption.
The USSR did have interests in Korea, but the Koreans weren't exactly fond of them. Kim Il Sung came to being after South Korea was created, as the transition was exceedingly fast. Within 3 months of liberation from Japan, both North Korea and our freshly minted South Korea were heading to war. The transition governments (generally one per town or local area) were extremely fluid as no state or federal government existed at the moment. That they did not experience widespread anarchy or looting is a good indicator of how much goodwill was around at the time.
That's why I said give aid and legitimacy to the existing government, not turn our backs and flee. North Korea didn't have much of a choice but to accept Chinese divisions (not even voluntarily, but fighting both the USA and China at the same time would have been suicidal).
As far as whose meddling caused North Korea, it's the fault of both superpowers. It takes two to tangle. If they engage but we don't, Korea would be a SSR after a very short war. If we engage but they don't, we get a puppet government after a very short war. Only if both go in there do we get a big war.
The events in between WWII and the Korean War are extremely muddy and our knowledge of that period is still evolving to this day. What makes it hard to study is that the events unfolded so quickly and were immediately followed by war. Within 3 months of the onset of hostilities (maybe earlier?), both North and South were run autocratically and neither had much interest in letting people know what unfolded during their rise to power (South Korea was a dictatorship until 1970 or so).
The easiest way to get porn is to post your e-mail to a public site. Spammers will then deliver small teaser portions right to your inbox.
PS: Yes, a computer per child is quite a luxury. Perhaps what's considered normal varies from place to place, but over here (New York City) many kids do not have computers, and those that do often share with their parents and siblings. I cannot see the point of having more than one kids' computer unless two or more of the kids are computer addicts or budding nerds.
Last I checked, Kuwait was a dictatorship. Only 10% of people residing in the country are considered citizens and being born in the country does not make you a citizen. There is no freedom of speech or religion. Kuwait has and is still stealing oil from Iraq by slant drilling into their country (this little point was not lost on Saddam when deciding to invade in the first Gulf War, but he was not able to do anything to stop them because of strong outside support for Kuwait). Had we left Saddam in control of Kuwait, the only people hurt would be the upper-crust of Kuwaiti society. The rest have little to lose and both Saddam's presidency and Kuwait's monarchy are about equally brutal and corrupt.
Most non-citizens (which remember, are 90% of the population) would love to become Soviet citizens and be given state jobs and free housing. No matter how dilapidated the housing or lousy the civil freedoms, Kuwait does them over.
South Korea is a very complex situation. Had no country intervened after WWII, Korea would have likely been united from the beginning by a federalist communist government as such a government was rapidly forming in the weeks and months after the liberation of Korea from the Japanese. It is up to speculation if, in the absence of a long civil war against US-funded South Korea, Korea would have a government along the lines of our Articles of Confederation, albiet under a communist economic system, or whether it would evolve into an authoritarian system more akin to the USSR or South Vietnam. Korean people are very hardworking people, have pro-growth social values, and could very well have built a country as well off or even better off than the current South Korea. The communist government that was developing before the need to fight the insurgency (South Korea) was very promising, but like all countries in civil wars, civil liberties and freedoms are the first things to be lost. Had we given the developing communist government legitimacy instead of installing our own government and given them reconstruction aid, things would probably have gone quite well for Koreans, there would have been no Korean War, and we would have had a solid ally against the USSR for our Cold War.
Taiwan is the only example where our intervening actually improved the situation. The native Taiwanese (not to be confused with the mass of emigrants from the mainland who comprise the bulk of the upper and middle classes) weren't happy with what happened but overall the country is a prospering and rather free democracy with the help of generous aid from the US.
Considering that you picked these three examples, I feel it's safe to assume that the rest of our interventions (hundreds over the last century) must have been quite misguided.
Illegal downloads come more and more frequently as 'full albums', including the cover art scanned. If they push the lyrics issue too far, the P2P market will just bundle lyrics with the albums while legal downloads will be saddled with the extra restrictions.
It's like the RIAA intentionally wants to discourage legal downloads to preserve their CD market.
I belief is that the problem is getting enough normal force to make the thing work. Micromachines (machines in the 1 to 1000 micrometer range - not the trademark) tend to be very light and at such size scales, gravity becomes less and less significant.
Anoher probable problem (unless you happen to be the patent holder) is that this is apparently patented, which means it's unlikely to be seriously researched until said patents expire.
In my opinion, Wikipedia is already superior to Britannica (or any traditional encyclopedia).
Many things that are covered in depth with Wikipedia are either briefly covered or not covered at all by traditional encyclopedias. Also, encyclopedias have their own biases. I doubt you'll get the full scoop on lawsuit-happy rackets like Scientology. The Soviet Union or Nazi Germany (or any topic sensitive to the elite) are also unlikely to get a fair review in a traditional encyclopedia.
From my experience using Wikipedia, I get the feeling that it's in fact less biased than normal encyclopedias, and that the bias is more randomly oriented whereas normal encyclopedias are always pro-establishment (the article on the Soviet Union will always be negative and misleading, and the article on capitalism will be mostly positive and misleading - unless it's an encyclopedia commisioned by the USSR, in which case you can reverse the spins) (articles on Nazism will always be very negative, but there will be little mention of the atrocities committed by Jewish families, such as De Beers or Ariel Sharon).
Also, with emulation being more and more popular, you cannot expect too much efficiency out of just in time compiling. It's best to let the hardware do it with dedicated gates than wasting CPU cycles on a better just in time compiling algorithm. The benefits of this increase exponentially with the number of emulation layers (though in practice, I've never nested emulators more than two deep, as I've never had to and 2 levels is slow enough already).
Baby Bells have been doing this ever since they were 'forced' to open their local lines to competitors. For a baby bell to transfer you over speedily and efficiently is the exception rather than the rule.
We all know that the mainstream press is extremely selective in what it covers, and it's not even like this is breaking news. Common sense says that they will act like this.
And it doesn't require the active knowledge and participation of the staff. Upper management can implement it themselves by assigning far too few staff to the "transfer business to our competitors" division.
Given the clear motive and the track record and considering that slashdot is not a criminal court, I put the burden of proof on Bell South to prove that they're innocent.
I do think he should be punished, but the punishest is a tad harsh I'd say.
Felonies carry at least 1 year of jail and in most states the loss of the right to vote for some period of time (in at least one state, it is a lifelong loss of the vote). Stealing $370 is an awfully minor crime to be punishing it that harshly. People get away with worse, like dumping anti-freeze down storm drains (even in industrial quantities) or abandoning their cars for much less punishment. Being a deadbeat parent generally doesn't earn a felony conviction (definitely not if you pay up once you're caught - maybe the worst and remorseless cases could be a felony).
Why not force him to pay for the stuff and do 100 hours community service? This is his first offense after all and odds are he'll have learned his lesson about petty crime.
They sure brought a lot of misery too. The Romans were responsible for a whole shitload of wars, and generally wars of aggression. They're also responsible for a number of genocides, the most notable being that against Carthage.
For Hitler, the biggest problem was a lack of energy and manufacturing capacity. By the end of the war, the Germans had very advanced tech, but only a handful of each unit. Highways are useless if you have no goods to move along them and no gasoline to put into your trucks.
If I were planning a logistical system for use in a future war, I would try to use rail as much as possible. Rails have far higher capacity than roads and they use only a small fraction of the fuel of roads. While global warming is a minor issue in war, running out of fuel is, and in war fuel demand goes up for the war machinery while production goes down because of bombing. Both rail and road are moderately vulnerable to enemy bombing.
Government has no monopoly on bureaucratic overhead. Private insurance firms spend about about 20% of revenues on overhead, a lot of it for lawyers to defend their shady practicies regarding claim rejection. Government insurance programs are typically low single digits overhead. Utterly wasteful overhead in medical insurace is a substantial factor into why the US pays top dollar prices for 2nd rate medical care.
In other industries, being able to couple a natural monopoly with a government fiat to give the service away can be extremely beneficial to society. Free municipal wi-fi is a shining modern day example of this at work.
Municipal wi-fi has a overhead of near nil. There is no billing or authentication involved in the better systems. There are no service visits needed to people's houses to repair broken wires. The cost of providing the service is only a few dollars per person covered compared to ~$50 for commercial broadband.
My belief is that private firms are fundamentally no different than public firms with regards to bureaucracy. It depends more on the level of transparency than any right vs. left or public vs. private decisions. When things are transparent a la wifi and Social Security, overhead and fraud is low. When things are opaque, such as with most private insurance and cable tv, overhead and fraud are endemic.
The copyright claim is probably a stretch. The title cannot be copyrighted, and merely formulating rules that are similar is not copyright infringement, though it is close enough for a lawsuit to stand on.
However, in these types of instances, trademarks cast a very wide net because of the anti-dilution clauses that were added to trademark law a few decades back. Judges often interpret the clause extremely broadly. The anti-consumer aspects of trademarks get their teeth from this, whereas the aspects of trademarks needed for a well functionin market, namely that one entity cannot pass off goods are being made by another, was very well handled by the older trademark laws.
What makes it even sillier is that the milliwatt-hours is not a unit of power (but rather energy), and square centimeters is not a unit of volume (but rather area). It's about as bad as trying to measure your weight in feet, or the distance from NYC to LA in pounds.
It was a joke. I hoped it would be obvious from the context of intercepting CC numbers and root passwords.
However, they probably would be effective. Those kinds of products only need a few sales to make a profit. Remember that offshore bank account and credit consolidation bring in lots of money per client.
PETA stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of animals. I cannot see why they would take offense at biodieson, considering that it is made from plants.
About contracts being the cornerstone of our legal system - I could care less. If they're beneficial, and they almost always are outside of monopolies [telcos, cable companies], monopsonies [cable company, when looked at by a content producer], monopolistic competition [copyrights/patents], and monopsonic competition [submitting newspaper editorials], then I have no trouble with them; however, copyrights and patents are government declared monopolies which leads to strongly monopolistic competition.
Tens of millions of people have contracts with Claria (aka Gator) not to remove thier software and to turn over all the personal information and computer resources that thier software wants.
Copyrights and patents are extremely unfree parts of society. They give an extremely strong stick that the seller can use to leverage and shackle the market. The massive gains of government and charitably funded copyright/patent type stuff comes from eliminating those monopolies.
In this context, I see a very good reason to interfere with contract law. You cannot shop around for better terms for MS Office. The average consumer has no bargaining power compared to Microsoft, so they will make a take-it-or-leave-it offer leaving themselves with all but a sliver of the profits in the transaction (you still benefit slightly, but far less than one would reasonably consider fair - just like $10/gallon gasoline would still benefit you compared to no gasoline, but it wouldn't be considered a fair price). There already exists a statutory contract - copyright law - which is quite beneficial to the seller as it is. Why do we need to further subsidise them by allowing them to leverage that monopoly in more ways than just wholesale price? I would nominate the residential software industry as a poster case of contracts hurting people.
I am quite aware that people like handouts, but this can be mostly prevented by implementing government funding smartly. Universities do this (though because they patent the stuff they discover, it's no better for humanity than having a private corp discover it). Charities and programs to teach people how to make independent films and supply equipment can get very high returns per dollar invested and big budget consumerist trash could be done election style - where a fixed amount of tax money is reserved per person, and it is distributed to content producers based on citizen's votes. Even though copyrights wouldn't exist, private companies could make profits if they can convince people that their show is better than the competitions'. Music is even easier, as musicians prove time and time again that they will produce without being paid a dime. The few who do get rich generally make it through non-copyright sources such as tours. Most software is something that will get done because business requires it. The stuff that won't is consumer oriented software that can be voted on using the same pool of money as for movies/tv.
Maybe when you look around you see a well oiled market, but when I look at the information/entertainment sector, I see a stunted and very ill market that only exists at all because the sector is so important in every day lives and commerce. My best analogy would be De Beers and diamonds. Carbon, which is only worth about $100/short ton (coal, international price - US domestic prices are closer to $20/short ton), sells for billions of dollars per short ton as diamond because of the cartel. Had the cartel not existed and the engineers who keep inventing diamond synthesizing machines not died, then we could probably have diamond semiconductors and diamond plate glass at reasonable prices by now (the physics of diamond precents their use in lenses or curved mirrors, but they would make scratch-proof and easy to maintain window panes). Where would the world be if the same had happened to aluminum and the scientist who brought it from a extremely precious metal worthy of kings' crowns to an extremely versatile and cost-effective building material been killed.
Hmm, I guess going commercial wouldn't, but the value added tax would violate the GPL (thus making GPL software illegal in that country) since you are forced to add a restriction on redistribution (namely that a tax must be paid since anyone who redistributes is a manufacturer and subject to the tax).
But seeing that is what the French want, I guess they are not too likely to complain about that.
Slashdot Mirror
The cadmium WILL get out. The several thousand degree temperature of an incerator or waste-to-energy plant will swiftly liberate the cadmium and put it into water-soluble fly ash or directly into the atmosphere.
And all this just to color a piece of plastic that you don't see in ordinary usage and that to colorblind people like myself looks identical to cyan (no cadmium there, every inkjet uses cyan die).
In this case it probably is true. Trans-fat is not a naturally occuring substance and only exists when oil is hydrogenated. If there isn't hydrogenated oil (generally soybean) in the product, then it is very unlikely to have trans-fats. Even natural butter has no trans-fats (all natural unsaturated fats are cis-fats, and saturated fats are neither).
The lie is that they're hiding other things that have been done, like bleaching the flour, using corn syrup or other sweeteners, and using GM crops laden with pesticides (after all, what good is a patented Roundup-Ready(TM) crop without a heavy application of Monsanto-patented pesticides). Marketing 101 is to trumpet the good stuff (regardless of whether you are responsible for them) and hide the bad stuff.
Liberally dishing of spankings isn't without its drawbacks either. Plenty of psychological studies have shown that it can lead to serious issues (self esteem, depression, socialability) later in life.
Artificially creating conflict like marketing does should not be allowed. If it wasn't for the marketing, you (as a parent) wouldn't have to be forced to decide between spoiling the brat (which is even worse for his/her long term social and mental health, no less your pocketbook) and having to be the 'no' and punitive person (which leads to another set of problems mostly manifesting in teenagers/young adults).
Personally, I will not allow my kids to come with me food shopping if I ever have any, and cold cereals (or other crap) will not be on my list. Combined with strict commercial filtering I hope to keep the temptation to a minimum. This would mean no live TV, but my experience with kids is that recorded or P2P'ed material is far prefered by them anyway, and recorded material offers me more control over their viewing habits with far less intrusiveness than having to ban TV channels or TV altogether - and the wider selection available on P2P generally balances out the crap unavailable due to censorship. (I don't intend on buying stuff in stores as finding anything that isn't mainstream is extremely hard, and even the stuff that I can find will have to be ripped [since backups are a must for kids] and generally comes as a handful of assorted episodes instead of the full 65 episodes])
Wheat sells for about $.05 a pound. Energy is about $.02/pound of coal (a record high I might add). Water is essentially free. Cereal is extremely cheap to manufacture. The marketing budget, packaging, retail margins, etc, are what cost money.
This is an aside, but how can anyone with a shred of moral conscience use PVC (polyvinyl chloride) for a thing like a smart card. 1 part per million of PVC mixed with other recyclable plastics can render a batch useless (PVC is nearly impossible to sort out of a plastic stream and when heated it releases chlorine compounds which destroy the steel used in the recycling machinery). Little bits of plastic like smart cards are likely to wind up in all waste streams by overeager or careless recyclers.
For a few hundred dollars per ton (a fraction of a cent per card) polycarbonate or HDPE could be used. The former is quite rigid and the latter is quite wear resistant. Both don't ruin recycling batches in small amounts and are not nearly as toxic (HDPE is completely non-toxic if no additives are used).
If the steam engine is using exhaust heat, it is going to be very bulky for its power output. Rankine cycle efficiency drops precipitously as temperature and pressure decrease, as does the density of the water vapor, meaning that the steam engine/turbine is larger yet produces less power.
Why not dump the internal combustion engine and run the car off a steam turbine? (such a system will be less bulky, complex, and more energy efficient)
My guess is that this system is not practical. A condensing steam engine/turbine must be employed unless you wish to use a water tower every few hundred miles like the steam trains of old and condensing steam engines are both bulky and high maintainance. The entire heat exhaust (as much as about 1MW) must be passed through the radiator, and the inside of the radiator must be kept a vacuum around 150 mbar (assuming turbine exhaust of 50C). If a turbine is used, the car must be able to handle applying torque on a vibration-sensitive machine that is spinning around 15,000-30,000 rpm. Steam turbines require maintainance, particularly replacing turbine blades. Steam engines must be taken apart, overhauled, and have the cylinders rebored every few thousand to ten thousand hours of operation or so much like an ICE (though ICEs are cheap enough that people generally just junk the motor at that point). Since turbines and steam engines are expensive pieces of equipment with service lives of up to 100 years (judging by industrial equipment, autos might be different), the car owner either will be wasting expensive machinery or be stuck with a decades or century old but still functional car.
I think there's a reason steam turbines/engines (mostly turbines due to manufacturing cost and efficiency) are mostly used in power plants, factories, ships, and tanks and NOT consumer appliances.
Lastly, even immobile steam engines are very expensive. They run around $5/watt of capacity, and this does not include the boiler, condensor, or pumps. Turbines are only cost competitive above around 25kW of power output and are still quite pricey until you reach the MW range.
To make bit for bit copies, you need very expensive DVD presses or specialty-made (and patent infringing) DVD blanks and burners, as the DVD-R format does not allow for storing an encryption key.
That, along with compacting the DVD to 4.3GiB to fit on 1 diskette, is why ordinary people (but not mass scale bootleggers) break the encryption.
The USSR did have interests in Korea, but the Koreans weren't exactly fond of them. Kim Il Sung came to being after South Korea was created, as the transition was exceedingly fast. Within 3 months of liberation from Japan, both North Korea and our freshly minted South Korea were heading to war. The transition governments (generally one per town or local area) were extremely fluid as no state or federal government existed at the moment. That they did not experience widespread anarchy or looting is a good indicator of how much goodwill was around at the time.
That's why I said give aid and legitimacy to the existing government, not turn our backs and flee. North Korea didn't have much of a choice but to accept Chinese divisions (not even voluntarily, but fighting both the USA and China at the same time would have been suicidal).
As far as whose meddling caused North Korea, it's the fault of both superpowers. It takes two to tangle. If they engage but we don't, Korea would be a SSR after a very short war. If we engage but they don't, we get a puppet government after a very short war. Only if both go in there do we get a big war.
The events in between WWII and the Korean War are extremely muddy and our knowledge of that period is still evolving to this day. What makes it hard to study is that the events unfolded so quickly and were immediately followed by war. Within 3 months of the onset of hostilities (maybe earlier?), both North and South were run autocratically and neither had much interest in letting people know what unfolded during their rise to power (South Korea was a dictatorship until 1970 or so).
The easiest way to get porn is to post your e-mail to a public site. Spammers will then deliver small teaser portions right to your inbox.
PS: Yes, a computer per child is quite a luxury. Perhaps what's considered normal varies from place to place, but over here (New York City) many kids do not have computers, and those that do often share with their parents and siblings. I cannot see the point of having more than one kids' computer unless two or more of the kids are computer addicts or budding nerds.
Last I checked, Kuwait was a dictatorship. Only 10% of people residing in the country are considered citizens and being born in the country does not make you a citizen. There is no freedom of speech or religion. Kuwait has and is still stealing oil from Iraq by slant drilling into their country (this little point was not lost on Saddam when deciding to invade in the first Gulf War, but he was not able to do anything to stop them because of strong outside support for Kuwait). Had we left Saddam in control of Kuwait, the only people hurt would be the upper-crust of Kuwaiti society. The rest have little to lose and both Saddam's presidency and Kuwait's monarchy are about equally brutal and corrupt.
Most non-citizens (which remember, are 90% of the population) would love to become Soviet citizens and be given state jobs and free housing. No matter how dilapidated the housing or lousy the civil freedoms, Kuwait does them over.
South Korea is a very complex situation. Had no country intervened after WWII, Korea would have likely been united from the beginning by a federalist communist government as such a government was rapidly forming in the weeks and months after the liberation of Korea from the Japanese. It is up to speculation if, in the absence of a long civil war against US-funded South Korea, Korea would have a government along the lines of our Articles of Confederation, albiet under a communist economic system, or whether it would evolve into an authoritarian system more akin to the USSR or South Vietnam. Korean people are very hardworking people, have pro-growth social values, and could very well have built a country as well off or even better off than the current South Korea. The communist government that was developing before the need to fight the insurgency (South Korea) was very promising, but like all countries in civil wars, civil liberties and freedoms are the first things to be lost. Had we given the developing communist government legitimacy instead of installing our own government and given them reconstruction aid, things would probably have gone quite well for Koreans, there would have been no Korean War, and we would have had a solid ally against the USSR for our Cold War.
Taiwan is the only example where our intervening actually improved the situation. The native Taiwanese (not to be confused with the mass of emigrants from the mainland who comprise the bulk of the upper and middle classes) weren't happy with what happened but overall the country is a prospering and rather free democracy with the help of generous aid from the US.
Considering that you picked these three examples, I feel it's safe to assume that the rest of our interventions (hundreds over the last century) must have been quite misguided.
Illegal downloads come more and more frequently as 'full albums', including the cover art scanned. If they push the lyrics issue too far, the P2P market will just bundle lyrics with the albums while legal downloads will be saddled with the extra restrictions.
It's like the RIAA intentionally wants to discourage legal downloads to preserve their CD market.
I belief is that the problem is getting enough normal force to make the thing work. Micromachines (machines in the 1 to 1000 micrometer range - not the trademark) tend to be very light and at such size scales, gravity becomes less and less significant.
Anoher probable problem (unless you happen to be the patent holder) is that this is apparently patented, which means it's unlikely to be seriously researched until said patents expire.
In my opinion, Wikipedia is already superior to Britannica (or any traditional encyclopedia).
Many things that are covered in depth with Wikipedia are either briefly covered or not covered at all by traditional encyclopedias. Also, encyclopedias have their own biases. I doubt you'll get the full scoop on lawsuit-happy rackets like Scientology. The Soviet Union or Nazi Germany (or any topic sensitive to the elite) are also unlikely to get a fair review in a traditional encyclopedia.
From my experience using Wikipedia, I get the feeling that it's in fact less biased than normal encyclopedias, and that the bias is more randomly oriented whereas normal encyclopedias are always pro-establishment (the article on the Soviet Union will always be negative and misleading, and the article on capitalism will be mostly positive and misleading - unless it's an encyclopedia commisioned by the USSR, in which case you can reverse the spins) (articles on Nazism will always be very negative, but there will be little mention of the atrocities committed by Jewish families, such as De Beers or Ariel Sharon).
Also, with emulation being more and more popular, you cannot expect too much efficiency out of just in time compiling. It's best to let the hardware do it with dedicated gates than wasting CPU cycles on a better just in time compiling algorithm. The benefits of this increase exponentially with the number of emulation layers (though in practice, I've never nested emulators more than two deep, as I've never had to and 2 levels is slow enough already).
Baby Bells have been doing this ever since they were 'forced' to open their local lines to competitors. For a baby bell to transfer you over speedily and efficiently is the exception rather than the rule.
We all know that the mainstream press is extremely selective in what it covers, and it's not even like this is breaking news. Common sense says that they will act like this.
And it doesn't require the active knowledge and participation of the staff. Upper management can implement it themselves by assigning far too few staff to the "transfer business to our competitors" division.
Given the clear motive and the track record and considering that slashdot is not a criminal court, I put the burden of proof on Bell South to prove that they're innocent.
I do think he should be punished, but the punishest is a tad harsh I'd say.
Felonies carry at least 1 year of jail and in most states the loss of the right to vote for some period of time (in at least one state, it is a lifelong loss of the vote). Stealing $370 is an awfully minor crime to be punishing it that harshly. People get away with worse, like dumping anti-freeze down storm drains (even in industrial quantities) or abandoning their cars for much less punishment. Being a deadbeat parent generally doesn't earn a felony conviction (definitely not if you pay up once you're caught - maybe the worst and remorseless cases could be a felony).
Why not force him to pay for the stuff and do 100 hours community service? This is his first offense after all and odds are he'll have learned his lesson about petty crime.
They sure brought a lot of misery too. The Romans were responsible for a whole shitload of wars, and generally wars of aggression. They're also responsible for a number of genocides, the most notable being that against Carthage.
For Hitler, the biggest problem was a lack of energy and manufacturing capacity. By the end of the war, the Germans had very advanced tech, but only a handful of each unit. Highways are useless if you have no goods to move along them and no gasoline to put into your trucks.
If I were planning a logistical system for use in a future war, I would try to use rail as much as possible. Rails have far higher capacity than roads and they use only a small fraction of the fuel of roads. While global warming is a minor issue in war, running out of fuel is, and in war fuel demand goes up for the war machinery while production goes down because of bombing. Both rail and road are moderately vulnerable to enemy bombing.
Government has no monopoly on bureaucratic overhead. Private insurance firms spend about about 20% of revenues on overhead, a lot of it for lawyers to defend their shady practicies regarding claim rejection. Government insurance programs are typically low single digits overhead. Utterly wasteful overhead in medical insurace is a substantial factor into why the US pays top dollar prices for 2nd rate medical care.
In other industries, being able to couple a natural monopoly with a government fiat to give the service away can be extremely beneficial to society. Free municipal wi-fi is a shining modern day example of this at work.
Municipal wi-fi has a overhead of near nil. There is no billing or authentication involved in the better systems. There are no service visits needed to people's houses to repair broken wires. The cost of providing the service is only a few dollars per person covered compared to ~$50 for commercial broadband.
My belief is that private firms are fundamentally no different than public firms with regards to bureaucracy. It depends more on the level of transparency than any right vs. left or public vs. private decisions. When things are transparent a la wifi and Social Security, overhead and fraud is low. When things are opaque, such as with most private insurance and cable tv, overhead and fraud are endemic.
IANAL, but ...
The copyright claim is probably a stretch. The title cannot be copyrighted, and merely formulating rules that are similar is not copyright infringement, though it is close enough for a lawsuit to stand on.
However, in these types of instances, trademarks cast a very wide net because of the anti-dilution clauses that were added to trademark law a few decades back. Judges often interpret the clause extremely broadly. The anti-consumer aspects of trademarks get their teeth from this, whereas the aspects of trademarks needed for a well functionin market, namely that one entity cannot pass off goods are being made by another, was very well handled by the older trademark laws.
What makes it even sillier is that the milliwatt-hours is not a unit of power (but rather energy), and square centimeters is not a unit of volume (but rather area). It's about as bad as trying to measure your weight in feet, or the distance from NYC to LA in pounds.
It was a joke. I hoped it would be obvious from the context of intercepting CC numbers and root passwords.
However, they probably would be effective. Those kinds of products only need a few sales to make a profit. Remember that offshore bank account and credit consolidation bring in lots of money per client.
PETA stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of animals. I cannot see why they would take offense at biodieson, considering that it is made from plants.
About contracts being the cornerstone of our legal system - I could care less. If they're beneficial, and they almost always are outside of monopolies [telcos, cable companies], monopsonies [cable company, when looked at by a content producer], monopolistic competition [copyrights/patents], and monopsonic competition [submitting newspaper editorials], then I have no trouble with them; however, copyrights and patents are government declared monopolies which leads to strongly monopolistic competition.
Tens of millions of people have contracts with Claria (aka Gator) not to remove thier software and to turn over all the personal information and computer resources that thier software wants.
Copyrights and patents are extremely unfree parts of society. They give an extremely strong stick that the seller can use to leverage and shackle the market. The massive gains of government and charitably funded copyright/patent type stuff comes from eliminating those monopolies.
In this context, I see a very good reason to interfere with contract law. You cannot shop around for better terms for MS Office. The average consumer has no bargaining power compared to Microsoft, so they will make a take-it-or-leave-it offer leaving themselves with all but a sliver of the profits in the transaction (you still benefit slightly, but far less than one would reasonably consider fair - just like $10/gallon gasoline would still benefit you compared to no gasoline, but it wouldn't be considered a fair price). There already exists a statutory contract - copyright law - which is quite beneficial to the seller as it is. Why do we need to further subsidise them by allowing them to leverage that monopoly in more ways than just wholesale price? I would nominate the residential software industry as a poster case of contracts hurting people.
I am quite aware that people like handouts, but this can be mostly prevented by implementing government funding smartly. Universities do this (though because they patent the stuff they discover, it's no better for humanity than having a private corp discover it). Charities and programs to teach people how to make independent films and supply equipment can get very high returns per dollar invested and big budget consumerist trash could be done election style - where a fixed amount of tax money is reserved per person, and it is distributed to content producers based on citizen's votes. Even though copyrights wouldn't exist, private companies could make profits if they can convince people that their show is better than the competitions'. Music is even easier, as musicians prove time and time again that they will produce without being paid a dime. The few who do get rich generally make it through non-copyright sources such as tours. Most software is something that will get done because business requires it. The stuff that won't is consumer oriented software that can be voted on using the same pool of money as for movies/tv.
Maybe when you look around you see a well oiled market, but when I look at the information/entertainment sector, I see a stunted and very ill market that only exists at all because the sector is so important in every day lives and commerce. My best analogy would be De Beers and diamonds. Carbon, which is only worth about $100/short ton (coal, international price - US domestic prices are closer to $20/short ton), sells for billions of dollars per short ton as diamond because of the cartel. Had the cartel not existed and the engineers who keep inventing diamond synthesizing machines not died, then we could probably have diamond semiconductors and diamond plate glass at reasonable prices by now (the physics of diamond precents their use in lenses or curved mirrors, but they would make scratch-proof and easy to maintain window panes). Where would the world be if the same had happened to aluminum and the scientist who brought it from a extremely precious metal worthy of kings' crowns to an extremely versatile and cost-effective building material been killed.
Hmm, I guess going commercial wouldn't, but the value added tax would violate the GPL (thus making GPL software illegal in that country) since you are forced to add a restriction on redistribution (namely that a tax must be paid since anyone who redistributes is a manufacturer and subject to the tax).
But seeing that is what the French want, I guess they are not too likely to complain about that.