A few hours of envelope stuffing sure adds up fast. If your time is worth $50 an hour, then if you spend 6 hours getting your rebates you could buy that stupid computer and Wal-Mart in cash and be done with it.
I've spent 2-3 hours over the course of about 6 months getting one of my rebates. In my life, I've filed 3 rebates and gotten 2 paid. To get them, I spent about 45 minutes making photocopies (4 trips to the library to make photocopies - the forth trip was because I actually had to send them an extra copy), about 2-3 hours on the phone (mostly on hold), another 45 minutes for 4 trips to the post office, and an hour or two filling them out. The extra complexity in my accounting wasn't nice either. (I like to have a nice breakdown of my income and cashflow, and rebates generate a lot of entries, since they fall under accounts receivable and I have to make a provision that some rebates will never be paid - according to my limited experience 33% of rebates receivable less than 8 months outstanding and 100% of rebates over 8 months outstanding seems reasonable). And finally I have to cash the check when it finally does come in (once again, a trip to the bank).
Net result: I make more money working at my job than filing rebates, and my work isn't as tedious either. To that end, I've decided never to bother with a rebate again. Giving away personal info and getting even more junk mail while getting paid around minimum wage for work that isn't very fun at all is a raw deal.
It shouldn't matter whose fault it is. That's for lawyers to decide.
What Google should do is immediately patch their software to block that attack, and if an attack does get into the wild, shut down their service until it is patched. In the future, maybe not integrating with IE would help.
Plenty of US politicians are racist and get away with it. The terminology is different, but it's hard to find a politician who treats Arabs, Persians, and followers of Mohammed as equals to Caucasians and followers of Christ. A quick check of Guantamano Bay and our behaviour in Iraq will attest to that and it would be political suicide for politicians to attack those policies, particularly with regard to Palestine.
We might not pay mon-and-pop farmers $40 a day to keep cows, but we match France's agricultural subsidies with our Agricultural Adjustment Act and massive ethanol subsidies. At least the French spread the wealth around, generally subsidizing small farmers whereas we target giant agribusiness with our largesse.
Plenty of French people consider France to be an ethnicity too (at least once you exclude the Algerians and the Jews).
Within my family, the biggest bigots are all from my French side, so I speak from experience. I fear what will happen once Le Pen gets into power (and I feel that he or a similar type of person will, seeing how effectively the corporations and media are playing their cards).
French people have no hate of Linux. There are even several French distros available for those Frenchmen who cannot stand to buy US products. The adoption rate might not be as high as in Sweden or Brazil, but it beats the USs. Any Linux opposition in the country can generally be blamed on the right wing, big media friendly government.
The US, on the other hand, has neither much government support or private support of open source software. We're down there with India in terms of open source contributions per trained programmer. Our federal government is in bed with Microsoft, and buy american sentiment can only help Microsoft whereas it would hurt in other countries. A few local governments might try to push for non-Microsoft products (all in blue states as far as I know), but many more agencies write specs that require the use the MS Office and MS Windows.
I'll eat my words about the US supporting OSS when the US releases Red, White, and Blue Linux to compete with China's Red Flag Linux.
The French have a very strong domestic media lobby and they do have a very politically influential film industry. The only reason it's still alive is because of massive governmnet subsidies (about 50% of an average film's production costs) and laws very friendly to them.
I'm saddened, but not shocked, to hear this come out of France. After all, France has never been a bastion of free speech or independant media (though they love to push their culture around, much like the large belligerent country on the other side of the pond that I reside in).
That's exactly what I thought halfway throught your post. Needless to say, it's better to stick to an acronym that doesn't already have a common meaning.
Gator's more in-depth tracking can get better clicking rates. The information their program gleams is in addition to the website's adds.
If their software figures out that you're middle class and are a big spender (very likely if it intercepts at least 10 unique credit card numbers from your particular copy of their spyware), then it could put up a "no payments until 2007" ad for the website. You're also a good target for Ponzi schemes and Nigerian scams. If it never sees a single credit card number but you visit shopping sites, then it might put up an ad touting how secure the vendor's system is or that the vendor will accept checks/money orders. If it notices that your root password or your bank account password is in a dictionary or is = 3 letters long, then it won't bother showing ads touting security, since obviously you could care less about it. However, if the passwords are for Swiss banks (and you are not from a Swiss IP), then you're an easy sell of secretive banking and tax evasion services.
The following is lawsuit-bot bait: claria spyware gator claria spyware gator spyware spyware spyware spyware
Why must contracts be all-powerful. Couldn't the government seriously limit copyright and idea contracts so that they cannot be used to add additional restrictions beyond those copyright/patents provide (thus negating virtually all shrink-wrap licenses, though the GPL and BSD license would still be valid).
As far as 'starving artists' go, then feed them and their egos directly. Science and art are places where government funding and charity are exceedingly efficient (often over 10x as efficient as private enterprise so long as the results of the research are public domain) at converting money to research. Creating a culture that respects science and learning (like many East Asian cultures) will also help scientific advancement - I personally find it hard to believe that society considers sports players and celebrities to be heroes and legends considering that they're playing a game, do not contribute to human welfare and probably lead to a collective dumbing of our nation.
From my experience, I would estimate their loss of sales from boycotts at around 5 to 10%. Working in computer support for a high school, my most common solution to a DRMed CD or downloaded music (which the teachers assumed could be used like a normal CD) was to download a copy off of P2P (using my home connection connected via ssh - the school connection has HTTP quite heavily censored and many ports are blocked and the bandwidth is too choked for very agressive downloading) and burn them a redbook compliant CD, which they could then use for their classes. I really doubt that any of them has bought another internet download after being told it was done intentionally and after having their lesson hampered by not having their CD play on the school's equipment or by not being able to access their data from the school computer (some download services apparently restrict the downloads/streaming to a single machine - it's not our connection or firewall).
We usually get the job done in under an hour when there are no pressing duties, so the teacher can often have the material for their next class.
Maybe younger people might not care so much, but older adults are generally shocked and none too happy when the DRM bites them in the rear.
The one thing I really liked bittorrent for was older US cartoons. Between the various channels hosted on irc.dejatoons.net, they accounted for at least 2/3rds of all cartoon torrents, and were always good quality. The IRC network still works, but fserves just aren't very easy for bulk downloads.
'grey' torrent trackers are just about impossible to find. By grey I mean trackers for things like TV shows which most people actually think are legal to download if not given a primer on copyright law. Many such trackers were shut down about a year ago, and replacements have only sprung up for the standard adult male fare.
I've never been into movies or porn, which seems to make up the bulk of the current torrents. I also have no need for bootleg software, running Linux, though I do get my distros via bittorrent.
It is a capitalist fanboy term, but I'm turning it around here (its typical use is to argue in favor of economic imperialism and free trade - and properly applied it is true, but free trade is generally a code word for 'privatization' and adopting US style laws as opposed to bilateral tariff and subsidy eliminations).
What makes it doubly funny is that P2P is essentially creating a de facto free market out of what is a highly monopolisic market. The most efficient price for a society to impose on a good or service is the marginal cost of production, which in the case of P2P is generally a few pennies per work. Monopolies destroy wealth by setting prices well above this point and sacrificing sales to extract higher profits. For media, the price averages about 100 times above the free market price and makes the wealth destruction of Standard Oil look like peanuts. In non-economic terms, monopolistic controls are the main thing preventing common people having access to the world's collective store of media, which would have positive effects throughout the economy, would increase the luxuries available to common people, would save about a billion hours a year in wasted labor, will increase the ability of authors to get distributed, and would lightly reduce pollution and ecological damage all in a single stroke.
Google just took a year or two from it becoming a big business to doing shady stuff. They're at the forefront of a lot of data mining efforts and they bend over backwards for countries like China, and I consider that to qualify as "evil big business." The only reason I still use them is that all of the search engines stink ethically, and Google at least gives a clean interface and good search results. Google probably had some overlap because it grew so rapidly. In under 5 years it went from a two person operation to one of the 500 most valuable corporations in the world. Give google time and they will either be bought out by another media firm, or they will become one of them.
Good luck getting the energy. Carbon loves its oxygen, and you'll have to rip them apart using a lot of electricity. You'll need several times the energy you got burning the coal in the first place. You'll also want to hydrate your carbon to turn it into petrochemicals instead of graphite, as the first can cause coal fires when stuffed under the earth. That requires electrolyzing hydrogen, which also takes plenty of energy.
Maybe redoubling our efforts on fusion technology and energy conservation might not be such a bad idea.
The effect is marginal. A tenth of a degree centigrade or so last I read. At the current time, it has peaked and the sun is now reducing its output, with a similar drop in heat over the next 30 years or so. The temperature graphs just show an accelerating warming over the last 10 years, so apparently the sun is getting overwhelmed by domestic factors. Remember that we do live in orbit around one of the most stable class of stars in the universe. If the sun had too much influence on climate, life would not been able to become very advanced.
You are right that the direct energy of combustion would have only minimal effects (though we have used enough energy to seperate the fresh from the bracking water, if we were able to concentrate all the energy across time and space of human history into the North Atlantic in a single moment). All known oil reserves only add up to about 1 day's worth of sunlight.
However, greenhouse gases work by trapping natural heat, not through the energy of combustion. They work much like a catalyst, not getting used up in the process. Much like a blanket or a greenhouse is not consumed in keeping things warm, greenhouse gases do not get consumed in the process of warming Earth. The gas equivalent of a millimetre-thick dry-ice blanket around the Earth is about all it takes to cause substantial global warming. If you do the math, you'll find that the amount of CO2 we've spewed is several times larger than enough to account for the warming observed, and in fact, scientists are curious as to why there hasn't been more warming that has been observed. (current theories are that the ocean is acting as a buffer, both for CO2 and as a thermal buffer).
There is a chemical that reduces global warming. In fact, there's a whole family of them, better known as petrocarbons and coal. The more coal and petrocarbons the world synthesizes from CO2, the less global warming. Not only that, but when pumped into the proper geological formations (empty oil well work well), petrochemicals, particularly heavier oils and tars, tend to stay underground and out of the atmosphere over geological time scales.
Granted, all reactions that I know of to sythesize petrocarbons from CO2 require either lots of energy or lots of hydrogen (which takes a lot of energy to electrolyze from water). This only makes sense as the reverse reaction petrol + O2 -> H20 + CO2 is highly exothermic.
This isn't a quick fix, but it means that with enough power available to use, global warming can be reversed (much more likely to happen sooner rather than later if decent money and scientists were put into researching solar and fusion, rather than the major focus on oil, coal, and fission research that is occuring these days [this is for the US, I don't know what the rest of the world is researching]).
If that is the case, then at least US libel laws are some of the most lenient in the world. Unlike our laws on most other things, I consider our libel system to actually be well balanced.
If you want to fear US laws, then go after stuff like patent law and copyright law, where the US is crippling the world economy in order to try to maintain its empire (I believe we will lose our empire soon much like Europe lost theirs in the 1960s, but that's a topic onto itself).
You didn't answer my question. Why can't I legally make a device to repel old people and keep them out of my store (or nightclub) but I can make a device to keep young people (and myself) out of my shop?
The nightclub wouldn't have to resort to dirty looks if it could legally card anyone who looked like they might possibly be over 45.
They apparently don't take 'every' and 'maximum market value' very seriously. If they were interested in that, the least they could do is list it with a reputable real estate company and sell conservatively (it should be priced so that it will take several months on the market to sell).
In practice, the property is generally sold at auction, and unlike Ebay auctions, these auctions generally close at a substantial discount to real market value. Various factors like buyers not being able to make a detailed assessment of the property, the buyers knowing that the property must be sold that day, that bidding will just reduce their profits, various question marks over why the property foreclosed [sometimes debtors walk away from a property when there is something very wrong with it - say a chemical spill or drug dealing - and they feel the loan is worth more than the property], and general corruption and old boys club stuff reduce the selling price to well under maximum market value.
In practice, the bank just wants its principal back, and it wants it as soon as possible, and the law is quite toothless (like most laws when it regards well monied interests).
Considering Mature is 17+ and AO is 18+, M isn't very meaningful.
I am opposed to this NIMF, but more on free speech grounds. Adults are effected by censorship and ratings too, and children should have limited free speech rights (only parents or schools should be able to abridge them, and only when they are with their parents or at school respectively - doing otherwise would cause too many problems). Likewise, I am just as opposed to ESRB. They are not only a censorship board, but a private and unaccountable trust that has monopoly powers. Just as a government run censorship/rating trust would be very bad, I cannot see how a private run censorship trust is any better. One cannot even vote the ESRB out of office.
While I do believe that some content can be harmful, my list is going to be very different from NIMFs (personally, I find movie violence, particularly when matched with a distorted and patriotic vision of war or authority [say, Birth of a Nation or Pearl Harbor], as patently offensive while I could care less about cartoon violence, nudity, and historically accurate violence [say, the violence contained in Battleship Potempkin or in your average History Channel documentary]). Other people might be appalled at nudity but feel that instilling violence is good (I personally know at least two people who believe that violent video games and TV makes their kids stronger and discourages or bans the playing of girly or kiddie games or TV by their sons). Yet other people might believe that historically accurate violence is okay, but would claim that Birth of a Nation is accurate while Battleship Potempkin is commie propoganda.
Since the ratings are by necessity going to be political and going to differ among people, everything should be allowed. Parents should be responsible over younger children. They can make case-by-case decisions about what to buy for their kids, and going by solely a rating is really an abdication of responsibility as the back of the software box generally provides far more detailed information on the genre/style of the content. For everyone else, who are generally considered responsible enough to be accountable for their own actions, they should have access to whatever material they choose and no party, public or private, should be able to collude to marginalize or ban certain types of works.
Alcohol and cigarettes are fine to age restrict as they cause harm, always to the drug user, and sometimes to other people. They also do not contain political or informational content. I would also be in favor of a phase out of those poisons, by banning them from being advertised, substantial taxation, and education and rehab.
But movies? They're essentially identical to video games from a civil liberties point of view.
You said slightly over 10 years while my number is under. I'm guessing that you used annual compounding or you heard the number from a financial presentation (finance has some love for non-continuous compounding, despite it being a tedious chore to compute, especially when non-equal periods are used, like the calander month). I hear that 7% is almost a doubling every 10 years figure so often that I wanted to clarify things.
If Verisign implements a 7% hike once a year, then the number you gave will be correct, but in the worst case, Verisign can raise prices continuously at a 7% APR and will bring the doubling time under 10 years.
Continuous compounding is so much simpler because many nice mathematical properties can be used. One can solve it using a simple integral (d-balance/d-time = balance * rate), which when solved gives us the PERT formula. Normal compounding just isn't very intuitive and requires bookkeeping to keep track to accrued (and non-interest bearing) balances from interest bearing balances.
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A few hours of envelope stuffing sure adds up fast. If your time is worth $50 an hour, then if you spend 6 hours getting your rebates you could buy that stupid computer and Wal-Mart in cash and be done with it.
I've spent 2-3 hours over the course of about 6 months getting one of my rebates. In my life, I've filed 3 rebates and gotten 2 paid. To get them, I spent about 45 minutes making photocopies (4 trips to the library to make photocopies - the forth trip was because I actually had to send them an extra copy), about 2-3 hours on the phone (mostly on hold), another 45 minutes for 4 trips to the post office, and an hour or two filling them out. The extra complexity in my accounting wasn't nice either. (I like to have a nice breakdown of my income and cashflow, and rebates generate a lot of entries, since they fall under accounts receivable and I have to make a provision that some rebates will never be paid - according to my limited experience 33% of rebates receivable less than 8 months outstanding and 100% of rebates over 8 months outstanding seems reasonable). And finally I have to cash the check when it finally does come in (once again, a trip to the bank).
Net result: I make more money working at my job than filing rebates, and my work isn't as tedious either. To that end, I've decided never to bother with a rebate again. Giving away personal info and getting even more junk mail while getting paid around minimum wage for work that isn't very fun at all is a raw deal.
It shouldn't matter whose fault it is. That's for lawyers to decide.
What Google should do is immediately patch their software to block that attack, and if an attack does get into the wild, shut down their service until it is patched. In the future, maybe not integrating with IE would help.
Plenty of US politicians are racist and get away with it. The terminology is different, but it's hard to find a politician who treats Arabs, Persians, and followers of Mohammed as equals to Caucasians and followers of Christ. A quick check of Guantamano Bay and our behaviour in Iraq will attest to that and it would be political suicide for politicians to attack those policies, particularly with regard to Palestine.
We might not pay mon-and-pop farmers $40 a day to keep cows, but we match France's agricultural subsidies with our Agricultural Adjustment Act and massive ethanol subsidies. At least the French spread the wealth around, generally subsidizing small farmers whereas we target giant agribusiness with our largesse.
Plenty of French people consider France to be an ethnicity too (at least once you exclude the Algerians and the Jews).
Within my family, the biggest bigots are all from my French side, so I speak from experience. I fear what will happen once Le Pen gets into power (and I feel that he or a similar type of person will, seeing how effectively the corporations and media are playing their cards).
French people have no hate of Linux. There are even several French distros available for those Frenchmen who cannot stand to buy US products. The adoption rate might not be as high as in Sweden or Brazil, but it beats the USs. Any Linux opposition in the country can generally be blamed on the right wing, big media friendly government.
The US, on the other hand, has neither much government support or private support of open source software. We're down there with India in terms of open source contributions per trained programmer. Our federal government is in bed with Microsoft, and buy american sentiment can only help Microsoft whereas it would hurt in other countries. A few local governments might try to push for non-Microsoft products (all in blue states as far as I know), but many more agencies write specs that require the use the MS Office and MS Windows.
I'll eat my words about the US supporting OSS when the US releases Red, White, and Blue Linux to compete with China's Red Flag Linux.
Doing so would violate the existing GPL and the French would just respond by charging you added-value tax.
The French have a very strong domestic media lobby and they do have a very politically influential film industry. The only reason it's still alive is because of massive governmnet subsidies (about 50% of an average film's production costs) and laws very friendly to them.
I'm saddened, but not shocked, to hear this come out of France. After all, France has never been a bastion of free speech or independant media (though they love to push their culture around, much like the large belligerent country on the other side of the pond that I reside in).
That's exactly what I thought halfway throught your post. Needless to say, it's better to stick to an acronym that doesn't already have a common meaning.
Gator's more in-depth tracking can get better clicking rates. The information their program gleams is in addition to the website's adds.
If their software figures out that you're middle class and are a big spender (very likely if it intercepts at least 10 unique credit card numbers from your particular copy of their spyware), then it could put up a "no payments until 2007" ad for the website. You're also a good target for Ponzi schemes and Nigerian scams. If it never sees a single credit card number but you visit shopping sites, then it might put up an ad touting how secure the vendor's system is or that the vendor will accept checks/money orders. If it notices that your root password or your bank account password is in a dictionary or is = 3 letters long, then it won't bother showing ads touting security, since obviously you could care less about it. However, if the passwords are for Swiss banks (and you are not from a Swiss IP), then you're an easy sell of secretive banking and tax evasion services.
The following is lawsuit-bot bait:
claria spyware gator claria spyware gator spyware spyware spyware spyware
Why must contracts be all-powerful. Couldn't the government seriously limit copyright and idea contracts so that they cannot be used to add additional restrictions beyond those copyright/patents provide (thus negating virtually all shrink-wrap licenses, though the GPL and BSD license would still be valid).
As far as 'starving artists' go, then feed them and their egos directly. Science and art are places where government funding and charity are exceedingly efficient (often over 10x as efficient as private enterprise so long as the results of the research are public domain) at converting money to research. Creating a culture that respects science and learning (like many East Asian cultures) will also help scientific advancement - I personally find it hard to believe that society considers sports players and celebrities to be heroes and legends considering that they're playing a game, do not contribute to human welfare and probably lead to a collective dumbing of our nation.
From my experience, I would estimate their loss of sales from boycotts at around 5 to 10%. Working in computer support for a high school, my most common solution to a DRMed CD or downloaded music (which the teachers assumed could be used like a normal CD) was to download a copy off of P2P (using my home connection connected via ssh - the school connection has HTTP quite heavily censored and many ports are blocked and the bandwidth is too choked for very agressive downloading) and burn them a redbook compliant CD, which they could then use for their classes. I really doubt that any of them has bought another internet download after being told it was done intentionally and after having their lesson hampered by not having their CD play on the school's equipment or by not being able to access their data from the school computer (some download services apparently restrict the downloads/streaming to a single machine - it's not our connection or firewall).
We usually get the job done in under an hour when there are no pressing duties, so the teacher can often have the material for their next class.
Maybe younger people might not care so much, but older adults are generally shocked and none too happy when the DRM bites them in the rear.
The civil rights act.
The one thing I really liked bittorrent for was older US cartoons. Between the various channels hosted on irc.dejatoons.net, they accounted for at least 2/3rds of all cartoon torrents, and were always good quality. The IRC network still works, but fserves just aren't very easy for bulk downloads.
'grey' torrent trackers are just about impossible to find. By grey I mean trackers for things like TV shows which most people actually think are legal to download if not given a primer on copyright law. Many such trackers were shut down about a year ago, and replacements have only sprung up for the standard adult male fare.
I've never been into movies or porn, which seems to make up the bulk of the current torrents. I also have no need for bootleg software, running Linux, though I do get my distros via bittorrent.
It is a capitalist fanboy term, but I'm turning it around here (its typical use is to argue in favor of economic imperialism and free trade - and properly applied it is true, but free trade is generally a code word for 'privatization' and adopting US style laws as opposed to bilateral tariff and subsidy eliminations).
What makes it doubly funny is that P2P is essentially creating a de facto free market out of what is a highly monopolisic market. The most efficient price for a society to impose on a good or service is the marginal cost of production, which in the case of P2P is generally a few pennies per work. Monopolies destroy wealth by setting prices well above this point and sacrificing sales to extract higher profits. For media, the price averages about 100 times above the free market price and makes the wealth destruction of Standard Oil look like peanuts. In non-economic terms, monopolistic controls are the main thing preventing common people having access to the world's collective store of media, which would have positive effects throughout the economy, would increase the luxuries available to common people, would save about a billion hours a year in wasted labor, will increase the ability of authors to get distributed, and would lightly reduce pollution and ecological damage all in a single stroke.
If that's not wealth creation, then what is?
Google just took a year or two from it becoming a big business to doing shady stuff. They're at the forefront of a lot of data mining efforts and they bend over backwards for countries like China, and I consider that to qualify as "evil big business." The only reason I still use them is that all of the search engines stink ethically, and Google at least gives a clean interface and good search results. Google probably had some overlap because it grew so rapidly. In under 5 years it went from a two person operation to one of the 500 most valuable corporations in the world. Give google time and they will either be bought out by another media firm, or they will become one of them.
It hasn't. Bittorrent taken a bit hit, but other networks have taken up the slack. As of a few months ago, Emule/Edonkey was the number one system.
It's still probably the greatest source of wealth creation on internet, and definitely is the greatest source of traffic.
Good luck getting the energy. Carbon loves its oxygen, and you'll have to rip them apart using a lot of electricity. You'll need several times the energy you got burning the coal in the first place. You'll also want to hydrate your carbon to turn it into petrochemicals instead of graphite, as the first can cause coal fires when stuffed under the earth. That requires electrolyzing hydrogen, which also takes plenty of energy.
Maybe redoubling our efforts on fusion technology and energy conservation might not be such a bad idea.
The effect is marginal. A tenth of a degree centigrade or so last I read. At the current time, it has peaked and the sun is now reducing its output, with a similar drop in heat over the next 30 years or so. The temperature graphs just show an accelerating warming over the last 10 years, so apparently the sun is getting overwhelmed by domestic factors. Remember that we do live in orbit around one of the most stable class of stars in the universe. If the sun had too much influence on climate, life would not been able to become very advanced.
You are right that the direct energy of combustion would have only minimal effects (though we have used enough energy to seperate the fresh from the bracking water, if we were able to concentrate all the energy across time and space of human history into the North Atlantic in a single moment). All known oil reserves only add up to about 1 day's worth of sunlight.
However, greenhouse gases work by trapping natural heat, not through the energy of combustion. They work much like a catalyst, not getting used up in the process. Much like a blanket or a greenhouse is not consumed in keeping things warm, greenhouse gases do not get consumed in the process of warming Earth. The gas equivalent of a millimetre-thick dry-ice blanket around the Earth is about all it takes to cause substantial global warming. If you do the math, you'll find that the amount of CO2 we've spewed is several times larger than enough to account for the warming observed, and in fact, scientists are curious as to why there hasn't been more warming that has been observed. (current theories are that the ocean is acting as a buffer, both for CO2 and as a thermal buffer).
There is a chemical that reduces global warming. In fact, there's a whole family of them, better known as petrocarbons and coal. The more coal and petrocarbons the world synthesizes from CO2, the less global warming. Not only that, but when pumped into the proper geological formations (empty oil well work well), petrochemicals, particularly heavier oils and tars, tend to stay underground and out of the atmosphere over geological time scales.
Granted, all reactions that I know of to sythesize petrocarbons from CO2 require either lots of energy or lots of hydrogen (which takes a lot of energy to electrolyze from water). This only makes sense as the reverse reaction petrol + O2 -> H20 + CO2 is highly exothermic.
This isn't a quick fix, but it means that with enough power available to use, global warming can be reversed (much more likely to happen sooner rather than later if decent money and scientists were put into researching solar and fusion, rather than the major focus on oil, coal, and fission research that is occuring these days [this is for the US, I don't know what the rest of the world is researching]).
If that is the case, then at least US libel laws are some of the most lenient in the world. Unlike our laws on most other things, I consider our libel system to actually be well balanced.
If you want to fear US laws, then go after stuff like patent law and copyright law, where the US is crippling the world economy in order to try to maintain its empire (I believe we will lose our empire soon much like Europe lost theirs in the 1960s, but that's a topic onto itself).
You didn't answer my question. Why can't I legally make a device to repel old people and keep them out of my store (or nightclub) but I can make a device to keep young people (and myself) out of my shop?
The nightclub wouldn't have to resort to dirty looks if it could legally card anyone who looked like they might possibly be over 45.
They apparently don't take 'every' and 'maximum market value' very seriously. If they were interested in that, the least they could do is list it with a reputable real estate company and sell conservatively (it should be priced so that it will take several months on the market to sell).
In practice, the property is generally sold at auction, and unlike Ebay auctions, these auctions generally close at a substantial discount to real market value. Various factors like buyers not being able to make a detailed assessment of the property, the buyers knowing that the property must be sold that day, that bidding will just reduce their profits, various question marks over why the property foreclosed [sometimes debtors walk away from a property when there is something very wrong with it - say a chemical spill or drug dealing - and they feel the loan is worth more than the property], and general corruption and old boys club stuff reduce the selling price to well under maximum market value.
In practice, the bank just wants its principal back, and it wants it as soon as possible, and the law is quite toothless (like most laws when it regards well monied interests).
Considering Mature is 17+ and AO is 18+, M isn't very meaningful.
I am opposed to this NIMF, but more on free speech grounds. Adults are effected by censorship and ratings too, and children should have limited free speech rights (only parents or schools should be able to abridge them, and only when they are with their parents or at school respectively - doing otherwise would cause too many problems). Likewise, I am just as opposed to ESRB. They are not only a censorship board, but a private and unaccountable trust that has monopoly powers. Just as a government run censorship/rating trust would be very bad, I cannot see how a private run censorship trust is any better. One cannot even vote the ESRB out of office.
While I do believe that some content can be harmful, my list is going to be very different from NIMFs (personally, I find movie violence, particularly when matched with a distorted and patriotic vision of war or authority [say, Birth of a Nation or Pearl Harbor], as patently offensive while I could care less about cartoon violence, nudity, and historically accurate violence [say, the violence contained in Battleship Potempkin or in your average History Channel documentary]). Other people might be appalled at nudity but feel that instilling violence is good (I personally know at least two people who believe that violent video games and TV makes their kids stronger and discourages or bans the playing of girly or kiddie games or TV by their sons). Yet other people might believe that historically accurate violence is okay, but would claim that Birth of a Nation is accurate while Battleship Potempkin is commie propoganda.
Since the ratings are by necessity going to be political and going to differ among people, everything should be allowed. Parents should be responsible over younger children. They can make case-by-case decisions about what to buy for their kids, and going by solely a rating is really an abdication of responsibility as the back of the software box generally provides far more detailed information on the genre/style of the content. For everyone else, who are generally considered responsible enough to be accountable for their own actions, they should have access to whatever material they choose and no party, public or private, should be able to collude to marginalize or ban certain types of works.
Alcohol and cigarettes are fine to age restrict as they cause harm, always to the drug user, and sometimes to other people. They also do not contain political or informational content. I would also be in favor of a phase out of those poisons, by banning them from being advertised, substantial taxation, and education and rehab.
But movies? They're essentially identical to video games from a civil liberties point of view.
You said slightly over 10 years while my number is under. I'm guessing that you used annual compounding or you heard the number from a financial presentation (finance has some love for non-continuous compounding, despite it being a tedious chore to compute, especially when non-equal periods are used, like the calander month). I hear that 7% is almost a doubling every 10 years figure so often that I wanted to clarify things.
If Verisign implements a 7% hike once a year, then the number you gave will be correct, but in the worst case, Verisign can raise prices continuously at a 7% APR and will bring the doubling time under 10 years.
Continuous compounding is so much simpler because many nice mathematical properties can be used. One can solve it using a simple integral (d-balance/d-time = balance * rate), which when solved gives us the PERT formula. Normal compounding just isn't very intuitive and requires bookkeeping to keep track to accrued (and non-interest bearing) balances from interest bearing balances.