I was hoping to hear some interesting counterarguments to the trend from Linux to Windows. Instead the article contains only a couple anecdotal examples with no logic to support the conclusions.
The first company had been using a Linux-based ISP for 9 years, but the ISP was badly managed, which is somehow the fault of Linux, so they decided to switch to Windows. Two years ago they rehosted their stuff under Windows Server 2003 (hmm...), and have never had an outage since. They had also been upset that the original ISP only offered Oracle for a database, which again was somehow the fault of Linux.
The other example is just as spurious. A resort company has a badly written e-commerce package, which failed in the middle of a big sale due to a bug in the transaction code. So, they ditched Linux for Windows. The owner also "had doubts about the security... of the system [under Linux]" but these are never elaborated upon futher, nor is his reaction to the slew of recent Windows security vulnerabilities covered.
So, Company A has a badly managed ISP and changes providers, and Company B rewrites a buggy e-commerce package which they rewrite. Linux is blamed for the original shortcomings, and the use of Windows after correcting the root problem is credited with solving everything.
Okay, so there's a bunch of quotes from previous United States Presidents about how the president can only send troops to war if Congress has approved such military action.
Exactly as they did in the case of Iraq.
As one Senator in particular put it, in a September 2002 New York times op-ed, "If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement... even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act."
On October 11, that Senator voted to authorize military action in Iraq. A majority of his colleagues on Capitol Hill did likewise, and Congress passed the measure authorizing Bush to use military force in Iraq. The Constitutional process was followed, just as the elder statesmen in the article would have had it.
As for the Senator quoted above, he later began to wildly flip-flop on the issue, and several others, in an attempt to stake out political ground for a Presidential bid. His name is John Kerry.
What is your opinion of the proposal in Colorado to award electoral votes proportionally to the popular vote? It would seem this could potentially be a great benefit to your party, firstly by making the state uninteresting to the Democrats and Republicans (it would only have one or two electoral votes in play instead of nine), and also by allowing third parties to win an electoral vote with only 11% of a state rather than needing a plurality across a state (or district). How signifigant would such a change be for your party? Of other changes to the voting system that have been proposed, such as approval voting, Borda counts, etc. which would you favor to improve the viability of third parties?
The candidates shall not address each other with proposed pledges.
I believe this refers to the strategy of trying to trap the other candidate into making on-the-spot promises. "Will you go on record as guaranteeing the American people that if elected you would {withdraw from Iraq within a week | never raise taxes | end illiteracy | whatever}?" The idea being that such questions shift the debate from a discussion of the issues to a bunch of attempts to get the other guy to commit to spur-of-the-moment promises that you hope will come back to haunt him later.
People outside the U.S. have a different agenda. What they want has no correlation to what is best for the citizens of the United States. For instance, someone with a dislike of America might favor a weak, incompetent candidate in the hopes that he might diminish America's position in the world. Likewise, Americans might favor a candidate for the French presidency who would be a yes-man and kowtow to all of the United States' policies. A French voter, however, would likely not share this priority.
Your own analogy is flawed as well. In the tiger rock situation, the presence of tigers has not been established, so keeping them away is of questionable value. This comparison would work if, say, claimed his defense policies were keeping the U.S. from being invaded by space aliens.
The desire of terrorists to attack the U.S. however, has been well demonstrated. Under the administration preceeding Bush, they made attacks, such as the earlier one on the WTC. While you might postulate that after 9/11, they got bored and decided to take up needlepoint instead, a more plausable explanation would be that the disbanding of the Taliban and arrests of many Al-Qaeda leaders had something to do with the lack of an encore.
So, to correct the tiger rock analogy: a tiger attacks you and mauls your arm. You hit it on the head with a big rock, and it staggers off. The wounded tiger doesn't attack you again, although later on you see it trying to sneak up on you and branish the rock, at which point it retreats. Is the tiger rock still a placebo?
This has been a very ill-conceived and widely misunderstood law, and I will be glad to see it go.
The affected weapons are mostly ones that outwardly resemble military firearms, while having nowhere near the firepower. Rather than firing bursts of ammunition like their fully-automatic counterparts, the so-called assault rifles fire one shot at a time, with less powerful ammunition than a hunting rifle. Pistols affected by this law generally had outward designs similar to fully-automatic submachine guns, but had only the same caliber and rate of fire as an ordinary handgun - with much bulkier size and weight.
A criminal would be an idiot to choose a firearm from the affected class of firearms. They would use an ordinary handgun, or if they really sought something more powerful as defenders of the legislation claim, they would smuggle in some firearms that actually WERE military grade instead of just superficially looking like it.
In practice, the only people affected by the law have been legitimate gun collectors, who disagree with the law but struggle to comply with it. What shape grips constitute a "conspicuous pistol grip"? When the law requires a barrel attachment to be "permanently affixed", do you weld it, super-glue it on, pin it, use lock-tight? Interpret the subjective phrases differently than someone at the ATF, and you become a felon.
The other major provision was a limitation on ammunition magazines ("clips") to 10 rounds. Much like 640k of memory, this might seem to be enough for anybody. But, given that those who are most in the know about defending oneself in life and death situations (police, military, federal agents, etc.) generally carry larger magazines than this themselves, even with superior training to worry less about missing their target, perhaps there is something to be said for having a couple extra rounds just in case.
The other flaw with the 10 round limit is that it was based on the arbitrary assumption that no civilian would ever need more than this to protect themself, but provided no guarantee to back this up. Why did the law not include language guaranteeing that before any civilian had fired the 10th shot in a life-and-death situation, police would had arrived on the scene and taken their attacker into custody?
"...in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
Hollywood must be quite the bastion of conservatism, they way the MPAA is fighting for stronger IP laws. And it is also interesting to hear that the Right has strong conservatives like Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) and Bill Clinton (signer of DMCA and Copyright Extention Act) on their side.
Interesting theory, but no. On this issue, there are good guys and bad guys on both side of the aisle, and which position they take has more to do with who they represent and where they get their funding than how conservative or liberal they are.
If the University is already providing wireless internet access, why on earth are the students paying for private access via either cable or DSL? Too much money to burn?
Perhaps the students want to use their computers for gaming, pr0n, running servers, p2p sharing, or other activities that universities tend to frown upon people using their academic networks for. This university in particular sounds a bit capricious in their policies, and it's not hard to see why students would want Internet access that was not subject to the university's whims.
You are correct in your assertion that a lot of people who in the past haven't been interested in voting will be doing so this time around, but fail to take into account the biggest factor between this election and the last: September 11.
People who in the past didn't have much interest in politics or world events have seen that these things can have an all-too direct effect on their lives. Bush has provided strong, decisive leadership in difficult times. If anything, his critics may accuse him of being too bold, widening the war on terror into Iraq. But this is still more comforting than an indecisive, weak-willed leader who stands for nothing except flip-flopping to match whichever way the latest political winds are blowing.
Bush has provided effective leadership at a time when it was desperately needed. He did not cave in like Spain in the wake of an attack, and Al-Qaeda has been unable to mount any sort of follow-up. People want that sort of security, not the uncertainty of Kerry, and that is what many of them are going to the polls to vote for.
If you get a domain wrong, the god damn browser should take you to google or whatever search engine you specified under some settings within your browser.
Yes, the browser should be able to do something like what you describe. MSIE does, and I'm pretty sure somewhere out there are Mozilla/Firefox extensions to do the same thing. It would be even better if the browser can do it in a configurable way - let you pick the search engine, let you turn the feature off if you want to see the error messages, and so on.
The big problem with SiteFinder is it's NOT the browser taking you to a search engine, it's a broken DNS implementation doing it. Unlike browsers, you can't just pick one that works the way you want it to. And if you happen to be isomg the net for something other than interactively surfing the Web, VeriSign's ploy can hurt you. Rather than that script giving you some kind of "host not found" if you have a typo, it decides VeriSign's server is the machine it's looking for.
Certainly a lot more than Kerry. Look for science related articles on both of their campaign sites. Kerry's says nothing at all of substance. The first point he talks about is how he would use tax breaks to "create a business environment that encourages investment". Imagine how wild the anti-business trolls would go if Bush lead off that way. Kerry's science and technology platforms highlight how he would bring broadband to "every corner of America". Like I use my 1.5mbps for conducting scientific experiments. Then you have the total fluff like "invest in the breakthroughs of tomorrow" and "create the industries and jobs of the future" without providing any ideas about what Kerry thinks those might be.
Then look at Bush's site. He actually talks about his record, with facts and numbers. Contrast this to how quiet Kerry is about his record in the Senate. Bush's site points out how the administration has raised federal funding for research and development by 44 percent to the highest percentage of discretionary spending since Apollo. And unlike Kerry, Bush mentions specific areas: space exploration, nanotechnology, hydrogen power, fusion, etc.
Please correct me if you have counterexamples, but it seems to me Kerry's entire science platform is insubstantial fluff, plus the "I'm going to support stem cell research to win points with the pro-abortion crowd" plank.
Each degree Celsius equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. The systems are also define zero degrees at different points, 32 degrees Fahrenheit apart. Thus, if it is 30 degrees Fahrenheit outside, it is (30 - 32) / 1.8 = -1.11111 degrees Celsius.
However, for relative temperatures, only the first sentence of the above matters: Each degree Celsius equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus this device cools things by 30 / 1.8 = 16.67 degrees Celsius.
If you're still not convinced, consider this. Say the fan in my computer breaks, and the CPU is 90 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it should be. Under your conversion value, in Celsius it has cooled down by 3.33 degrees.
Because you, being a liberal, like the decision, you automatically assume that conservatives will not. However while some issues draw lines strongly along partisan lines (abortion, death penalty, religious freedom, etc.), others, like copyright law or space exploration have no particular "liberal" or "conservative" stance. People weigh in more or less independently of party affiliation. Orrin Hatch, a Republican, gets it wrong on copyright, but then so did Bill Clinton when he signed the DMCA and Mickey Mouse Act. Likewise someone advocating IP reform might be equally likely to come from either party. One party, as you point out, has been accused of being "in favor of the corporations that support them", the other is known for being cozy with Hollywood, and therefore the MPAA.
So, nice try, but there is nothing anti-conservative about this ruling. In fact, being such a conservative, I applaud the decision. After all, the argument EFF presented here is the same one conservatives have been making for years in the gun debate: this technology has lots of legitimate uses so don't blame the maker because some people are using it to do illegal things.
Which actions are these that should be turning off Republicans? Pointing out some of the glaring inconsistencies and outright lies in Kerry's war record?
We are born to our position in society, and from there we have only the rights our leaders see fit to grant us.
I must disagree. Rights themselves exist regardless of the whims of one's leaders; they are inalienable. However, the set of rights you might actually be able to exercise are very much dependent on the leaders.
It might seem like a trivial distinction. Who cares if you still have rights if you are in no position to use them? Actually, it makes a big difference. If governments grant and take away rights at will, who can say if they are just or unjust in doing so? One could not claim something like slavery is wrong -- slaves have no rights, so nobody could possibly infringe on those rights.
On the other hand, if rights are an innate part of the human condition, one can easily discern good government from bad by looking at what rights people have that are being repressed. The goal then is to minimize the dichotomy between the rights people are born with and the rights they are actually free to exercise.
The European countries often give the U.S. the choice between undermining its own national interests, or doing what is best for the U.S. and being criticized for being unilateral, not caring about the international community, and so on. Consider the things some of our "closest allies" have asked the U.S. to do:
Leave Saddam Hussein in power. He was such a nice guy.
Sign the Kyoto protocol. This would be a big negative impact from a commerce/economic perspective, and of debatable environmental benefit. And yet, America began catching flak for not signing before ANY countries had done so.
Not to develop technology to shoot down deadly missiles, because it would require withdrawing from a treaty made with a no-longer-existant country in a different era.
Join the international tribunal. While the goals of the organization are lofty, it would be incompatible with America's de-facto position as the world's policeman, since trumped-up charges against American servicement would become a popular way of taking a swipe at the U.S.
End the death penalty. If Europe is so concerned about the well-being of America's mass murderers, maybe we should just send them all over there.
America is always being asked to do things that go against its own interests to appease the agendas of other nations. Bush resists this international peer pressure even more than usual for America, which has caused some to admire and others to detest him.
If Bush Jr really wanted to encourage the economy, a tax cut for the poor would have made a much better and longer lasting impact to many more people... He could have given people living on or near the povety line the opportunity to pick themselves up off the floor and make something of themselves. That would really help the economy. But instead he just gave the rich more of what they already have too much of.
It's been pointed out by other replies that the poor pay no taxes, so your argument that they should somehow pay less is illogical. Another fallacy here is that you break people up into "the poor" ("on or near the poverty line") and "the rich", who are "only a small percentage of the population", with these being the only social classes. You make your case based on a feudal social order (teeming masses of starving peasants, small number of wealthy elites, nothing in between). In America, however, the majority of people fall into the middle class, whom you have forgotten about completely. The middle class get money from Bush's tax cuts, and can definitely put it to good use for exactly the types of things you say a tax cut should go for (pay off debts, better education, more time with kids, start a business). Once you factor them in, the tax cuts makes more sense.
Don't make people wander through a phone-tree maze to talk to a human. "0" at any point should get you to a human or at least in the line for one. How good this on-hold music is doesn't matter much if it takes me 10 minutes to figure out which fourth-level-down option I need to get in the queue, because by then I'll already be irritated anyway.
Another oh-hold annoyance: systems that make you type in your phone number, customer id, or whatever, and then as soon as you get through to a human, the first thing they ask for is this same piece of information. Is the computer incapable of storing this information? Was there any point in me typing it in in the first place?
Anyway, avoid those and your phone system will be less aggrivating. Also, parent poster's idea about quiet banjo music is a good one.
On a less pithy note, would it be that hard for EMI to make an agreement with Apple such that, if you have the CD in the drive, you can buy the iTunes version for free?
So what happens to the rest of the customers (the majority) whose MP3 players are not iPods?
If I owned an ISP and someone reported that there was a problem with copyrighted material on my equipment, I would take the stuff down too. How much time should I spend seeing if the stuff is a problem. I guestimate 0.
It's a good thing not everyone shares your philosophy. All Darl McBride would have to do is call up a few backbone providers and tell them "redhat.com / gentoo.org / kernel.org / whatever is infringing on my copyrighted IP, pull them off the Net please." No substantiation or evidence required.
This has given me an idea for my next evil ploy for world domination:
Develop highly contageous but otherwise harmless airborne bacterial stain
Patent its genetic sequence
Release into the wild
Sit back and collect royalty payments from everyone using my technology
*insane cackling*
Running out of gas
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 2, Insightful
At a 1930's World Fair, there was a "robot" answering people's questions about what life in the future would be like. One of the questions was when we would run out of fossil fuels. This is a topic people have been worried about for a long time.
Thus far, all the predictions of doom have been averted. New techniques for locating oil reserves, and tapping resources in previously unreachable places, through technologies like offshore platforms, have allowed new supplies to keep up with demand.
Of course, the total amount of fossil fuel is finite, even if petroleum engineers become clever enough to locate and extract every drop, that won't keep the world running forever. But much like with Moore's law, new advances have kept us from running into a brick wall so far, and will continue to at least for the near future.
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With a title like that is sounds like it should be an inside look at the Clinton White House...
I was hoping to hear some interesting counterarguments to the trend from Linux to Windows. Instead the article contains only a couple anecdotal examples with no logic to support the conclusions.
The first company had been using a Linux-based ISP for 9 years, but the ISP was badly managed, which is somehow the fault of Linux, so they decided to switch to Windows. Two years ago they rehosted their stuff under Windows Server 2003 (hmm...), and have never had an outage since. They had also been upset that the original ISP only offered Oracle for a database, which again was somehow the fault of Linux.
The other example is just as spurious. A resort company has a badly written e-commerce package, which failed in the middle of a big sale due to a bug in the transaction code. So, they ditched Linux for Windows. The owner also "had doubts about the security ... of the system [under Linux]" but these are never elaborated upon futher, nor is his reaction to the slew of recent Windows security vulnerabilities covered.
So, Company A has a badly managed ISP and changes providers, and Company B rewrites a buggy e-commerce package which they rewrite. Linux is blamed for the original shortcomings, and the use of Windows after correcting the root problem is credited with solving everything.
Okay, so there's a bunch of quotes from previous United States Presidents about how the president can only send troops to war if Congress has approved such military action.
Exactly as they did in the case of Iraq.
As one Senator in particular put it, in a September 2002 New York times op-ed, "If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement... even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act."
On October 11, that Senator voted to authorize military action in Iraq. A majority of his colleagues on Capitol Hill did likewise, and Congress passed the measure authorizing Bush to use military force in Iraq. The Constitutional process was followed, just as the elder statesmen in the article would have had it.
As for the Senator quoted above, he later began to wildly flip-flop on the issue, and several others, in an attempt to stake out political ground for a Presidential bid. His name is John Kerry.
What is your opinion of the proposal in Colorado to award electoral votes proportionally to the popular vote? It would seem this could potentially be a great benefit to your party, firstly by making the state uninteresting to the Democrats and Republicans (it would only have one or two electoral votes in play instead of nine), and also by allowing third parties to win an electoral vote with only 11% of a state rather than needing a plurality across a state (or district). How signifigant would such a change be for your party? Of other changes to the voting system that have been proposed, such as approval voting, Borda counts, etc. which would you favor to improve the viability of third parties?
The candidates shall not address each other with proposed pledges.
I believe this refers to the strategy of trying to trap the other candidate into making on-the-spot promises. "Will you go on record as guaranteeing the American people that if elected you would {withdraw from Iraq within a week | never raise taxes | end illiteracy | whatever}?" The idea being that such questions shift the debate from a discussion of the issues to a bunch of attempts to get the other guy to commit to spur-of-the-moment promises that you hope will come back to haunt him later.
People outside the U.S. have a different agenda. What they want has no correlation to what is best for the citizens of the United States. For instance, someone with a dislike of America might favor a weak, incompetent candidate in the hopes that he might diminish America's position in the world. Likewise, Americans might favor a candidate for the French presidency who would be a yes-man and kowtow to all of the United States' policies. A French voter, however, would likely not share this priority.
Your own analogy is flawed as well. In the tiger rock situation, the presence of tigers has not been established, so keeping them away is of questionable value. This comparison would work if, say, claimed his defense policies were keeping the U.S. from being invaded by space aliens.
The desire of terrorists to attack the U.S. however, has been well demonstrated. Under the administration preceeding Bush, they made attacks, such as the earlier one on the WTC. While you might postulate that after 9/11, they got bored and decided to take up needlepoint instead, a more plausable explanation would be that the disbanding of the Taliban and arrests of many Al-Qaeda leaders had something to do with the lack of an encore.
So, to correct the tiger rock analogy: a tiger attacks you and mauls your arm. You hit it on the head with a big rock, and it staggers off. The wounded tiger doesn't attack you again, although later on you see it trying to sneak up on you and branish the rock, at which point it retreats. Is the tiger rock still a placebo?
This has been a very ill-conceived and widely misunderstood law, and I will be glad to see it go.
The affected weapons are mostly ones that outwardly resemble military firearms, while having nowhere near the firepower. Rather than firing bursts of ammunition like their fully-automatic counterparts, the so-called assault rifles fire one shot at a time, with less powerful ammunition than a hunting rifle. Pistols affected by this law generally had outward designs similar to fully-automatic submachine guns, but had only the same caliber and rate of fire as an ordinary handgun - with much bulkier size and weight.
A criminal would be an idiot to choose a firearm from the affected class of firearms. They would use an ordinary handgun, or if they really sought something more powerful as defenders of the legislation claim, they would smuggle in some firearms that actually WERE military grade instead of just superficially looking like it.
In practice, the only people affected by the law have been legitimate gun collectors, who disagree with the law but struggle to comply with it. What shape grips constitute a "conspicuous pistol grip"? When the law requires a barrel attachment to be "permanently affixed", do you weld it, super-glue it on, pin it, use lock-tight? Interpret the subjective phrases differently than someone at the ATF, and you become a felon.
The other major provision was a limitation on ammunition magazines ("clips") to 10 rounds. Much like 640k of memory, this might seem to be enough for anybody. But, given that those who are most in the know about defending oneself in life and death situations (police, military, federal agents, etc.) generally carry larger magazines than this themselves, even with superior training to worry less about missing their target, perhaps there is something to be said for having a couple extra rounds just in case.
The other flaw with the 10 round limit is that it was based on the arbitrary assumption that no civilian would ever need more than this to protect themself, but provided no guarantee to back this up. Why did the law not include language guaranteeing that before any civilian had fired the 10th shot in a life-and-death situation, police would had arrived on the scene and taken their attacker into custody?
"...in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
Hollywood must be quite the bastion of conservatism, they way the MPAA is fighting for stronger IP laws. And it is also interesting to hear that the Right has strong conservatives like Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) and Bill Clinton (signer of DMCA and Copyright Extention Act) on their side.
Interesting theory, but no. On this issue, there are good guys and bad guys on both side of the aisle, and which position they take has more to do with who they represent and where they get their funding than how conservative or liberal they are.
If the University is already providing wireless internet access, why on earth are the students paying for private access via either cable or DSL? Too much money to burn?
Perhaps the students want to use their computers for gaming, pr0n, running servers, p2p sharing, or other activities that universities tend to frown upon people using their academic networks for. This university in particular sounds a bit capricious in their policies, and it's not hard to see why students would want Internet access that was not subject to the university's whims.
You are correct in your assertion that a lot of people who in the past haven't been interested in voting will be doing so this time around, but fail to take into account the biggest factor between this election and the last: September 11.
People who in the past didn't have much interest in politics or world events have seen that these things can have an all-too direct effect on their lives. Bush has provided strong, decisive leadership in difficult times. If anything, his critics may accuse him of being too bold, widening the war on terror into Iraq. But this is still more comforting than an indecisive, weak-willed leader who stands for nothing except flip-flopping to match whichever way the latest political winds are blowing.
Bush has provided effective leadership at a time when it was desperately needed. He did not cave in like Spain in the wake of an attack, and Al-Qaeda has been unable to mount any sort of follow-up. People want that sort of security, not the uncertainty of Kerry, and that is what many of them are going to the polls to vote for.
If you get a domain wrong, the god damn browser should take you to google or whatever search engine you specified under some settings within your browser.
Yes, the browser should be able to do something like what you describe. MSIE does, and I'm pretty sure somewhere out there are Mozilla/Firefox extensions to do the same thing. It would be even better if the browser can do it in a configurable way - let you pick the search engine, let you turn the feature off if you want to see the error messages, and so on.
The big problem with SiteFinder is it's NOT the browser taking you to a search engine, it's a broken DNS implementation doing it. Unlike browsers, you can't just pick one that works the way you want it to. And if you happen to be isomg the net for something other than interactively surfing the Web, VeriSign's ploy can hurt you. Rather than that script giving you some kind of "host not found" if you have a typo, it decides VeriSign's server is the machine it's looking for.
Certainly a lot more than Kerry. Look for science related articles on both of their campaign sites. Kerry's says nothing at all of substance. The first point he talks about is how he would use tax breaks to "create a business environment that encourages investment". Imagine how wild the anti-business trolls would go if Bush lead off that way. Kerry's science and technology platforms highlight how he would bring broadband to "every corner of America". Like I use my 1.5mbps for conducting scientific experiments. Then you have the total fluff like "invest in the breakthroughs of tomorrow" and "create the industries and jobs of the future" without providing any ideas about what Kerry thinks those might be.
Then look at Bush's site. He actually talks about his record, with facts and numbers. Contrast this to how quiet Kerry is about his record in the Senate. Bush's site points out how the administration has raised federal funding for research and development by 44 percent to the highest percentage of discretionary spending since Apollo. And unlike Kerry, Bush mentions specific areas: space exploration, nanotechnology, hydrogen power, fusion, etc.
Please correct me if you have counterexamples, but it seems to me Kerry's entire science platform is insubstantial fluff, plus the "I'm going to support stem cell research to win points with the pro-abortion crowd" plank.
Each degree Celsius equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. The systems are also define zero degrees at different points, 32 degrees Fahrenheit apart. Thus, if it is 30 degrees Fahrenheit outside, it is (30 - 32) / 1.8 = -1.11111 degrees Celsius.
However, for relative temperatures, only the first sentence of the above matters: Each degree Celsius equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus this device cools things by 30 / 1.8 = 16.67 degrees Celsius.
If you're still not convinced, consider this. Say the fan in my computer breaks, and the CPU is 90 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it should be. Under your conversion value, in Celsius it has cooled down by 3.33 degrees.
Because you, being a liberal, like the decision, you automatically assume that conservatives will not. However while some issues draw lines strongly along partisan lines (abortion, death penalty, religious freedom, etc.), others, like copyright law or space exploration have no particular "liberal" or "conservative" stance. People weigh in more or less independently of party affiliation. Orrin Hatch, a Republican, gets it wrong on copyright, but then so did Bill Clinton when he signed the DMCA and Mickey Mouse Act. Likewise someone advocating IP reform might be equally likely to come from either party. One party, as you point out, has been accused of being "in favor of the corporations that support them", the other is known for being cozy with Hollywood, and therefore the MPAA.
So, nice try, but there is nothing anti-conservative about this ruling. In fact, being such a conservative, I applaud the decision. After all, the argument EFF presented here is the same one conservatives have been making for years in the gun debate: this technology has lots of legitimate uses so don't blame the maker because some people are using it to do illegal things.
Which actions are these that should be turning off Republicans? Pointing out some of the glaring inconsistencies and outright lies in Kerry's war record?
We are born to our position in society, and from there we have only the rights our leaders see fit to grant us.
I must disagree. Rights themselves exist regardless of the whims of one's leaders; they are inalienable. However, the set of rights you might actually be able to exercise are very much dependent on the leaders.
It might seem like a trivial distinction. Who cares if you still have rights if you are in no position to use them? Actually, it makes a big difference. If governments grant and take away rights at will, who can say if they are just or unjust in doing so? One could not claim something like slavery is wrong -- slaves have no rights, so nobody could possibly infringe on those rights.
On the other hand, if rights are an innate part of the human condition, one can easily discern good government from bad by looking at what rights people have that are being repressed. The goal then is to minimize the dichotomy between the rights people are born with and the rights they are actually free to exercise.
You all have a clear choice this November.
Between the guy who helped pass the Patriot Act, and the one who signed it into law. How are they "starkly different" on this issue again?
The European countries often give the U.S. the choice between undermining its own national interests, or doing what is best for the U.S. and being criticized for being unilateral, not caring about the international community, and so on. Consider the things some of our "closest allies" have asked the U.S. to do:
Leave Saddam Hussein in power. He was such a nice guy.
Sign the Kyoto protocol. This would be a big negative impact from a commerce/economic perspective, and of debatable environmental benefit. And yet, America began catching flak for not signing before ANY countries had done so.
Not to develop technology to shoot down deadly missiles, because it would require withdrawing from a treaty made with a no-longer-existant country in a different era.
Join the international tribunal. While the goals of the organization are lofty, it would be incompatible with America's de-facto position as the world's policeman, since trumped-up charges against American servicement would become a popular way of taking a swipe at the U.S.
End the death penalty. If Europe is so concerned about the well-being of America's mass murderers, maybe we should just send them all over there.
America is always being asked to do things that go against its own interests to appease the agendas of other nations. Bush resists this international peer pressure even more than usual for America, which has caused some to admire and others to detest him.
If Bush Jr really wanted to encourage the economy, a tax cut for the poor would have made a much better and longer lasting impact to many more people... He could have given people living on or near the povety line the opportunity to pick themselves up off the floor and make something of themselves. That would really help the economy. But instead he just gave the rich more of what they already have too much of.
It's been pointed out by other replies that the poor pay no taxes, so your argument that they should somehow pay less is illogical. Another fallacy here is that you break people up into "the poor" ("on or near the poverty line") and "the rich", who are "only a small percentage of the population", with these being the only social classes. You make your case based on a feudal social order (teeming masses of starving peasants, small number of wealthy elites, nothing in between). In America, however, the majority of people fall into the middle class, whom you have forgotten about completely. The middle class get money from Bush's tax cuts, and can definitely put it to good use for exactly the types of things you say a tax cut should go for (pay off debts, better education, more time with kids, start a business). Once you factor them in, the tax cuts makes more sense.
I have a couple on-hold annoyances of my own:
Don't make people wander through a phone-tree maze to talk to a human. "0" at any point should get you to a human or at least in the line for one. How good this on-hold music is doesn't matter much if it takes me 10 minutes to figure out which fourth-level-down option I need to get in the queue, because by then I'll already be irritated anyway.
Another oh-hold annoyance: systems that make you type in your phone number, customer id, or whatever, and then as soon as you get through to a human, the first thing they ask for is this same piece of information. Is the computer incapable of storing this information? Was there any point in me typing it in in the first place?
Anyway, avoid those and your phone system will be less aggrivating. Also, parent poster's idea about quiet banjo music is a good one.
On a less pithy note, would it be that hard for EMI to make an agreement with Apple such that, if you have the CD in the drive, you can buy the iTunes version for free?
So what happens to the rest of the customers (the majority) whose MP3 players are not iPods?
If I owned an ISP and someone reported that there was a problem with copyrighted material on my equipment, I would take the stuff down too. How much time should I spend seeing if the stuff is a problem. I guestimate 0.
It's a good thing not everyone shares your philosophy. All Darl McBride would have to do is call up a few backbone providers and tell them "redhat.com / gentoo.org / kernel.org / whatever is infringing on my copyrighted IP, pull them off the Net please." No substantiation or evidence required.
This has given me an idea for my next evil ploy for world domination:
*insane cackling*
At a 1930's World Fair, there was a "robot" answering people's questions about what life in the future would be like. One of the questions was when we would run out of fossil fuels. This is a topic people have been worried about for a long time.
Thus far, all the predictions of doom have been averted. New techniques for locating oil reserves, and tapping resources in previously unreachable places, through technologies like offshore platforms, have allowed new supplies to keep up with demand.
Of course, the total amount of fossil fuel is finite, even if petroleum engineers become clever enough to locate and extract every drop, that won't keep the world running forever. But much like with Moore's law, new advances have kept us from running into a brick wall so far, and will continue to at least for the near future.