If you're using a system like Condor, I believe that you can actually migrate virtual machines between Amazon EC2 and your own machines, making it a useful little backup system in case your server farm starts to go belly-up because the data center is flooding, or some useful temporary capacity while you wait for the new hardware to get set up, or something like that.
The DMCA - the good part - at first sounds like it should be applicable and good, but it seems that it wasn't designed with trademarks in mind. Just copyright. Ah, the joys of modern IP law....
10:32: Disney: Cost savings were not the big driving reason for the deal. What really drives is synergies over time. It will create enhanced growth rate for Disney over time.
10:33: Iger: Even with DVD sales slowing, movies with strong, brand name characters such as Marvel characters will hold up better than others. "It's not bulletproof"
... libertarian is not a self-defining term. There are many varieties of libertarians. There's a zero-government libertarian, an anarchist. There's a limited-government libertarianism. They share a lot in terms of their fundamental values. If you trace them to their ultimate roots, they are different. It doesn't matter in practice, because we both want to work in the same direction.
The idea is that Roche developed Tamiflu, and 20 years from now anyone can make Tamiflu. At worst, society is losing a 20 society-disease-years over the matter (that's a fun unit, innit?). Afterward, society gets to benefit from a new flu drug (infinite society-disease-years, or something like that - and probably with a bigger unit of Society to boot).
Consider the alternative, where there is no such patent available. Does Tamiflu, or an enhancement, get created at all in this scenario? Sure! Of course!.... eventually. But academic / government-sponsored research surely cannot hope to replace the entire research output of the pharmaceutical industry! (Even if it is trendy these days to demonize them as a bunch of leeches on society incapable of generating anything but drug advertising, they actually do pay some very smart, highly educated people high-five/six-figure salaries to do research.)
This is why, as a young person, I like 20-year patents on drugs and pray that they will remain around during my lifetime, so that there will be more drugs (and medical procedures etc) - both brand new and 20 years old - available to me when I'm old and need them most. The alternative has a very real chance to negatively impact my future quality of life... and that of my children, at such time that I have any.
So 84% of the US population has health care coverage... why then is there an urgent need to undertake a massive revamp of the system while our still-fragile economy is recovering from a disaster (almost a catastrophe) and our national deficit has already exploded? Could it possibly be that the claims of urgency are a matter of political expedience, rather than what's actually in the country's best interest?
Canada population: 33.2 million (CIA World Factbook)
US population of illegal immigrants: 11 million (Center for Immigration Studies estimate)
I mean, holy confounding factors Batman! And that's without even trying too hard. Wait until you throw all sorts of "lifestyle" differences into the mix.
As for waiting lists, they certainly are "democratic" in spreading the misery around - which is, of course, much easier than making everyone well off - but I don't really see pursuit of that goal as a clear and effective way to better society.
Tsk, tsk. This is an important cultural and religious phenomenon that you really should be aware of.
Know then that John 6:49 goes something like this. Jesus is getting off the "dividing the loaves and fishes" episode and was evacuating across the lake; the crowd followed him anyway and now they're asking him for a miraculous sign so they can believe in him. They suggest the old manna-in-the-desert trick as an example. Many of them may be operating off of the popular "revolutionary messiah" premise, believing that there will soon be a military overthrow of the existing oppressive world order. They don't quite get what they expected:
"Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."
Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.
For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.
Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever."
On hearing it, many of his disciples said, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?"
Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, "Does this offend you?
What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before!
The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.
Yet there are some of you who do not believe."
... From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
Some interpretations dismiss this as a purely symbolic exercise, but the language isn't really the language of symbolism, and furthermore the actual working metaphors for "to eat (someone's) flesh" and "to drink (someone's) blood" mean "to persecute (someone)" and "to oppress (them)". The traditional interpretation for a long time - today, the Catholic and Orthodox stories - integrate this with the subsequent "Last Supper" rite in which blessed bread / wine are said to become his (Jesus's) actual body and blood (though the actual appearance and taste, of course, is unchanged, perhaps recognizing that, in fact, cannibalism is something that people find icky in oractice.)
The whole flesh-as-bread premise probably works a lot better with people who have a diet of mostly-bread, and actually experience handling bread dough, for whatever that's worth.
In all fairness, though he's being a self-serving jerk, there's a point: What if (George W Bush|Obama|Stalin|Hitler|Kim Jong Il|the Pope|your choice of "monster" here|Rupert Murdoch himself under government contract with the next administration) used billions and billions of tax dollars to put out a news service, delivering it to every home in the country for free, and outcompeted all the other news sources, driving them to bankruptcy and ruin? Would that be fair? Would there not be at least some risk of it being a Pravdaesque version of reality endorsed by the government to the exclusion of any criticism they didn't feel like having? Clearly the BBC is no Pravda (not this year, anyway, or yesteryear), but can any nation trust its government enough that having a taxpayer-funded news service a good idea in the long run? I think that's a question worth thinking about.
I'm also personally concerned with the notion of a "television license". Call it paranoia, but it makes me think of the "secret radio!!" plot in Jakob the Liar -- a government powers to restrict your receipt of telecommunications are not very comforting.
I agree with you in most of your cases, but the air conditioning is the probably the most trivial setting in the car, and I've never really needed to look at the dash for more than a fraction of a second to adjust it. This is about as likely to make my driving dangerous as taking my eyes off the road in front of me for a fraction of second to check the speedometer, or the rear-view mirror. (Of course, there are times when driving that I wouldn't do either of those).
And yes, cell phone manipulation is many times more distracting, and it tends to last for longer. My personal take on it is, "Sure, you can text in your car all you want... as long as it isn't moving. Light turns green, drop the thing in your lap."
Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
-- the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16.
Some big complaints I gleaned from other news sources seem to include the fact that if you're deemed a "critical" enough place, then
a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.
The EFF further complains "The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."
So, random government intrusion in random places which are "critical". Blargh. "Be more specific please" is the complaint.
no known substitute that can do the job for the price
See, that's the thing: you're trying to hoard it for when it's more expensive... and when that happens, there are alternatives (ethanol, natural gas, electrical battery-power for cars (fueled by coal, or nuclear, mmmaybe even renewables if you go for that stuff and it's really expensive)... plant-based plastics for medicine, "less packaging" for the stuff in the grocery stores... recycling... plus any really-expensive-to-extract oil fields.
Raise the price and you'll see the (quantity) demanded fall off fast enough.
If it's really that scarce non-renewable, people could make big bucks buying it now and storing it for a few decades.
People right now either think that the price is fair --- (helium price now + cost of N decades helium storage + financing / opportunity costs) >= (helium price in future) --- or people are being stupid/oblivious to opportunity.
Perhaps you and your finance buddies should get a helium futures ETF started?
It's a commodity play, and people are worried about inflation in the next few years.
Could be a sweet little deal.
Prior to the Soviets? During the Soviets, my dearly departed grandmother was "exported" from Poland to a Siberian labor camp (as was the rest of her family), mostly since her father was a war hero in the earlier Polish-Bolshevik war. (He got some of the townsfolk from the nearby village of to help pull a few big machine-gun caissons out of a ditch, and subsequently helped save the rear ends of the retreating Polish cavalry. I don't think the Soviets liked the family. Too much initiative.)
Heck.... or editing their own pages, for that matter. Excerpt from an actual message a few years ago, in response to a standard little {{copyvio}} notice when a bunch of text had been copied from somewhere without attribution:
Please tell me your True Name so I can identify you by Family as I know the Spiritual Worth of Geneaolgy and its Disaster as I believe you were brought up wrongly [...] of course Wikipedia is a place for me to work because I am a War Historian in
Essay which is the "Truth of content" by Authority. Only the Royal Family can write "History" unless Academically qualified by an institution they found.
Want more? Look at Time Cube. I'm pretty sure there's anti-Wikipedia invective in the top 3 screens most of the time these days...
Yes, but that omg-terrible-trouble can be resolved by an ounce of Preparedness:
going to a bank during normal business hours
asking for $20 (or more) in quarters
stashing these quarters in your car
They even make these handy devices which can be used to hold quarters and fit in your car's cup holders, or stick themselves to something on the dashboard to the right of the driver, or....
If you don't park downtown regularly - great! $20 in quarters should last a long time. If you do park there regularly - all the more reason to be prepared and stocked up!
The reason we have more heart disease and cancer isn't just because of a "lavish lifestyle" (lavish cholesterol can lead to the one, less so to the other), but also because we've conquered most other "easy" diseases. Get us some good old-fashioned malaria, polio, parasites, flesh eating diseases, what-have-you, and you'll see a big drop in deaths from cancer and heart disease.
Manufacturing is one thing, but the software developers at IBM's China Development Labs aren't known for giving kids lead poisoning, and they still have plenty of "offshoring" hate. I don't think there's too much "exploitation! sweatshops!" there either.
The idea that "import taxes will fix everything" is bogus magical thinking, because "jobs" aren't what makes a country rich. Wealth, ultimately, is something that you have (or possibly something that you experience) and the US imports a lot of Things from overseas and there ends up being more stuff for everyone. Forcing Americans to pay top dollar (or pay penalties) for American labor and American factories for their shampoo and their cars and their Ikea furniture does not mean that people in America will end up with more cars and shampoo and Ikea furniture.
Economic studies have shown that your typical $50k/yr manufacturing job "saved" by tariffs costs the rest of the economy over $100,000-$200,000/yr. That's no way to make your country wealthy. And in the intermediate-to-long run it probably won't mean half as many jobs as it means "robots".
And in the case of IBM employees, don't try to sell me baloney that says they're being "exploited" like a sweatshop. Mmf.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're using a system like Condor, I believe that you can actually migrate virtual machines between Amazon EC2 and your own machines, making it a useful little backup system in case your server farm starts to go belly-up because the data center is flooding, or some useful temporary capacity while you wait for the new hardware to get set up, or something like that.
In the US, at least, we have the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, to call regarding things like that. Which reminds me; I should send them money.
Wow. What idiots populate your local theater such that "throwing their drink at the screen" is a serious problem to worry about?
The DMCA - the good part - at first sounds like it should be applicable and good, but it seems that it wasn't designed with trademarks in mind. Just copyright. Ah, the joys of modern IP law....
Then ObamaCare^WKennedyCare could actually deliver cost savings!
(duck, run, flamebait)
-- WSJ coverage of investor call (ongoing) emphasis mine
The idea is that Roche developed Tamiflu, and 20 years from now anyone can make Tamiflu. At worst, society is losing a 20 society-disease-years over the matter (that's a fun unit, innit?). Afterward, society gets to benefit from a new flu drug (infinite society-disease-years, or something like that - and probably with a bigger unit of Society to boot).
Consider the alternative, where there is no such patent available. Does Tamiflu, or an enhancement, get created at all in this scenario? Sure! Of course! .... eventually. But academic / government-sponsored research surely cannot hope to replace the entire research output of the pharmaceutical industry! (Even if it is trendy these days to demonize them as a bunch of leeches on society incapable of generating anything but drug advertising, they actually do pay some very smart, highly educated people high-five/six-figure salaries to do research.)
This is why, as a young person, I like 20-year patents on drugs and pray that they will remain around during my lifetime, so that there will be more drugs (and medical procedures etc) - both brand new and 20 years old - available to me when I'm old and need them most. The alternative has a very real chance to negatively impact my future quality of life... and that of my children, at such time that I have any.
So 84% of the US population has health care coverage... why then is there an urgent need to undertake a massive revamp of the system while our still-fragile economy is recovering from a disaster (almost a catastrophe) and our national deficit has already exploded? Could it possibly be that the claims of urgency are a matter of political expedience, rather than what's actually in the country's best interest?
Canada population: 33.2 million (CIA World Factbook)
US population of illegal immigrants: 11 million (Center for Immigration Studies estimate)
I mean, holy confounding factors Batman! And that's without even trying too hard. Wait until you throw all sorts of "lifestyle" differences into the mix.
As for waiting lists, they certainly are "democratic" in spreading the misery around - which is, of course, much easier than making everyone well off - but I don't really see pursuit of that goal as a clear and effective way to better society.
Tsk, tsk. This is an important cultural and religious phenomenon that you really should be aware of. Know then that John 6:49 goes something like this. Jesus is getting off the "dividing the loaves and fishes" episode and was evacuating across the lake; the crowd followed him anyway and now they're asking him for a miraculous sign so they can believe in him. They suggest the old manna-in-the-desert trick as an example. Many of them may be operating off of the popular "revolutionary messiah" premise, believing that there will soon be a military overthrow of the existing oppressive world order. They don't quite get what they expected:
Some interpretations dismiss this as a purely symbolic exercise, but the language isn't really the language of symbolism, and furthermore the actual working metaphors for "to eat (someone's) flesh" and "to drink (someone's) blood" mean "to persecute (someone)" and "to oppress (them)". The traditional interpretation for a long time - today, the Catholic and Orthodox stories - integrate this with the subsequent "Last Supper" rite in which blessed bread / wine are said to become his (Jesus's) actual body and blood (though the actual appearance and taste, of course, is unchanged, perhaps recognizing that, in fact, cannibalism is something that people find icky in oractice.)
The whole flesh-as-bread premise probably works a lot better with people who have a diet of mostly-bread, and actually experience handling bread dough, for whatever that's worth.
I'm also personally concerned with the notion of a "television license". Call it paranoia, but it makes me think of the "secret radio!!" plot in Jakob the Liar -- a government powers to restrict your receipt of telecommunications are not very comforting.
And yes, cell phone manipulation is many times more distracting, and it tends to last for longer. My personal take on it is, "Sure, you can text in your car all you want... as long as it isn't moving. Light turns green, drop the thing in your lap."
Or it doesn't, and it fades into obscurity like countless non-notable technologies.
-- the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16.
When all you see at your job all day long is a bunch of nails, you start looking for a big old hammer.
Some big complaints I gleaned from other news sources seem to include the fact that if you're deemed a "critical" enough place, then
-- CNET
The EFF further complains "The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."
So, random government intrusion in random places which are "critical". Blargh. "Be more specific please" is the complaint.
See, that's the thing: you're trying to hoard it for when it's more expensive... and when that happens, there are alternatives (ethanol, natural gas, electrical battery-power for cars (fueled by coal, or nuclear, mmmaybe even renewables if you go for that stuff and it's really expensive)... plant-based plastics for medicine, "less packaging" for the stuff in the grocery stores... recycling... plus any really-expensive-to-extract oil fields.
Raise the price and you'll see the (quantity) demanded fall off fast enough.
If it's really that scarce non-renewable, people could make big bucks buying it now and storing it for a few decades. People right now either think that the price is fair --- (helium price now + cost of N decades helium storage + financing / opportunity costs) >= (helium price in future) --- or people are being stupid/oblivious to opportunity.
Perhaps you and your finance buddies should get a helium futures ETF started? It's a commodity play, and people are worried about inflation in the next few years. Could be a sweet little deal.
Prior to the Soviets? During the Soviets, my dearly departed grandmother was "exported" from Poland to a Siberian labor camp (as was the rest of her family), mostly since her father was a war hero in the earlier Polish-Bolshevik war. (He got some of the townsfolk from the nearby village of to help pull a few big machine-gun caissons out of a ditch, and subsequently helped save the rear ends of the retreating Polish cavalry. I don't think the Soviets liked the family. Too much initiative.)
Want more? Look at Time Cube. I'm pretty sure there's anti-Wikipedia invective in the top 3 screens most of the time these days...
They even make these handy devices which can be used to hold quarters and fit in your car's cup holders, or stick themselves to something on the dashboard to the right of the driver, or....
If you don't park downtown regularly - great! $20 in quarters should last a long time. If you do park there regularly - all the more reason to be prepared and stocked up!
The reason we have more heart disease and cancer isn't just because of a "lavish lifestyle" (lavish cholesterol can lead to the one, less so to the other), but also because we've conquered most other "easy" diseases. Get us some good old-fashioned malaria, polio, parasites, flesh eating diseases, what-have-you, and you'll see a big drop in deaths from cancer and heart disease.
Manufacturing is one thing, but the software developers at IBM's China Development Labs aren't known for giving kids lead poisoning, and they still have plenty of "offshoring" hate. I don't think there's too much "exploitation! sweatshops!" there either.
The idea that "import taxes will fix everything" is bogus magical thinking, because "jobs" aren't what makes a country rich. Wealth, ultimately, is something that you have (or possibly something that you experience) and the US imports a lot of Things from overseas and there ends up being more stuff for everyone. Forcing Americans to pay top dollar (or pay penalties) for American labor and American factories for their shampoo and their cars and their Ikea furniture does not mean that people in America will end up with more cars and shampoo and Ikea furniture.
Economic studies have shown that your typical $50k/yr manufacturing job "saved" by tariffs costs the rest of the economy over $100,000-$200,000/yr. That's no way to make your country wealthy. And in the intermediate-to-long run it probably won't mean half as many jobs as it means "robots".
And in the case of IBM employees, don't try to sell me baloney that says they're being "exploited" like a sweatshop. Mmf.