Right, for example, a herbivorous species could decide that any intelligent species that evolves from carnivore stock is ipso-facto dangerous to their galactic society. That doesn't have to be a well founded belief, it simply has to be the sort of thing an alien might actually beleive. Heck, the aliens could be intillectually inferior - maybe they average worse than us, but throw up occasional supergeniuses that takes up some of the slack, or they progress at only half our rate, but have been around fifty times as long. On the other hand, imagine a well developed and long lived galactic culture. They've seen thousands of species reach sentience and eventually follow one or another of many branches in developing technology and culture. Out of those, a relative handful have started down certain paths, and all of them, if they got high enough tech to spread off their homeworld, became speciesist genocidal monsters in the truest sense of the words. Out of 3,284 species that were admitted to the Great Galactic Confederation, only Seven were like that, and in each case, the whole Galaxy was savaged by internal war that eventually grew to include planetary exterminations, solar system wide death camps, and the loss of literally quadrillions of innocent lives. Now, you find an eighth culture like those seven, but it's not yet reached the stage of interstellar travel.
The question becomes, are we a blighted species, that our own insanely paranoid and power hungry will inevitably eventually dominate us and make us into a race of totally corrupt super Nazis. We don't have to have lost all nobility, all decency, and all creativity yet for this to be true, you'll note. If it's inevitable given some pattern of history that we don't yet understand, that the worst of use will win out over our own and then try to destroy everyone else, then killing us because it's the noble thing to do, to protect our quadrillions of potential victims, become rational. I'll put Beethoven, Dirac, and a host of thers on the con side of that argument for inevitability, but I must admit my species has had its arguments pro as well.
A lot of our foreign aid is actually homeland security driven, and is something promoted and voted for more by the conservative side of the congress.
Take the whole area around Columbia, for example. The DEA provides drug interdiction helicopters to destroy Cocaine crops. This gives Columbia whole squadrons of assault helicopters, and the people who fly them become some of Columbia's best trained and 'well-bloodied' troops from actual under fire experience. They get really advanced communications tech we don't normally export, just so cartels can't eavesdrop on their communications, and eventually they even get attack helicopters such as Apaches, to support the mission when the cartels start using rocket launchers. This makes all Columbia's neighbors wonder, "What happen if they uses all those shiny toys for something besides drug interdiction inside their own borders?"
But, the DEA can't afford to just buy more weapons for everybody, and it would look fishy buying them for countries that don't even produce much Cocaine, so funding gets added to various places in Central America's foreign aid budget, money that has attached stipulations that those countries buy certain US made weapons systems with it. Then the conservatives that wanted a bigger war on drugs and more profits for General Dynamics tell everyone that Foreign Aid is a liberal thing, without mentioning that this would mean programs such as the DEA and indeed the whole Military/Industrial Complex are Liberal plots. There are a dozen senators today who are to the right of Jesse Helms who regularly criticise foreign aid in public addresses, and would be appalled if the public really tried to cut back foreign aid enough to defund these special programs hidden in it
We are talking only $ 500,000 here. Let's look at another study that would be worth that.
Hollywood is missing a lot of SF they could option and make and have a better chance of a profit than they are likely to get remaking, say, Logan's Run, or Buck Rogers. Even the new Apes movie is a bigger risk than Hollywood accounting wants to admit (The first shows always made money, but the more recent movie with the Ape Lincoln ending didn't do well at all. Technically, this one is a sort of sideways sequel/prequel to the last one, but you'll notice that's 'not being mentioned much'.). That's been typical of Hollywood's approach to SF.
$ 500,000 to give them a good list of stories from classic SF authors that have distinctive ideas and prior finished products based on their works would at least result in the studio that paid for it knowing why not making any recent Heinlein, Clarke, Michael Moorcock or Roger Zelazny films*, (to instead look for more little known and not yet filmed works by Asimov and P. K. Dick), is not the best way to make a profit. Neither is remaking whatever options you already have yet again before even considering original content. Any major studio could benefit from a market survey and historical piece at that price. They're all planning SF projects every year for the next decade, without that sort of support. Hell, paying some BNF $ 80,000 a year just to answer questions such as whether anyone else had described planar explosives before George Lucas, and who it was, would be only sensible by the time they had called with say six to ten of them. How much are those same people spending asking those sorts of questions of lawyers first?
If you're really right that a special DARPA study won't beat a bunch of existing SF works, then DARPA might just benefit from knowing what those already proposed ideas are. That industry study (just incidentally of course) might also cover which SF authors might have actually said something with real world science behind it and possible applications to interstellar travel. There would exist a database that would presumably be comprehensive and well maintained, simply because it would save some large corporation money and hassles, and that databse would be a good start to DARPA'sa project. For somebody else's 500,000 DARPA could get a good list of ideas to start with, just as an incidental side effect of something sensible private investors should probably be doing anyway. I'm afraid your 'sensible' private investors would like the government to instead pay for such research, tailored strictly to market purposes rather than furthering to even the slightest degree something so out there as real interstellar travel.
* All these authors have had films of at least one work made, and you can find people whose job is to know what their own studio has in the vaults and what they have current options on, who don't know about those works one way or the other, and seem uninterested or unable to find out why it might matter to their bottom line next year. It's like talking to an Oil company executive and having him ask you "What's this 'crude' you keep mentioning?".
People on here (and in plenty of other venues) have been saying for years that America is too dumb, sedated by TV and a compliant news system, to get off their butts and do something about this or that problem. They said that about the west in general quite often too, and I'd point out that England certainly counts as "the West" in that context.
I'd submit that the biggest thing keeping riots and massive protests from happening here is neither fear or apathy. Rather, its been that the populace is half way rational, and any step as big as riots looks like excess until someone else proves it can actually change things for the better. As we move towards the same long, drawn out stagnation, lost decades and lost generations the British are well into, any change starts looking like one for the better. We're transitioning from people who would only riot in hope of it making a change to more and more people who would riot out of the sense they have nothing left to lose.
The Us is not just one, but several powderkegs. We have a right so out of touch that when they get 80 or 90% of what they ask for by non-violent means, they still talk about second amendments solutions. They talks exactly the way people who have never personally been on the receiving end of blow-back talk. (That's not just my assessment, by the way, it's the FBI's, which has both reported that the greatest terrorist threat is from right wing domestic organizations, and that those organizations have a surprisingly large number of members who have never been in the military but are getting their training as members of private militias, and appear to have unrealistic assessments of how effective violence is at accomplishing their goals. When the FBI refers to a lot of young militia members who couldn't qualify to join the US armed forces and are getting their primary training from inside the militias as "useful idiots", they are trying to convey the seriousness of this very point - the FBI is not in the habit of using Lenin as a reference unless it's the only way to make the point.
On the left, we see more eco-violence (burning SUVs on the lot), or 'animal advocacy' violence (releasing lab animals), where the most violent acts are directed largely or sometimes exclusively against property. That's probably because the classical political left is cautions about being used and infiltrated as they were in the Nixon or Reagen eras, not because they have somehow magically gone away. They're feeling desperate now. The US crossed a few lines over the last couple of years, and being on this side of them makes everything political. Right now, I'm betting if somebody committed violence against any group that doesn't fit the left-right dichotomy, say just for example, a Westboro Baptist Church protest, it would immediately get recast in a left vs. right mode and trigger other copycat violence against organized political groups.
Bananas are radioactive mostly because of Potassium-40. I'm radioactive mostly because of Bananas (Potassium 40 is the largest single contributor to the normal human internalized dose, and unless you eat an exceptional lot of Potatoes or Brazil Nuts, Bananas are the most significant source.). Granite is mostly radioactive because of Uranium, and this decays resulting in elevated Radon gas levels. Thorium's decay chain also results in Radon being produced at one point.
This leads to some conclusions. 1. The risk from a radioactive substance is best determined by considering the whole decay process, including the role various isotopes play in biology, and 2. Zombies should refrain from eating either me or Granite countertops.
Fortunately, we have found more and more uses for them, so, for example, what was once a laboratory curiosity and mere byproduct of extracting, say, palladium, now is a useful material on its own (Rhenium, one of the rarest of the rare earths, but now available in amounts sufficient to show its use in one of the highest grade steel alloys).
In the 1940's we used relatively low tech gaseous diffusion processes to extract Uranium 235 from material that was already all Uranium, but mostly isotope 238, and we had no uses at all for many of the rejected portions (we came up with most uses for 'depleted' Uranium only after we had a lot laying around). Separating chemically similar but distinct elements certainly isn't any harder than that. In fact, if there is no way to separate them chemically, isotopic separation is exactly what would still work.
The Thorium alone is effectively worth as much as Uranium for good old fashioned large reactor fuel. Arguably, its worth much more since it enables fundamentally safer reactors and longer term social stability. Now somebody is suggesting it can be used in an application where Uranium turned out to be basically inadequate - powering personal vehicles - which is a tremendous added payoff. Plus, we have a big list of uses for most of the 'byproducts'. If it was, say, only 20% of a cost effective solution to build the US nuclear arsenal, it's still highly cost effective to develop both Thorium power production and generalised rare earth/lanthanide separation methods.
But, that's like saying that diseases kill vastly more people than terrorism, and it might be cost effective to spend more money on fighting, say, Cancer, and less on fighting the Taliban. You can advocate it all you want, but who will believe mere math?
The way law generally works, more than one person can be fully responsible for a single crime. We can hold everyone culpable in a bank robbery guilty of murder for one elderly security guard who has a heart attack, including the guy who was 'just' driving the getaway car, for just one example. There are usually particular reasons and limitations on how the law works for such cases of multiple blame.* I'm not clear just where you are advocating redrawing those lines. For example, if several people fired firearms at the same person, would you prosecute an actual murder charge only against the one that actually hit their target, or perhaps the one who hit nearest a normally lethal zone? Do you see the others as still guilty of attempted murder since they did each do some actual act, or does the fact that the victim didn't get 'attempted murdered' but actually murdered mean the other acts don't matter?
* For your example, the law doesn't want to argue a lot of internal, subjective, state of mind issues, so whether the hit man would have been fully inclined to kill the victim just for a cash offer or had to be persuaded by various other arguments offered by the person soliciting the hit is something the law wants to avoid getting too deep into. Overlapping, shared responsibility means a judge or prosecutor can spend less time bring state of mind related issues before the jury. Prove that both people had, at some points, intent for a particular person to die, and the intent was accomplished by both of them taking actions (such as one telling the other one where a good spot to catch the victim alone was, not just the one action of, say, pulling a trigger), and you don't have to spend days debating just how cold blooded each person was, whether either of them might have changed their mind if things had been just a little bit different, and other intangible or speculative issues that might be presented if blame for a single act is a fixed value that has to be awarded to just one, or even if it's allowed to be divided between everyone involved.
Mach 1 is normally measured as at sea level, because it is based on the average temperature of air molecules at that same level. When you go high enough, temperature gets significant, as the hotter molecules tend to rise to the top. Speed of sound generally increases with altitude. Pitot tubes and such work with what air they have to measure Mach, and at least until modern computing, that raw data is ALL they gave a pilot, so what they report is normally 'distorted' by both local temperature and by wind-speed. Originally, a Mach meter didn't know how high a plane was at all, and instead reported speed in knots per hour, with a mark on the analog gauge that really only meant, "if you were at sea level, you'd definitely be above the speed of sound now, but what you actually see outside the window may vary", Now-a-days, fancy little boxes in the avionics systems may give a pilot or remote operator adjusted Mach values. A pilot doesn't usually want to know Mach, rather he or she would prefer a few seconds warning when they are about to pass into supersonic and hypersonic regions under local conditions.
Somehow the thought of Sarah Palin encrypting a moose just doesn't work for me. (Emily Latella) I don't usually pay for porn with it all over the internet, but... Oh, encrypting... Nevermind! (/Emily Latella)
Personally, I'd respect your right to seek redress for actual monetary damages. I'm definitely OK with you having that right for the 28 years it ran prior to the 1970's. I'll go farther than what you had under pre 1976 law, and support a few additional legal priniciples:
1. I support you having a right to extend a suit to include triple actual damages where there are certain aggravating circumstances, such as commercial infringement for profit. I sort of support those same increased penalties for non-commercial infringement if the other party has done enough, i.e. ignored warnings, committed repeated torts, etc, but I want just how serious those additional factors have to be, spelled out better than my rough list, before the courts start applying the sort of law I'm just sketching out here. 2. I support a simple process for registering copyrighted works so as to get protection, with either all costs part of what my own taxes help pay for, or at most a very nominal fee for initial registration, just so we keep the overall period fair. By fair I include that it should be the same length for every creator, and not favor younger or longer lived people, over older or medically disadvantaged ones. You're welcome to debate just what else you think should be included in that admittedly loaded word, 'fair'.
There are some other things I think are desirable in this system you may not like, besides the shorter term itself:
1. If people insist on extending periods to more than 28 years total, I would favor making there be some real, significant fees involved for the extension. I don't really see a system where people have full blanket coverage for 50 years plus without bothering to register the work at all as even remotely workable - too many cases of trying to fudge publication date to get extended protection, saddling the court with a lot of having to settle claims that can't be documented.
2. I don't want any 'stretching' or 'blending 'of copyright to cover other IP issues, such as trade secrets, patents or trademarks. For example, assuming you can still patent software under this sort of copyright system, no patenting a work and then claiming copyright also applies after the patent expires in 20 years.
3. Actual damages are not statutory damages. You should be able to show at least some probable cause that you have actually lost money to win a lawsuit. Actual damages from other sorts of abuses, i.e. if the American Kid Fiddlers Party prints copies of your book and sells it, claiming you endorse their platform, may be actionable as slander or libel, but what the 'French style' or 'moral' copyright system is trying to protect authors from isn't appropriate to tie to US copyright law. Damage to your reputation may be actionable, but not by invoking copyright law.
Something I think authors and other creators ought to know: When copyright went from 28 years to about twice that long, costs of enforcement didn't just double, and when It went to life plus rules, costs did not just double again. Going back that far retroactively meant for many claims the lawyers had to include a lot of court records from the Great depression era, and those are tangled, convoluted, and are often the work of judges who were hastily disposing of mostly physical assets from bankrupt companies, and had no idea that the IP parts of those assets would ever be worth money again. The costs of doing a decent search on many older works didn't just double, they went up by a factor of 10 or so. Add just such factors as, for one example, the average rate that film stock decays at and how many older films have or will mold away in the vaults before release, and that the law did away with registration requirements that helped levy the cost of litigation, and you could make a good case that the overall costs to society of enforcing the Sonny Bono Act and subsequent legislation have been a forty or fifty-fold increase in costs to be born by the typical taxpayer. Yes, that sounds hyperbolic, but that film stock issue is mirrored by
Two sentences of yours, put together make one of the major points most people are missing here. That point is, "While the US arguably deserves less than an AAA rating, S&P is doing an incredibly lousy job of rating things, so why should they have the influence they do?" Let's imagine something traditional on Slashdot, a car analogy: Suppose Consumer Reports reviewed a car series (the Wallaby Baloonfire model three-door touring sedan) that usually gets a lot of five star ratings, and this year they gave the new Wallaby X-4000 only four out of five stars on fuel economy, crash worthyness, etc. They even cite some very good reasons (that is reasons you might agree with or even ones with solid numbers behind them). You might hope more people listen to consumer reports and buy some other car. You might think it would benefit you if another make you already own becomes more popular, or it might benefit them with all the advantages of driving their kids to school in a safer car - whether you are being altruistic, pragmatic, or utterly self focused doesn't really matter on whether you think the report is likely to be of benefit in general. But lets suppose you find a slightly dog-eared copy of Consumer Reports from 2 years ago in your dentist's waiting room. There's this glowing five star review of what you now know turned out to be the Dahlmer-Manson 2008 Kiddkillermobile...
I don't blame any lender for deciding that the US has increasingly severe problems with reliability and they want a higher rate if they loan us money in the future. That doesn't mean I don't think any lender that still listens to S&P or uses them to justify its decisions is a fool. Why is S&P's decision significant? Because after getting a whole bunch of things dead wrong, they finally said something where we don't really know yet but it looks like they just could be right? Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (if it's analog), and S&P is a stopped clock.
Standard and poor is evidently also "so left-of-center", since their own spokesman cited not swiftly raising the debt ceiling before addressing the rest of the cuts that needed to be made as the very first reason they reduced the rating. It would appear even a bunch of wall street bankers are too hippy-commie-liberal from your POV, which is why America is swiftly going to hell.
To be fair, USENET also took a step towards this by simply creating the Alt. domain, and another step by allowing unmoderated groups to be created in it.
While I agree with you that the first amendment is about controlling the government suppressing speech and not a lot of other things that people try to stretch it into, there's a corollary. That is, any time someone has to resort to anonymity because of a genuinely well founded fear of a private stalker, nut-case fan (like Letterman's), paparazzi, identity thief or similar, that person has immediately had enormous damage done in a free society. The stalker, identity thief, or whatever has taken away their normal right to sign their name to what they believe, made it so that the person looks like a coward who won't identify themselves with their political (or related) speech instead of that person hiding because of the criminal.
The stalker (again add identity thieves, or whatever other criminals you think fit) has deprived their victim of normal chances to be taken seriously by many other people, and so hurt all the other people who were affected if they did what seems superficially logical and ignored speech from people who appear to be too cowardly to stand behind what they say.
This means that the penalties for being a stalker, identity thief, etc. ought to be extremely much more severe than they are. All these crimes are revealed as hate crimes, with many victims other than the obvious one.
Possibly you or I were hurt right here on Slashdot, because somebody would have posted something either of us might have valued, if it had it been posted as other than AC. All it takes is the quite reasonable decision to filter ACs or often just to read at above -1, to avoid all the people who genuinely deserve the C part of AC. If only the others didn't have a private situation making them choose that option we might have appreciated that post, and so long as that's true, we become secondary victims (admittedly to a much, much lesser extent than the primary victim, but still victims).
So what's a reasonable penalty for stalking? What's reasonable for identity theft? Even if some parts of being followed by cameramen and reporters are simply a price of being famous and should stay legal, what's a reasonable penalty if the press crosses the line into beyond legal? Sounds like all those things should be up there with murder, rape and arson.
Pipeline! Uuhhm... Very flexible pipeline, with a bunch of joints like bendy straws... and when it passes close to the Sun, we'll only pump at night... look, if you really want this, you're gonna have to give me a grant...
To be fair, the lava was red, the acid, acid green (or that was very mean algae in those ponds). I seem to remember some very brightly hued things, all of which killed your character quite efficiently. And there were some levels where a bluish gray predominated. One fourth of Q1 was the Medieval style levels, and by all accounts that whole era in the real world was brown all the time, so maybe they can claim historical accuracy.;-) Quake 2 actually was better - there were levels where the Stroggs had things lit up with a thousand points of blue white laser communications grids, throbbing power-plants, and display screens to where it was often quite pretty. All too many fans criticized that, in effect demanding more brown whether that's what they meant or not. In the same way, there were reviewers and players who criticized the stained glass windows in Hexen.
Just as a guestimate, a quarter of the posts on this thread will involve somebody complaining in such a way that, if the company actually listens to those complaints and does exactly what they imply should be done, the complainer will still end up very disappointed that they got exactly what they asked for.
Basically the advertiser thinks of it as either a one step process or a two step, depending on their model of what's most efficient. Either they 1. just want to know whatever will motivate person X to give them money. Or they want to first know 1. whether person X actually has any spare money, that the advertiser can get without too much bother, and then learn 2. whatever will motivate that subgroup of person Xes, the ones with spare money and without issues that will become too much bother, to give the advertiser some.
Advertisers only care about locations if their profit margin depends on where they ship to. They only care about age if someone has decided they will get very few sales to people above a certain age AND more complaints to be resolved, tech support requests or some other cost factor from those people of a certain age, (usually defined by the advertiser as older than age N, where N is often about 35, but sometimes around 47). An advertiser will want any information, however private, if they think it will impact whether an initial sale is made, whether there's a chance of repeat business, and whether there's a chance of a cost being incurred in the future.
An advertiser that has committed to prescreening likely clients usually only wants the client's name, if it has been shown they see more successful sales to a particular ethnic group, and the last name has some power at identifying such groups (So an advertiser just might care if your last name identifies you as likely to be Irish, as in O'Brien, or Chinese as for Wong, and yet not care about it at all if your last name is Lee, (because they don't know if its English based Lee or Korean based Lee), or if it's Kovalski, suggesting you are of Polish extraction, as they may have a study that says the Chinese American community, on average, pays their monthly installments on time, The Irish community tends to run late, and the study didn't look at Eastern Europeans one way or another. ). Often, these studies are full of biases from the people who run them, or the people who commission them, and usually get told what they want to hear. There are plenty of advertisers in the US, for example, who expect certain ethnicities to be harder to sell to, or likely to default, or to make scenes or file lawsuits - they just don't usually go around announcing that they make decisions based on this factor.
Advertisers that have decided prescreening their sales base is worth it will try to find ways to collect data even if its considered very private, like medical histories. For example, an advertiser who has come to greatly detest nuisance lawsuits is likely to want mental health data or court records if they think it will cut down on such suits, and generally considers such things as HIPAA rules government over-regulation if they get in the way.
So, we're talking Britain here. There's still splinter groups out there from the IRA who also have spokespersons. There's people who blow up subway cars who have spokespersons. The idea here is to use a route that still protects the real core of damage causers, meaning your spokesperson doesn't really know all that much. Maybe one or more of those meatspace groups won't bother to call in and take 'responsibility' for the next atrocity and the British government will be left wondering just which group did it. A government that goes after spokespersons better have reason to think they can provide important, even vital data, or there's a big downside. Going after one for possibly knowing 'something' is simultaneously saying the group you are after isn't a real threat and you're confident your actions won't provoke them more than the info the spokesperson gives you is worth. Do you see any reason why the British government can make such a claim to its citizens?
Now when people ask me why I use Seamonkey I can tell them it's because we have a horde of unpaid Beta Testers called Opera uses, who debug all the features for a full year before we adopt them.;-)
Deduce is preferred, but for a few similar usages of deduct, see A. C. Doyle's "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" or several other works in the canon. Deduct is at least technically acceptable, in the manner of saying "Ruffles are Rugose" instead of the standard potato chip motto.
Yeah, I got Internet Explorer to run on Windows back in Windows 95 days, AND I GOT IT TO RUN ON THE INTERNETZ!!! Sometimes it kept running for 15 minutes or more. This Anonymous Coward guy is making a mistake, and we can't allow one of those on Slashdot or it might spread to the real internet. Fortunately, we're all incredibly gifted with smarts or patience, so we can either fix it or just outwait Anonymous Coward. He can't keep posting this much for long, his fingertips will wear off.
I remember when the Blagojevich scandal started, and MSNBC quoted some of Blagojevich's people saying that the whole Obama election team was a bunch of boy scouts who wouldn't bend the rules an inch, and their commentator said it sounded like Obama was involved in Chicago politics as usual, and the Times Headline did the same quotes and yet read "Obama has some explaining to do." I'm sorry, but when the perp says you were Mr. clean cut, rah-rah go Team Apple Pie is when you DON'T have any explaining to do. It's when your NOT playing by Chicago rules. Do you count MSNBC or the NYT as parts of that left wing? Go look at the headlines the supposedly left wing parts of the press floated for Obama's involvement in that story, and then ask yourself if they were really trying to drive the country towards the left? Or were they just slinging mud and seeing how the public took it? Or look at the US coverage of the tragedy in Norway. How many US papers and TV news outlets have mentioned that the youth camp shot up was for the Norwegian Labor Party (their center left, and the party currently holding the most power), and the scumbag that did it was entirely politically motivated, by his own accounts. If the media was largely left leaning, don't you think this would be played (quite fairly) as a conservative deciding specifically to kill liberal babies? Instead the political side has gone largely unmentioned, and completely omitted on some major channels. MSNBC has some mention of it 12 paragraphs down in their latest update as I write this. USA today has been careful to just call it an island youth retreat. Right now, the west has had over a dozen cases of Right Wing nuts killing people they saw as Left, since Bush 43 left office, and that 'left wing press' seems strangely reluctant to point out that, in terms of killing children, left and right don't seem to have the same scores. Your 'left wing press' seems to ignore that fact, or at best say "Oooh! there's terrorists on the left too - they burned a car lot full of SUVs, that's equally bad. There, we've reported it balanced.".
KDE here, with the cutting edge repositories for Kubuntu enabled. KDE is pretty damned stable, and with Bespin for window appearance and such has people asking me if that's Apple Lion or some sneak preview of Windows 8 I'm running (and I didn't even turn on wobbly windows). But, worrying about what Gnome calls System Settings one way or the other is still a waste! People shouldn't worry so much about what to call a part of the "Control Panel". Use the names Microsoft uses, or pick a name you think adds more information.
Please: Don't demand standard names just for popularity.
Don't demand different names just because Foo doesn't implement every control Bar does under the same section (or at all).
Don't do it just because Microsoft does it that way.
Don't do it just to make it clearer Linux is not Windows - believe it or not, most people get that part.
What those someone else's mentioned is the "federal funds rate". This is is the interest rate at which depository institutions lend balances at the Federal Reserve to other depository institutions overnight. It's currently running at 0.0% to 0.25% depending on just who is doing the asking and the loaning.
There's no theoretical obstacle to taking very short term loans like these every normal banking day of the year, so, in theory, one receiving depository could borrow about 288 trillion dollars in the course of a year without the lending institution ever having more than 1 trillion out. These are huge banks that do plenty of business at night, on weekends and such, and maybe they could also borrow at the best rate on odd weekends or holidays, but supposedly, member institutions are supposed to plan for such routine conditions as a lot of people wanting some spending money for Friday evening, or Social Security checks coming on the 3rd of the month, so maybe they would have a hard time getting immediate coverage on some days for some situations.
In practice, if one particular bank needed to borrow overnight nearly that often, eventually its interest rate would start to go above these marginal courtesy rates and if it was still having the same problems, soon the other depositories would make individual decisions to stop lending to them at all, but the reserve rules don't force all the banks into lockstep on doing these deals.
15 trillion can be explained if the average member reserve bank borrows overnight about once a month, and that would result in an average risk of 'only' 1/2 a trillion total. Since the numbers are probably not that evenly distributed, real worst case risk might have been 0.75 trillion or even 1 full trillion on some particular days.
What economy couldn't be ruined by the dreams of the mediaeval alchemyste? You think the EU or China are in any better position to weather the changes resulting from Eternal Youth? Maybe the Hopi...
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Right, for example, a herbivorous species could decide that any intelligent species that evolves from carnivore stock is ipso-facto dangerous to their galactic society.
That doesn't have to be a well founded belief, it simply has to be the sort of thing an alien might actually beleive. Heck, the aliens could be intillectually inferior - maybe they average worse than us, but throw up occasional supergeniuses that takes up some of the slack, or they progress at only half our rate, but have been around fifty times as long.
On the other hand, imagine a well developed and long lived galactic culture. They've seen thousands of species reach sentience and eventually follow one or another of many branches in developing technology and culture. Out of those, a relative handful have started down certain paths, and all of them, if they got high enough tech to spread off their homeworld, became speciesist genocidal monsters in the truest sense of the words. Out of 3,284 species that were admitted to the Great Galactic Confederation, only Seven were like that, and in each case, the whole Galaxy was savaged by internal war that eventually grew to include planetary exterminations, solar system wide death camps, and the loss of literally quadrillions of innocent lives. Now, you find an eighth culture like those seven, but it's not yet reached the stage of interstellar travel.
The question becomes, are we a blighted species, that our own insanely paranoid and power hungry will inevitably eventually dominate us and make us into a race of totally corrupt super Nazis. We don't have to have lost all nobility, all decency, and all creativity yet for this to be true, you'll note. If it's inevitable given some pattern of history that we don't yet understand, that the worst of use will win out over our own and then try to destroy everyone else, then killing us because it's the noble thing to do, to protect our quadrillions of potential victims, become rational. I'll put Beethoven, Dirac, and a host of thers on the con side of that argument for inevitability, but I must admit my species has had its arguments pro as well.
A lot of our foreign aid is actually homeland security driven, and is something promoted and voted for more by the conservative side of the congress.
Take the whole area around Columbia, for example. The DEA provides drug interdiction helicopters to destroy Cocaine crops. This gives Columbia whole squadrons of assault helicopters, and the people who fly them become some of Columbia's best trained and 'well-bloodied' troops from actual under fire experience. They get really advanced communications tech we don't normally export, just so cartels can't eavesdrop on their communications, and eventually they even get attack helicopters such as Apaches, to support the mission when the cartels start using rocket launchers. This makes all Columbia's neighbors wonder, "What happen if they uses all those shiny toys for something besides drug interdiction inside their own borders?"
But, the DEA can't afford to just buy more weapons for everybody, and it would look fishy buying them for countries that don't even produce much Cocaine, so funding gets added to various places in Central America's foreign aid budget, money that has attached stipulations that those countries buy certain US made weapons systems with it. Then the conservatives that wanted a bigger war on drugs and more profits for General Dynamics tell everyone that Foreign Aid is a liberal thing, without mentioning that this would mean programs such as the DEA and indeed the whole Military/Industrial Complex are Liberal plots. There are a dozen senators today who are to the right of Jesse Helms who regularly criticise foreign aid in public addresses, and would be appalled if the public really tried to cut back foreign aid enough to defund these special programs hidden in it
We are talking only $ 500,000 here. Let's look at another study that would be worth that.
Hollywood is missing a lot of SF they could option and make and have a better chance of a profit than they are likely to get remaking, say, Logan's Run, or Buck Rogers. Even the new Apes movie is a bigger risk than Hollywood accounting wants to admit (The first shows always made money, but the more recent movie with the Ape Lincoln ending didn't do well at all. Technically, this one is a sort of sideways sequel/prequel to the last one, but you'll notice that's 'not being mentioned much'.). That's been typical of Hollywood's approach to SF.
$ 500,000 to give them a good list of stories from classic SF authors that have distinctive ideas and prior finished products based on their works would at least result in the studio that paid for it knowing why not making any recent Heinlein, Clarke, Michael Moorcock or Roger Zelazny films*, (to instead look for more little known and not yet filmed works by Asimov and P. K. Dick), is not the best way to make a profit. Neither is remaking whatever options you already have yet again before even considering original content. Any major studio could benefit from a market survey and historical piece at that price. They're all planning SF projects every year for the next decade, without that sort of support. Hell, paying some BNF $ 80,000 a year just to answer questions such as whether anyone else had described planar explosives before George Lucas, and who it was, would be only sensible by the time they had called with say six to ten of them. How much are those same people spending asking those sorts of questions of lawyers first?
If you're really right that a special DARPA study won't beat a bunch of existing SF works, then DARPA might just benefit from knowing what those already proposed ideas are. That industry study (just incidentally of course) might also cover which SF authors might have actually said something with real world science behind it and possible applications to interstellar travel. There would exist a database that would presumably be comprehensive and well maintained, simply because it would save some large corporation money and hassles, and that databse would be a good start to DARPA'sa project. For somebody else's 500,000 DARPA could get a good list of ideas to start with, just as an incidental side effect of something sensible private investors should probably be doing anyway. I'm afraid your 'sensible' private investors would like the government to instead pay for such research, tailored strictly to market purposes rather than furthering to even the slightest degree something so out there as real interstellar travel.
* All these authors have had films of at least one work made, and you can find people whose job is to know what their own studio has in the vaults and what they have current options on, who don't know about those works one way or the other, and seem uninterested or unable to find out why it might matter to their bottom line next year. It's like talking to an Oil company executive and having him ask you "What's this 'crude' you keep mentioning?".
People on here (and in plenty of other venues) have been saying for years that America is too dumb, sedated by TV and a compliant news system, to get off their butts and do something about this or that problem. They said that about the west in general quite often too, and I'd point out that England certainly counts as "the West" in that context.
I'd submit that the biggest thing keeping riots and massive protests from happening here is neither fear or apathy. Rather, its been that the populace is half way rational, and any step as big as riots looks like excess until someone else proves it can actually change things for the better. As we move towards the same long, drawn out stagnation, lost decades and lost generations the British are well into, any change starts looking like one for the better. We're transitioning from people who would only riot in hope of it making a change to more and more people who would riot out of the sense they have nothing left to lose.
The Us is not just one, but several powderkegs. We have a right so out of touch that when they get 80 or 90% of what they ask for by non-violent means, they still talk about second amendments solutions. They talks exactly the way people who have never personally been on the receiving end of blow-back talk. (That's not just my assessment, by the way, it's the FBI's, which has both reported that the greatest terrorist threat is from right wing domestic organizations, and that those organizations have a surprisingly large number of members who have never been in the military but are getting their training as members of private militias, and appear to have unrealistic assessments of how effective violence is at accomplishing their goals. When the FBI refers to a lot of young militia members who couldn't qualify to join the US armed forces and are getting their primary training from inside the militias as "useful idiots", they are trying to convey the seriousness of this very point - the FBI is not in the habit of using Lenin as a reference unless it's the only way to make the point.
On the left, we see more eco-violence (burning SUVs on the lot), or 'animal advocacy' violence (releasing lab animals), where the most violent acts are directed largely or sometimes exclusively against property. That's probably because the classical political left is cautions about being used and infiltrated as they were in the Nixon or Reagen eras, not because they have somehow magically gone away. They're feeling desperate now. The US crossed a few lines over the last couple of years, and being on this side of them makes everything political. Right now, I'm betting if somebody committed violence against any group that doesn't fit the left-right dichotomy, say just for example, a Westboro Baptist Church protest, it would immediately get recast in a left vs. right mode and trigger other copycat violence against organized political groups.
Bananas are radioactive mostly because of Potassium-40.
I'm radioactive mostly because of Bananas (Potassium 40 is the largest single contributor to the normal human internalized dose, and unless you eat an exceptional lot of Potatoes or Brazil Nuts, Bananas are the most significant source.).
Granite is mostly radioactive because of Uranium, and this decays resulting in elevated Radon gas levels. Thorium's decay chain also results in Radon being produced at one point.
This leads to some conclusions. 1. The risk from a radioactive substance is best determined by considering the whole decay process, including the role various isotopes play in biology, and 2. Zombies should refrain from eating either me or Granite countertops.
Fortunately, we have found more and more uses for them, so, for example, what was once a laboratory curiosity and mere byproduct of extracting, say, palladium, now is a useful material on its own (Rhenium, one of the rarest of the rare earths, but now available in amounts sufficient to show its use in one of the highest grade steel alloys).
In the 1940's we used relatively low tech gaseous diffusion processes to extract Uranium 235 from material that was already all Uranium, but mostly isotope 238, and we had no uses at all for many of the rejected portions (we came up with most uses for 'depleted' Uranium only after we had a lot laying around). Separating chemically similar but distinct elements certainly isn't any harder than that. In fact, if there is no way to separate them chemically, isotopic separation is exactly what would still work.
The Thorium alone is effectively worth as much as Uranium for good old fashioned large reactor fuel. Arguably, its worth much more since it enables fundamentally safer reactors and longer term social stability. Now somebody is suggesting it can be used in an application where Uranium turned out to be basically inadequate - powering personal vehicles - which is a tremendous added payoff. Plus, we have a big list of uses for most of the 'byproducts'. If it was, say, only 20% of a cost effective solution to build the US nuclear arsenal, it's still highly cost effective to develop both Thorium power production and generalised rare earth/lanthanide separation methods.
But, that's like saying that diseases kill vastly more people than terrorism, and it might be cost effective to spend more money on fighting, say, Cancer, and less on fighting the Taliban. You can advocate it all you want, but who will believe mere math?
The way law generally works, more than one person can be fully responsible for a single crime. We can hold everyone culpable in a bank robbery guilty of murder for one elderly security guard who has a heart attack, including the guy who was 'just' driving the getaway car, for just one example. There are usually particular reasons and limitations on how the law works for such cases of multiple blame.* I'm not clear just where you are advocating redrawing those lines. For example, if several people fired firearms at the same person, would you prosecute an actual murder charge only against the one that actually hit their target, or perhaps the one who hit nearest a normally lethal zone? Do you see the others as still guilty of attempted murder since they did each do some actual act, or does the fact that the victim didn't get 'attempted murdered' but actually murdered mean the other acts don't matter?
* For your example, the law doesn't want to argue a lot of internal, subjective, state of mind issues, so whether the hit man would have been fully inclined to kill the victim just for a cash offer or had to be persuaded by various other arguments offered by the person soliciting the hit is something the law wants to avoid getting too deep into. Overlapping, shared responsibility means a judge or prosecutor can spend less time bring state of mind related issues before the jury. Prove that both people had, at some points, intent for a particular person to die, and the intent was accomplished by both of them taking actions (such as one telling the other one where a good spot to catch the victim alone was, not just the one action of, say, pulling a trigger), and you don't have to spend days debating just how cold blooded each person was, whether either of them might have changed their mind if things had been just a little bit different, and other intangible or speculative issues that might be presented if blame for a single act is a fixed value that has to be awarded to just one, or even if it's allowed to be divided between everyone involved.
Mach 1 is normally measured as at sea level, because it is based on the average temperature of air molecules at that same level. When you go high enough, temperature gets significant, as the hotter molecules tend to rise to the top. Speed of sound generally increases with altitude. Pitot tubes and such work with what air they have to measure Mach, and at least until modern computing, that raw data is ALL they gave a pilot, so what they report is normally 'distorted' by both local temperature and by wind-speed. Originally, a Mach meter didn't know how high a plane was at all, and instead reported speed in knots per hour, with a mark on the analog gauge that really only meant, "if you were at sea level, you'd definitely be above the speed of sound now, but what you actually see outside the window may vary", Now-a-days, fancy little boxes in the avionics systems may give a pilot or remote operator adjusted Mach values. A pilot doesn't usually want to know Mach, rather he or she would prefer a few seconds warning when they are about to pass into supersonic and hypersonic regions under local conditions.
Somehow the thought of Sarah Palin encrypting a moose just doesn't work for me. ... Oh, encrypting... Nevermind! (/Emily Latella)
(Emily Latella) I don't usually pay for porn with it all over the internet, but
Personally, I'd respect your right to seek redress for actual monetary damages. I'm definitely OK with you having that right for the 28 years it ran prior to the 1970's. I'll go farther than what you had under pre 1976 law, and support a few additional legal priniciples:
1. I support you having a right to extend a suit to include triple actual damages where there are certain aggravating circumstances, such as commercial infringement for profit. I sort of support those same increased penalties for non-commercial infringement if the other party has done enough, i.e. ignored warnings, committed repeated torts, etc, but I want just how serious those additional factors have to be, spelled out better than my rough list, before the courts start applying the sort of law I'm just sketching out here.
2. I support a simple process for registering copyrighted works so as to get protection, with either all costs part of what my own taxes help pay for, or at most a very nominal fee for initial registration, just so we keep the overall period fair. By fair I include that it should be the same length for every creator, and not favor younger or longer lived people, over older or medically disadvantaged ones. You're welcome to debate just what else you think should be included in that admittedly loaded word, 'fair'.
There are some other things I think are desirable in this system you may not like, besides the shorter term itself:
1. If people insist on extending periods to more than 28 years total, I would favor making there be some real, significant fees involved for the extension. I don't really see a system where people have full blanket coverage for 50 years plus without bothering to register the work at all as even remotely workable - too many cases of trying to fudge publication date to get extended protection, saddling the court with a lot of having to settle claims that can't be documented.
2. I don't want any 'stretching' or 'blending 'of copyright to cover other IP issues, such as trade secrets, patents or trademarks. For example, assuming you can still patent software under this sort of copyright system, no patenting a work and then claiming copyright also applies after the patent expires in 20 years.
3. Actual damages are not statutory damages. You should be able to show at least some probable cause that you have actually lost money to win a lawsuit. Actual damages from other sorts of abuses, i.e. if the American Kid Fiddlers Party prints copies of your book and sells it, claiming you endorse their platform, may be actionable as slander or libel, but what the 'French style' or 'moral' copyright system is trying to protect authors from isn't appropriate to tie to US copyright law. Damage to your reputation may be actionable, but not by invoking copyright law.
Something I think authors and other creators ought to know: When copyright went from 28 years to about twice that long, costs of enforcement didn't just double, and when It went to life plus rules, costs did not just double again. Going back that far retroactively meant for many claims the lawyers had to include a lot of court records from the Great depression era, and those are tangled, convoluted, and are often the work of judges who were hastily disposing of mostly physical assets from bankrupt companies, and had no idea that the IP parts of those assets would ever be worth money again. The costs of doing a decent search on many older works didn't just double, they went up by a factor of 10 or so. Add just such factors as, for one example, the average rate that film stock decays at and how many older films have or will mold away in the vaults before release, and that the law did away with registration requirements that helped levy the cost of litigation, and you could make a good case that the overall costs to society of enforcing the Sonny Bono Act and subsequent legislation have been a forty or fifty-fold increase in costs to be born by the typical taxpayer. Yes, that sounds hyperbolic, but that film stock issue is mirrored by
Two sentences of yours, put together make one of the major points most people are missing here.
That point is, "While the US arguably deserves less than an AAA rating, S&P is doing an incredibly lousy job of rating things, so why should they have the influence they do?"
Let's imagine something traditional on Slashdot, a car analogy: Suppose Consumer Reports reviewed a car series (the Wallaby Baloonfire model three-door touring sedan) that usually gets a lot of five star ratings, and this year they gave the new Wallaby X-4000 only four out of five stars on fuel economy, crash worthyness, etc. They even cite some very good reasons (that is reasons you might agree with or even ones with solid numbers behind them). You might hope more people listen to consumer reports and buy some other car. You might think it would benefit you if another make you already own becomes more popular, or it might benefit them with all the advantages of driving their kids to school in a safer car - whether you are being altruistic, pragmatic, or utterly self focused doesn't really matter on whether you think the report is likely to be of benefit in general. But lets suppose you find a slightly dog-eared copy of Consumer Reports from 2 years ago in your dentist's waiting room. There's this glowing five star review of what you now know turned out to be the Dahlmer-Manson 2008 Kiddkillermobile...
I don't blame any lender for deciding that the US has increasingly severe problems with reliability and they want a higher rate if they loan us money in the future. That doesn't mean I don't think any lender that still listens to S&P or uses them to justify its decisions is a fool. Why is S&P's decision significant? Because after getting a whole bunch of things dead wrong, they finally said something where we don't really know yet but it looks like they just could be right? Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (if it's analog), and S&P is a stopped clock.
Standard and poor is evidently also "so left-of-center", since their own spokesman cited not swiftly raising the debt ceiling before addressing the rest of the cuts that needed to be made as the very first reason they reduced the rating. It would appear even a bunch of wall street bankers are too hippy-commie-liberal from your POV, which is why America is swiftly going to hell.
To be fair, USENET also took a step towards this by simply creating the Alt. domain, and another step by allowing unmoderated groups to be created in it.
While I agree with you that the first amendment is about controlling the government suppressing speech and not a lot of other things that people try to stretch it into, there's a corollary. That is, any time someone has to resort to anonymity because of a genuinely well founded fear of a private stalker, nut-case fan (like Letterman's), paparazzi, identity thief or similar, that person has immediately had enormous damage done in a free society. The stalker, identity thief, or whatever has taken away their normal right to sign their name to what they believe, made it so that the person looks like a coward who won't identify themselves with their political (or related) speech instead of that person hiding because of the criminal.
The stalker (again add identity thieves, or whatever other criminals you think fit) has deprived their victim of normal chances to be taken seriously by many other people, and so hurt all the other people who were affected if they did what seems superficially logical and ignored speech from people who appear to be too cowardly to stand behind what they say.
This means that the penalties for being a stalker, identity thief, etc. ought to be extremely much more severe than they are. All these crimes are revealed as hate crimes, with many victims other than the obvious one.
Possibly you or I were hurt right here on Slashdot, because somebody would have posted something either of us might have valued, if it had it been posted as other than AC. All it takes is the quite reasonable decision to filter ACs or often just to read at above -1, to avoid all the people who genuinely deserve the C part of AC. If only the others didn't have a private situation making them choose that option we might have appreciated that post, and so long as that's true, we become secondary victims (admittedly to a much, much lesser extent than the primary victim, but still victims).
So what's a reasonable penalty for stalking? What's reasonable for identity theft? Even if some parts of being followed by cameramen and reporters are simply a price of being famous and should stay legal, what's a reasonable penalty if the press crosses the line into beyond legal? Sounds like all those things should be up there with murder, rape and arson.
Pipeline!
Uuhhm... Very flexible pipeline, with a bunch of joints like bendy straws... and when it passes close to the Sun, we'll only pump at night... look, if you really want this, you're gonna have to give me a grant...
To be fair, the lava was red, the acid, acid green (or that was very mean algae in those ponds). I seem to remember some very brightly hued things, all of which killed your character quite efficiently. And there were some levels where a bluish gray predominated. One fourth of Q1 was the Medieval style levels, and by all accounts that whole era in the real world was brown all the time, so maybe they can claim historical accuracy. ;-) Quake 2 actually was better - there were levels where the Stroggs had things lit up with a thousand points of blue white laser communications grids, throbbing power-plants, and display screens to where it was often quite pretty. All too many fans criticized that, in effect demanding more brown whether that's what they meant or not. In the same way, there were reviewers and players who criticized the stained glass windows in Hexen.
Just as a guestimate, a quarter of the posts on this thread will involve somebody complaining in such a way that, if the company actually listens to those complaints and does exactly what they imply should be done, the complainer will still end up very disappointed that they got exactly what they asked for.
Basically the advertiser thinks of it as either a one step process or a two step, depending on their model of what's most efficient.
Either they 1. just want to know whatever will motivate person X to give them money.
Or they want to first know 1. whether person X actually has any spare money, that the advertiser can get without too much bother, and then learn 2. whatever will motivate that subgroup of person Xes, the ones with spare money and without issues that will become too much bother, to give the advertiser some.
Advertisers only care about locations if their profit margin depends on where they ship to. They only care about age if someone has decided they will get very few sales to people above a certain age AND more complaints to be resolved, tech support requests or some other cost factor from those people of a certain age, (usually defined by the advertiser as older than age N, where N is often about 35, but sometimes around 47). An advertiser will want any information, however private, if they think it will impact whether an initial sale is made, whether there's a chance of repeat business, and whether there's a chance of a cost being incurred in the future.
An advertiser that has committed to prescreening likely clients usually only wants the client's name, if it has been shown they see more successful sales to a particular ethnic group, and the last name has some power at identifying such groups (So an advertiser just might care if your last name identifies you as likely to be Irish, as in O'Brien, or Chinese as for Wong, and yet not care about it at all if your last name is Lee, (because they don't know if its English based Lee or Korean based Lee), or if it's Kovalski, suggesting you are of Polish extraction, as they may have a study that says the Chinese American community, on average, pays their monthly installments on time, The Irish community tends to run late, and the study didn't look at Eastern Europeans one way or another. ). Often, these studies are full of biases from the people who run them, or the people who commission them, and usually get told what they want to hear. There are plenty of advertisers in the US, for example, who expect certain ethnicities to be harder to sell to, or likely to default, or to make scenes or file lawsuits - they just don't usually go around announcing that they make decisions based on this factor.
Advertisers that have decided prescreening their sales base is worth it will try to find ways to collect data even if its considered very private, like medical histories. For example, an advertiser who has come to greatly detest nuisance lawsuits is likely to want mental health data or court records if they think it will cut down on such suits, and generally considers such things as HIPAA rules government over-regulation if they get in the way.
So, we're talking Britain here. There's still splinter groups out there from the IRA who also have spokespersons. There's people who blow up subway cars who have spokespersons. The idea here is to use a route that still protects the real core of damage causers, meaning your spokesperson doesn't really know all that much. Maybe one or more of those meatspace groups won't bother to call in and take 'responsibility' for the next atrocity and the British government will be left wondering just which group did it. A government that goes after spokespersons better have reason to think they can provide important, even vital data, or there's a big downside. Going after one for possibly knowing 'something' is simultaneously saying the group you are after isn't a real threat and you're confident your actions won't provoke them more than the info the spokesperson gives you is worth. Do you see any reason why the British government can make such a claim to its citizens?
Now when people ask me why I use Seamonkey I can tell them it's because we have a horde of unpaid Beta Testers called Opera uses, who debug all the features for a full year before we adopt them. ;-)
Deduce is preferred, but for a few similar usages of deduct, see A. C. Doyle's "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" or several other works in the canon. Deduct is at least technically acceptable, in the manner of saying "Ruffles are Rugose" instead of the standard potato chip motto.
Yeah, I got Internet Explorer to run on Windows back in Windows 95 days, AND I GOT IT TO RUN ON THE INTERNETZ!!! Sometimes it kept running for 15 minutes or more. This Anonymous Coward guy is making a mistake, and we can't allow one of those on Slashdot or it might spread to the real internet. Fortunately, we're all incredibly gifted with smarts or patience, so we can either fix it or just outwait Anonymous Coward. He can't keep posting this much for long, his fingertips will wear off.
Where is this left wing press you believe exists?
I remember when the Blagojevich scandal started, and MSNBC quoted some of Blagojevich's people saying that the whole Obama election team was a bunch of boy scouts who wouldn't bend the rules an inch, and their commentator said it sounded like Obama was involved in Chicago politics as usual, and the Times Headline did the same quotes and yet read "Obama has some explaining to do." I'm sorry, but when the perp says you were Mr. clean cut, rah-rah go Team Apple Pie is when you DON'T have any explaining to do. It's when your NOT playing by Chicago rules. Do you count MSNBC or the NYT as parts of that left wing? Go look at the headlines the supposedly left wing parts of the press floated for Obama's involvement in that story, and then ask yourself if they were really trying to drive the country towards the left? Or were they just slinging mud and seeing how the public took it?
Or look at the US coverage of the tragedy in Norway. How many US papers and TV news outlets have mentioned that the youth camp shot up was for the Norwegian Labor Party (their center left, and the party currently holding the most power), and the scumbag that did it was entirely politically motivated, by his own accounts. If the media was largely left leaning, don't you think this would be played (quite fairly) as a conservative deciding specifically to kill liberal babies? Instead the political side has gone largely unmentioned, and completely omitted on some major channels. MSNBC has some mention of it 12 paragraphs down in their latest update as I write this. USA today has been careful to just call it an island youth retreat. Right now, the west has had over a dozen cases of Right Wing nuts killing people they saw as Left, since Bush 43 left office, and that 'left wing press' seems strangely reluctant to point out that, in terms of killing children, left and right don't seem to have the same scores. Your 'left wing press' seems to ignore that fact, or at best say "Oooh! there's terrorists on the left too - they burned a car lot full of SUVs, that's equally bad. There, we've reported it balanced.".
KDE here, with the cutting edge repositories for Kubuntu enabled. KDE is pretty damned stable, and with Bespin for window appearance and such has people asking me if that's Apple Lion or some sneak preview of Windows 8 I'm running (and I didn't even turn on wobbly windows). But, worrying about what Gnome calls System Settings one way or the other is still a waste! People shouldn't worry so much about what to call a part of the "Control Panel". Use the names Microsoft uses, or pick a name you think adds more information.
Please: Don't demand standard names just for popularity.
Don't demand different names just because Foo doesn't implement every control Bar does under the same section (or at all).
Don't do it just because Microsoft does it that way.
Don't do it just to make it clearer Linux is not Windows - believe it or not, most people get that part.
What those someone else's mentioned is the "federal funds rate". This is is the interest rate at which depository institutions lend balances at the Federal Reserve to other depository institutions overnight. It's currently running at 0.0% to 0.25% depending on just who is doing the asking and the loaning.
There's no theoretical obstacle to taking very short term loans like these every normal banking day of the year, so, in theory, one receiving depository could borrow about 288 trillion dollars in the course of a year without the lending institution ever having more than 1 trillion out. These are huge banks that do plenty of business at night, on weekends and such, and maybe they could also borrow at the best rate on odd weekends or holidays, but supposedly, member institutions are supposed to plan for such routine conditions as a lot of people wanting some spending money for Friday evening, or Social Security checks coming on the 3rd of the month, so maybe they would have a hard time getting immediate coverage on some days for some situations.
In practice, if one particular bank needed to borrow overnight nearly that often, eventually its interest rate would start to go above these marginal courtesy rates and if it was still having the same problems, soon the other depositories would make individual decisions to stop lending to them at all, but the reserve rules don't force all the banks into lockstep on doing these deals.
15 trillion can be explained if the average member reserve bank borrows overnight about once a month, and that would result in an average risk of 'only' 1/2 a trillion total. Since the numbers are probably not that evenly distributed, real worst case risk might have been 0.75 trillion or even 1 full trillion on some particular days.
What economy couldn't be ruined by the dreams of the mediaeval alchemyste? You think the EU or China are in any better position to weather the changes resulting from Eternal Youth? Maybe the Hopi...