I served in the U.S. armed forces for 13 years, and am convinced the best war would be fought on a tropical island, using paintball or laser-tag weaponry, and allowing 15 minute breaks every two hours, plus weekends off. Winner gets whatever political point was being fought over but has to pick up the whole bar tab. If we spread it over several islands the Marines could play too.
Warning: We did have a US invasion of the USA once (Lee went north of the line into Pennsylvania, then a bit later Sherman went way, way south of the line, and finally, Sherman, Grant, and Sheridan all met up for the photo-op so everybody got to feel invaded at least a little, some a lot.), and that wasn't nearly as fun as either of our proposals.
1. By reducing our dependence on foreign oil, so we aren't pressured to depose their governments and put in people the oil companies like better (e.g. the Shah of Iran). By the way, reducing dependence was originally a doctrine proposed by Henry Kissinger way back during the Nixon years, and endorsed by both Reagan and Bush 43 in speeches they made during their terms. 2. By giving us an alternative to Nuclear, so those Muslem suicide bombers YOU want to blame for the whole problem of war, don't use it to extend their bomb blast radius by three or four orders of magnetude. That's originally from the Carter administration, but endorsed by Bush 41, 43, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and plenty of other republicans before they found out Obama had written a college paper relating to the subject.
You're the one who has claimed that Muslem suicide bombers are a very serious problem, justifying a 480 Billion a year budget and a rapidly growing deficit, but that we don't need to worry about that very serious problem getting funds from what we spend on oil, or using some of the other alternatives against us. That's crazy talk - either they are a big problem or they aren't, but there's no possible middle ground where they are not a threat but worth spending 480 billion a year to counter.
The real point is you hate the president, nothing he will ever do will ever please you, and if you have to simultaniously quake in fear of those Muslem terrorists and think they are no big deal whenever he takes a rational step to deal with them, you are capable of the double-think required to preserve your hate.
Grok is the ultimate word to NOT take literally. Taking it literally means you didn't grok it at all. Still, I think you grok Apple just fine. Next question is, Can Steve Jobs sit lotus at the bottom of a swimming pool for longer than Percy Jackson?
Complex choices are certainly a big part of the problem, but still only part. Some Slashdotters tend to think the whole problem is dumb users who can't handle too many choices, when it's really as often a case of a dumb marketer who couldn't figure out how to distribute features sensibly among all those choices. Witness Dell, where some higher end product lines don't have higher grade versions of Windows among their options.
To use one of those lousy car analogies, what would we think of a car maker who offered a V-8 option with its budget subcompact, but not with its sports or luxury sedan models? It's not an end user 'too many choices' problem when the marketing department has already pre-made the dumb choices.
Improving education is the ultimate answer, but that's for so many things. People ought to grow up with a better understanding of their whole culture, of the arts and letters, of history and philosophy and generally how to think and learn, not just science. A person who knows nothing of modern Physics, but who understands how to judge whether a historical account is truth or propaganda, and in what measure, can probably swiftly master enough of an area where Physics matters, such as nuclear power generation, to vote intelligently. That person will probably understand why they need to master more so when questions come up, and have the skills to learn as needed.
The most 'dumbed down' version of the theory of Evolution is Social Darwinism. The people who oppose Social Darwinism by and large aren't poorly educated and socially backwards creationists, they are people with an intellectual commitment to genuine democracy, but whose education has mostly been in the humanities, not the sciences. Claiming they oppose the versions of the theory of Evolution they commonly hear because they are the sort who build museums where cave-people ride dinosaurs just makes them think all the Evolutionists are Nazis trying to undermine intellectual opposition to the next wave of putting people into camps. Teaching them more science may be part of the solution there, but getting the people who claim to support Evolution but teach that its all about purging inferior types out of the cover of mainstream science is at least equally important.
The 'hurricanes increase with more patches of warmer water where they form' theory is pretty good, and likely true, but it's a sort of separate rider on the main hypothesis. Specific damage estimates aren't even that, because all the climatology can be right, but there can be flaws in the economic side that make the conclusion off by orders of magnitude. There - that's what's so difficult - you set out to explain the main theory, got sidetracked swiftly into possible tangentals, and by not 'admitting' that you were adding in additional assumptions, look at least a little shady. Of course, you aren't trying to gloss over sources of inaccuracy, you're just trying to sum up without it getting too complex, but some of these people are already thinking you are speaking for the very father of lies, so maybe it makes sense to phrase everything like the person you are addressing is trying extra hard to spot any lies you might tell. As simple as possible, but no simpler.
Let me give you a similar scientific/public situation. There are a lot of not real scientifically educated people who think the Paleontologists actually always do whole reconstructions from a single bone. (Loren Eisley used to complain that he got that question every single press conference "Say Doc, is it true you fellas always work from just a single bone?"). So, it's important for anyone talking to the public about something such as dinosaurs to stress what the raw evidence they have is, as in "We have found the sixth complete fossil of a T-Rex, and we have 35 more partials. With six, we have enough examples to be sure this one was a mature female. So far, the females seem to average a bit bigger than the males, but we'd like to find a few more good specimens to check that".
Really ignorant people won't believe we can tell which specimens were male and which female until they first understand we have more than a single foot bone or something to go on, and less ignorant people will spot a veracity problem if the scientist claims to be as highly confident of how sexually dimorphic the species was, as whether we can tell them apart at all. I've long wished for a child's book on dinosaurs that says "We have over 500 complete specimens of this one, including old ones, adolescents, and infants just hatching." and where needed, "our best fossil for this one is only a front half. Because it seems most closely related to this other one, we are pretty confident it looked mostly like this.". A little honesty openly displayed to the next generation would go a long way in getting people to trust the method itself, and maybe its practitioners.
The direct energy costs of old gear can certainly be higher, and don't usually make a good argument for saving it, but figuring total energy costs, as including clean up of toxics in the old gear, will usually tip the balance.
Some of it is about where you use the item, for example a CRT will inevitably use a lot more power than an LCD or other thinscreen, so much that it's probably the worst case on energy savings - but even there, what if you hook the CRT to a server where it seldom needs to be active? It's an alternative to going headless and remotely administering the machine, and some machines/OSs need the alternative.
What happens if you add a huge old full color monitor to a camera security array, where you normally watch everything in six or eight small B & W windows on one more modern monitor, but occasionally have a need to pipe one view onto a larger screen for review? You only need it to look back at a recorded image, say of a possible shoplifing, in rare cases where the normal image was vague and you want to be sure you saw what you thought you did, or that your evidence is up to proceeding in court, situations such as that.
How often would you need to fire up the screen for a dedicated music computer that's part of your stereo - half an hour per day or less to make a massive playlist, and a few minutes to load a new one once you have a few made, then it's off again? Delaying having to junk that old CRT by a few years, until it actually burns out, and giving your area time to build better recycling facilities, might even be worth it from a pure energy standpoint for this worst case.
Right now, I assume that floppy drives, zip, 120's, most tape drives and such are not worth the bother, but it might be worth preserving a CD writer (not a basic reader). Exceptionally small CRT monitors can be more useful than standard sizes - a boxy 12 inch diagonal vrs. a much lighter 17 inch thinscreen sounds like no contest, but realworld spaces are 3D, and the old monitor may fit conveniently where the newer one's 2 D profile doesn't.
USB 2 and 3 didn't make USB 1/1.1 obsolete at all. Some devices simply don't need fast.
Whole older boxes staying useful sometimes depends as much on space as power. If there's a big basement and you can set up a LAN, a bunch of P2s can run one heck of a lan party with old copies of Quake or new ones of Openarena, or even go back to Hexen or Doom 2. I've seen this at the level of a college dorm with an unused meeting room where every box has pretty modern hardware graphics acceleration, and alternately at the level of a boyscout troop that was running kid friendly lan-parties on 400 Mhz Pentium 2s and AMDs mixed.
And young man goes on journey, sees many exotic things, meets new people who think differently than his native tribe, and experiences some maturing specifically because of travel is a whole type of story in itself, one that traditionally stops about when the young man puts down roots back home and doesn't traditionally try to answer the questions of how he will use his newfound knowledge after he resolves the conflict that drove him to travel in the first place.
There's probably plenty of valid criticisms of Tron, but expecting some things of it is like criticising Huckleberry Finn for not describing what Huck does as an adult after the raft ride ends.
Tron was a Disney film, which somehow still went out on a bit of a political limb and made a statement about whether 'religious' experiences (in the cyberworld), might have a rational underlying explanation, and how many generations of time (at cyberworld speeds) might imbue mundane physical and pragmatic events with a religious symbolic venier. Still Disney left it as a rather complex and multi-leveled theme rather than dumb it down to Rah-Rah "Flynn is Jesus" total oblivion. They too the time to introduce a few sympathetic characters and get the audience to identify them as good guys, then bring up spirituality in a way that didn't autoconfirm they were the good side, but instead made you wonder if they were a little skewed or misinterpreting what Tron was trying to do. John Warner's character isn't just nasty, he's specifically Miltonic. The question of whether his pride is his greatest flaw isn't just raised, but it's addressed by both visual and verbal references to Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno. Yeah, those points whizzed right over my head at that age too.
And I would only want one of the five production light cycles if they steer better than they look to do, and with the electric engine option if it actually gets good range, so I suspect the actual experience would be disappointing.
The thing is, there's usually something happening every few months between the US and any nation it has trouble with. Publicise a problem with North Korea one month, everyone guesses it relates to missle testing. Wait a month, and it must have something to do with them holding some hikers who supposedly strayed across the border. Wait one more and it has something to do with them arguing with Japan, or South Korea, or China. Either the government never goes public at all, or it goes public when something is happening and some people craft a theory that the two factors are related.
Plus if "V" makes that lucky guess on one question, all the other BS is presumed to be at least a little believable. V tells you the name of a contact, "it must also be the truth", so even when you check out that guy and it just isn't possible, you're never completely sure he's clean. maybe you should torture him too, only what if that's what the Ruskies want?
V says the Ruskies are spending millions on psychic research, now you gotta spend tens of millions on trying to find loyal Americans who can kill goats with their minds too. V says that South American politician who died of an apparent heart attack a few years ago was actually a test of a new, untraceable poison, sorry he doesn't remember the guy's name or just when, you gotta fund a chemical research program or something.
How about, you view an ad when you go to the distribution site. At the beginning and end of a full TV episode or film, you see a black screen, with "This show is brought to you without commercial interruption by General Motors. We hope you enjoy our presentation.". That worked for the first few years of TV, and kept working for a lot longer for selected products (Hallmark Hall of Fame, for one, lasted about 40 years on that model).
Or how about product placement - do you think Burger King is concerned about people seeing Iron Man on bootleg copies when that's still another ad for Whoppers as far as they are concerned, and you can't download a Whopper? A 'stolen' copy of Iron Man is still a successful ad delivery, and maybe the real problem is the makers of Iron Man are missing out on selling that slot to BK based on projected total views instead of officially purchased copies (or maybe they did take that into account and are complaining anyway).
The original "Hotel" TV show was originally called the Marriott Hotel, and made sure there were Marriott establishing shots at the beginning of each episode, but ran without commercial breaks. Maybe, something like that would still annoy you, just like a 10 second verbal every 3 min 27 seconds for pop music would be pretty intrusive after a bit, but if that 10 seconds came every 10 songs, or full album, or you listened to really long tracks and only heard it once an hour or so, there's probably some level of exposure you'd find quite pleasant.
For most of us, there's a pretty acceptable level, as in "I'd flock to a TV channel where the commercials came only at the beginning and end of the show, or even only every 30 minutes.".
Selectively targeting people who are likely to make mistakes such that they end up with too much debt to have descressionary income? But that would mean the music and movie sellers business model was counting on their being one born every minute. Is the whole argument over piracy really about propping up businesses that are assuming their preferred customers will always be replaced by other morons, those morons will always get extra spending money somehow, and the base will never wise up or all go broke at once?
Entertainment can even include switching to local, Non-RIAA bands, or the extra cost to grill at the lake instead of cook at home, the gas to visit a state park, sports equipment, etc.
Plus, is piracy really free (as in beer)? Monthly long retention Usenet service fees, huge hard drives, stacks of blank DVDs and cases, commercial burning or label-making software, power supply, ram and processor upgrades, a lot of cheap pirates are still spending at least some money somewhere to make it happen. 13 bucks a month to Giganews is 13 bucks a month that could go to a legal service offering movies, and the 20 bucks extra in some locations for unlimited download cable over capped download ADSL is another $20 that could go to some legal source, and so on. How many people could get by with 8 or 10 year old PCs if they weren't torrenting? How many wouldn't bother with color ink cartridges if they weren't printing labels?
So, if most pirates are still paying something here and there, the real problem is music and movies in the *IAA formats don't seem like a good value compared to the alternatives. That means things such as unskippable trailers on DVDs or Region Encoding really do change perceived value enough to matter to sales, and it's not all accountable as "people are cheap".
Obviously, not all students or recent grads or young people in general stick to a budget. But isn't it better for society if more of them do, and more people learn to budget younger?
So long as there are tremendous interest rate differentials, society takes the hits for even a few idiots. One fool who signs a contract for a $4,000 big screen color TV at 36% and defaults, has as much negative impact as 18 wiser heads have positive impact by saving $4,000 each, if their return is only 2%. We could do a lot of financially educating people and never get anywhere near to where the ratio is better than 18/19ths wise people. So long as there are bail outs, you, me, and even the RIAA take a big economic hit waiting to get the fast growing economy we might have with better than 18/19ths smart budgeters.
You're claiming the grandparent argument is fundamentally flawed. Either you really meant to claim that no college student or recent grad can make a budget, which is obvious trolling, or I'll give you credit for sanity and assume you really meant not enough of them do. That's true, but when the rules are structured so that enough equals better than 18 in 19, what you really just said is the fundamental flaw is that the whole US economy can't work, period. So, are you a troll or a commie? I'm not really trying to make you look like either one here, but if we give the benefit of a doubt as to trolling, I think it's only fair to warn you you have reasoned your way to a point where the entire republican right would call you a dirty commie commie hippy libtard.
I use a couple of wireless mouses, both from Microsoft. One's an Arcmouse, the other's a Wireless Mobile 3000.
I recently switched to using rechargeable batteries for every device that could take them, everywhere in my home, and powering the chargers off a small solar panel on the roof. I did this primarily so now if I lose grid power for days or even weeks I'll still have flashlights, emergency radio and such, but I bought enough batteries for my MP3 players, mouses, and the rest as well. (And, for the thinking impaired, no I don't expect to have the computers run for days off the grid just because the mouses will).
While I'm pretty satisfied with these mouses over all, it's worth mentioning that they now 'fail funny' when the battery gets low. The red warning lights in the mouses don't even come on until the battery is so low the devices are malfunctioning, and instead of seeing hesitation or intermittent pointer movement, the failure mode seems to involve the pointer suddenly jumping across the screen, or several button clicks doing nothing and then suddenly being applied all at once, and other such odd effects. I'm not sure why there are rechargeable mouses yet non-rechargeable wireless mouses should have so much odd failing behavior when fitted with rechargeable batteries. This happens with both regular NiMH and Platinum rechargables as well.
I never have bought a mouse that was cradle rechargeable straight from the factory, which leads me to wonder, do these have a distinctive failure mode as well?
Any person who can represent a company in legal matters isn't a low paid drone. Ultimately, if a company has 'low paid drones' making decisions, or being the only point of contact to apply decisions, the company has made those people legal agents. If they aren't trained as legal agents, don't actually know what the law requires, don't have the right to sign contracts for the company and so on, yet they are the only people you can speak with, then the company is trying to do business without making its legal agents available.
I am currently a legal agent for two banks, and have had training in what I can and can't promise for those banks, plus I know damned well that the law requires me to make specific points and means of contact with our lawyers available in writing and explain certain legal rights to all clients both in writing and verbally.
Banks face tough rules (well lending banks do, maybe not the big boy investment banks, or prime lenders of resort), but everyone incorporated has to have a sharp line between general workers and people authorised to represent the company. If you ever find yourself doing business with someone and they can't explain which side of that line they fall on, the solution is to not do business with them. (I hate to even say this - it feels like saying, "If the wires appear to be carrying current, don't stick them in your ears" - but somehow, a lot of people don't get this one.).
There will be real effects. Consider - in the US we have had recent obscenity convictions against some porn producers seen as turning out content especially degrading to women (slapping, punching, spitting in faces, and faux rape.). We haven't had anything in well over a decade focused on non-violent porn, targeting gay porn selectively has apparently died out even in the south, and even such things as bondage and fisting videos get a pass, (but many of them are careful to have spoken discliamers from the submissives involved and various "no sluts were harmed in the making of this video" claims included to protect themselves). Scat probably would draw legal action, but the mainstream producers haven't tried that. The industry has been vocally extremely divided over violence for the last few years.
I'd just about bet real money that some porn producers will use.xxx to prove they are being responsible corporations and trying to keep their material out of the hands of minors, because that would be another way to protect themselves from prosecution, and they seem to be willing to go to some trouble over creating an image that they are not one of 'those' porn businesses, but rather one of the 'other' ones. Some will see it as a financial hit to move content exclusively to.xxx domains, but others will see it as another way to avoid being the rare porn producer singled out.
The bigest force actually working against this is the evangelical right, which usually sees no difference between a Girls Gone Wild video and Underaged Wet Mule Sodomizers part 83. If they focused their complaints on the companies that produce the kinkiest stuff, they'd get a lot more results from various justice departments, but then they would have to admit that some porn producers really do care if all the 'models' are over 18, really do show safe sex practices, or avoid violent sex, so don't hold your breath.
I've always wondered, did Von Braun deal with those statements as he was portrayed in the Right Stuff? Werner was both a pretty smart guy, and a former Nazi - I would kind of expect he would integrate the idea of using propaganda to manipulate the public in about 0.037 seconds and be enthusiastically telling the press whatever would push the right buttons.
Art is certainly rare in porn, but it's pretty rare in commercial television as well - perhaps the real question is, is it getting rarer? Satire and Parody tend to count as artistic values. I don't know if there's anything like parodies coming out nowdays, but back during the 70's - 80s, there were. Many films had titles such as '8 to 4' (parodying '9 to 5'), or Flesh Gordon (which ended up being distributed as nonporn or at least softcore, because the funny parts were, well, funny enough to stand on their own.) You could just about bet there would be a porno version of some films, because you could see how some of the parts that could easily be parodied would be sexual humor.
As for "minor", for some people, everything short of Shakespeare or at least Beckett is minor. Tons of directors could aspire to make the great XXX commentary on the human condition, and it's quite possible not one of them would hit such a high mark. Devil in Miss Jones definitely aspired to say something about religious repression of natural human desires, but did it actually say anything at all important? I doubt anyone in the porn industry today is even aiming that high, but I doubt that people in the TV industry get as much freedom and/or resource commitment when they try to break out of cliche land as they once did. Maybe porn is facing the same problem as video media in general, more than something unique to porn.
There's some real interest in theoretical physics circles in defining what 'impossible' means. For example, if the universe runs down, as in the classic big bang with an open value for Omega, there comes times when the probabilities of certain things happening that require large enough energy differentials to happen classically become less than 1/whole remaining lifetime of the universe. It may be that there's no meaningful distinction between an event having a chance of 1/2 to happen just once in just one location over the entire lifetime of the universe, and having a 1 in 400 or 1 in 957,623 chance under the same limitations. In some models, particularly if there aren't multiple 'parallel' universes, those all really mean ZERO, not just itty-bitty.
Does this really mean that those types of events become impossible rather than just very improbable? Is a non-classical event, i.e. quantum tunneling, ever completely impossible instead of just increasingly improbable, for the same models of the universe?
What this implies for your arbitrarily large values may be nothing at all, but depending on what type of universe this is, at the least, maybe all probabilities less than some deterministic value really equal exactly zero. And there are some fairly simple math tricks for expressing an 'arbitrarily' large chance as the opposite outcome of one or some really small chances, which could mean some of your "arbitrarily large"'s actually equal a very non-arbitrary 1.
This gets some weird predictions that seem to actually fit our (admittedly very limited) observations. The chance of life evolving somewhere in our particular universe could be 1, while the chance of it evolving more than once could still be 0. While such a thing sounds statistically unlikely, it stops being necessarily an extreme long shot, if our universe is both unique and destined to simply run down, approaching absolute zero temperature over many aeons. There's probably a simpler or more straight-forward explanation for why we are here but we haven't yet found evidence of anybody else.
So congratulations on asking a question which may one day be answerable, but it turns out isn't just yet.
Bill Gates could afford to drop out of Harvard for something that looked better. That's the typical situation for most of our wealthyest. Surely, if Warren Buffett's dad had sent him to an Ivy League school, it would have been with the understanding that that was THE big break and Warren needed to do everything he could to maximise it, but Warren's the exception. Note carefully what I am saying here. It's not just that most of our richest get starting conditions such as ivy league schools, it's that they get enough breaks to start them off that even attending Harvard without it needing a total commitment is just one of many such breaks.
You're citing a bunch of Corporations with limited liability by law in every single one of your examples. Your 'free market' would have to give no advantages to incorporation as a separate entity that retains any assets what-so-ever. That means a constitutional amendment 'clarifying' what the 14th amendment says, or losing all the benefits of the 14th. Since the US spent five bitter years 'litigating' that issue once, and the repercussions are still with us over a century later, do you have a plan to avoid a second Civil War, or are you calling for one? Really, and I don't say this to insult you, if you can't answer that question, your claims are valueless, because the issue you're addressing is really approaching that level of seriousness again.
Are you aware that a theoretical perfect free market is one where everyone knows all the relevant information to guide their decision making processes, and everyone is a rational actor? You can't argue for a John Stewart Mill style market by claiming that getting the government out will create a free market first and then all the irrational investors will lose out and be displaced from the system - that's just as paradoxical as when the Marxists advocated giving the state more power so it would eventually wither away. We don't have a free market until everyone is well informed and rational (in Mill's limited meaning of the word) first! Now how do we get there?
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I served in the U.S. armed forces for 13 years, and am convinced the best war would be fought on a tropical island, using paintball or laser-tag weaponry, and allowing 15 minute breaks every two hours, plus weekends off. Winner gets whatever political point was being fought over but has to pick up the whole bar tab. If we spread it over several islands the Marines could play too.
Warning: We did have a US invasion of the USA once (Lee went north of the line into Pennsylvania, then a bit later Sherman went way, way south of the line, and finally, Sherman, Grant, and Sheridan all met up for the photo-op so everybody got to feel invaded at least a little, some a lot.), and that wasn't nearly as fun as either of our proposals.
1. By reducing our dependence on foreign oil, so we aren't pressured to depose their governments and put in people the oil companies like better (e.g. the Shah of Iran). By the way, reducing dependence was originally a doctrine proposed by Henry Kissinger way back during the Nixon years, and endorsed by both Reagan and Bush 43 in speeches they made during their terms.
2. By giving us an alternative to Nuclear, so those Muslem suicide bombers YOU want to blame for the whole problem of war, don't use it to extend their bomb blast radius by three or four orders of magnetude. That's originally from the Carter administration, but endorsed by Bush 41, 43, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and plenty of other republicans before they found out Obama had written a college paper relating to the subject.
You're the one who has claimed that Muslem suicide bombers are a very serious problem, justifying a 480 Billion a year budget and a rapidly growing deficit, but that we don't need to worry about that very serious problem getting funds from what we spend on oil, or using some of the other alternatives against us. That's crazy talk - either they are a big problem or they aren't, but there's no possible middle ground where they are not a threat but worth spending 480 billion a year to counter.
The real point is you hate the president, nothing he will ever do will ever please you, and if you have to simultaniously quake in fear of those Muslem terrorists and think they are no big deal whenever he takes a rational step to deal with them, you are capable of the double-think required to preserve your hate.
Grok is the ultimate word to NOT take literally. Taking it literally means you didn't grok it at all. Still, I think you grok Apple just fine. Next question is, Can Steve Jobs sit lotus at the bottom of a swimming pool for longer than Percy Jackson?
Complex choices are certainly a big part of the problem, but still only part. Some Slashdotters tend to think the whole problem is dumb users who can't handle too many choices, when it's really as often a case of a dumb marketer who couldn't figure out how to distribute features sensibly among all those choices. Witness Dell, where some higher end product lines don't have higher grade versions of Windows among their options.
To use one of those lousy car analogies, what would we think of a car maker who offered a V-8 option with its budget subcompact, but not with its sports or luxury sedan models? It's not an end user 'too many choices' problem when the marketing department has already pre-made the dumb choices.
Improving education is the ultimate answer, but that's for so many things. People ought to grow up with a better understanding of their whole culture, of the arts and letters, of history and philosophy and generally how to think and learn, not just science. A person who knows nothing of modern Physics, but who understands how to judge whether a historical account is truth or propaganda, and in what measure, can probably swiftly master enough of an area where Physics matters, such as nuclear power generation, to vote intelligently. That person will probably understand why they need to master more so when questions come up, and have the skills to learn as needed.
The most 'dumbed down' version of the theory of Evolution is Social Darwinism. The people who oppose Social Darwinism by and large aren't poorly educated and socially backwards creationists, they are people with an intellectual commitment to genuine democracy, but whose education has mostly been in the humanities, not the sciences. Claiming they oppose the versions of the theory of Evolution they commonly hear because they are the sort who build museums where cave-people ride dinosaurs just makes them think all the Evolutionists are Nazis trying to undermine intellectual opposition to the next wave of putting people into camps. Teaching them more science may be part of the solution there, but getting the people who claim to support Evolution but teach that its all about purging inferior types out of the cover of mainstream science is at least equally important.
The 'hurricanes increase with more patches of warmer water where they form' theory is pretty good, and likely true, but it's a sort of separate rider on the main hypothesis. Specific damage estimates aren't even that, because all the climatology can be right, but there can be flaws in the economic side that make the conclusion off by orders of magnitude. There - that's what's so difficult - you set out to explain the main theory, got sidetracked swiftly into possible tangentals, and by not 'admitting' that you were adding in additional assumptions, look at least a little shady. Of course, you aren't trying to gloss over sources of inaccuracy, you're just trying to sum up without it getting too complex, but some of these people are already thinking you are speaking for the very father of lies, so maybe it makes sense to phrase everything like the person you are addressing is trying extra hard to spot any lies you might tell. As simple as possible, but no simpler.
Let me give you a similar scientific/public situation. There are a lot of not real scientifically educated people who think the Paleontologists actually always do whole reconstructions from a single bone. (Loren Eisley used to complain that he got that question every single press conference "Say Doc, is it true you fellas always work from just a single bone?"). So, it's important for anyone talking to the public about something such as dinosaurs to stress what the raw evidence they have is, as in "We have found the sixth complete fossil of a T-Rex, and we have 35 more partials. With six, we have enough examples to be sure this one was a mature female. So far, the females seem to average a bit bigger than the males, but we'd like to find a few more good specimens to check that".
Really ignorant people won't believe we can tell which specimens were male and which female until they first understand we have more than a single foot bone or something to go on, and less ignorant people will spot a veracity problem if the scientist claims to be as highly confident of how sexually dimorphic the species was, as whether we can tell them apart at all. I've long wished for a child's book on dinosaurs that says "We have over 500 complete specimens of this one, including old ones, adolescents, and infants just hatching." and where needed, "our best fossil for this one is only a front half. Because it seems most closely related to this other one, we are pretty confident it looked mostly like this.". A little honesty openly displayed to the next generation would go a long way in getting people to trust the method itself, and maybe its practitioners.
The direct energy costs of old gear can certainly be higher, and don't usually make a good argument for saving it, but figuring total energy costs, as including clean up of toxics in the old gear, will usually tip the balance.
Some of it is about where you use the item, for example a CRT will inevitably use a lot more power than an LCD or other thinscreen, so much that it's probably the worst case on energy savings - but even there, what if you hook the CRT to a server where it seldom needs to be active? It's an alternative to going headless and remotely administering the machine, and some machines/OSs need the alternative.
What happens if you add a huge old full color monitor to a camera security array, where you normally watch everything in six or eight small B & W windows on one more modern monitor, but occasionally have a need to pipe one view onto a larger screen for review? You only need it to look back at a recorded image, say of a possible shoplifing, in rare cases where the normal image was vague and you want to be sure you saw what you thought you did, or that your evidence is up to proceeding in court, situations such as that.
How often would you need to fire up the screen for a dedicated music computer that's part of your stereo - half an hour per day or less to make a massive playlist, and a few minutes to load a new one once you have a few made, then it's off again? Delaying having to junk that old CRT by a few years, until it actually burns out, and giving your area time to build better recycling facilities, might even be worth it from a pure energy standpoint for this worst case.
Right now, I assume that floppy drives, zip, 120's, most tape drives and such are not worth the bother, but it might be worth preserving a CD writer (not a basic reader). Exceptionally small CRT monitors can be more useful than standard sizes - a boxy 12 inch diagonal vrs. a much lighter 17 inch thinscreen sounds like no contest, but realworld spaces are 3D, and the old monitor may fit conveniently where the newer one's 2 D profile doesn't.
USB 2 and 3 didn't make USB 1/1.1 obsolete at all. Some devices simply don't need fast.
Whole older boxes staying useful sometimes depends as much on space as power. If there's a big basement and you can set up a LAN, a bunch of P2s can run one heck of a lan party with old copies of Quake or new ones of Openarena, or even go back to Hexen or Doom 2. I've seen this at the level of a college dorm with an unused meeting room where every box has pretty modern hardware graphics acceleration, and alternately at the level of a boyscout troop that was running kid friendly lan-parties on 400 Mhz Pentium 2s and AMDs mixed.
How about a +-0 Heresy mod - it doesn't affect karma, but we get to vent.
You mean they too it out where you saw it?
And young man goes on journey, sees many exotic things, meets new people who think differently than his native tribe, and experiences some maturing specifically because of travel is a whole type of story in itself, one that traditionally stops about when the young man puts down roots back home and doesn't traditionally try to answer the questions of how he will use his newfound knowledge after he resolves the conflict that drove him to travel in the first place.
There's probably plenty of valid criticisms of Tron, but expecting some things of it is like criticising Huckleberry Finn for not describing what Huck does as an adult after the raft ride ends.
Tron was a Disney film, which somehow still went out on a bit of a political limb and made a statement about whether 'religious' experiences (in the cyberworld), might have a rational underlying explanation, and how many generations of time (at cyberworld speeds) might imbue mundane physical and pragmatic events with a religious symbolic venier. Still Disney left it as a rather complex and multi-leveled theme rather than dumb it down to Rah-Rah "Flynn is Jesus" total oblivion. They too the time to introduce a few sympathetic characters and get the audience to identify them as good guys, then bring up spirituality in a way that didn't autoconfirm they were the good side, but instead made you wonder if they were a little skewed or misinterpreting what Tron was trying to do. John Warner's character isn't just nasty, he's specifically Miltonic. The question of whether his pride is his greatest flaw isn't just raised, but it's addressed by both visual and verbal references to Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno. Yeah, those points whizzed right over my head at that age too.
And I would only want one of the five production light cycles if they steer better than they look to do, and with the electric engine option if it actually gets good range, so I suspect the actual experience would be disappointing.
The thing is, there's usually something happening every few months between the US and any nation it has trouble with. Publicise a problem with North Korea one month, everyone guesses it relates to missle testing. Wait a month, and it must have something to do with them holding some hikers who supposedly strayed across the border. Wait one more and it has something to do with them arguing with Japan, or South Korea, or China. Either the government never goes public at all, or it goes public when something is happening and some people craft a theory that the two factors are related.
Plus if "V" makes that lucky guess on one question, all the other BS is presumed to be at least a little believable. V tells you the name of a contact, "it must also be the truth", so even when you check out that guy and it just isn't possible, you're never completely sure he's clean. maybe you should torture him too, only what if that's what the Ruskies want?
V says the Ruskies are spending millions on psychic research, now you gotta spend tens of millions on trying to find loyal Americans who can kill goats with their minds too. V says that South American politician who died of an apparent heart attack a few years ago was actually a test of a new, untraceable poison, sorry he doesn't remember the guy's name or just when, you gotta fund a chemical research program or something.
How about, you view an ad when you go to the distribution site. At the beginning and end of a full TV episode or film, you see a black screen, with "This show is brought to you without commercial interruption by General Motors. We hope you enjoy our presentation.". That worked for the first few years of TV, and kept working for a lot longer for selected products (Hallmark Hall of Fame, for one, lasted about 40 years on that model).
Or how about product placement - do you think Burger King is concerned about people seeing Iron Man on bootleg copies when that's still another ad for Whoppers as far as they are concerned, and you can't download a Whopper? A 'stolen' copy of Iron Man is still a successful ad delivery, and maybe the real problem is the makers of Iron Man are missing out on selling that slot to BK based on projected total views instead of officially purchased copies (or maybe they did take that into account and are complaining anyway).
The original "Hotel" TV show was originally called the Marriott Hotel, and made sure there were Marriott establishing shots at the beginning of each episode, but ran without commercial breaks. Maybe, something like that would still annoy you, just like a 10 second verbal every 3 min 27 seconds for pop music would be pretty intrusive after a bit, but if that 10 seconds came every 10 songs, or full album, or you listened to really long tracks and only heard it once an hour or so, there's probably some level of exposure you'd find quite pleasant.
For most of us, there's a pretty acceptable level, as in "I'd flock to a TV channel where the commercials came only at the beginning and end of the show, or even only every 30 minutes.".
Selectively targeting people who are likely to make mistakes such that they end up with too much debt to have descressionary income? But that would mean the music and movie sellers business model was counting on their being one born every minute. Is the whole argument over piracy really about propping up businesses that are assuming their preferred customers will always be replaced by other morons, those morons will always get extra spending money somehow, and the base will never wise up or all go broke at once?
Entertainment can even include switching to local, Non-RIAA bands, or the extra cost to grill at the lake instead of cook at home, the gas to visit a state park, sports equipment, etc.
Plus, is piracy really free (as in beer)? Monthly long retention Usenet service fees, huge hard drives, stacks of blank DVDs and cases, commercial burning or label-making software, power supply, ram and processor upgrades, a lot of cheap pirates are still spending at least some money somewhere to make it happen. 13 bucks a month to Giganews is 13 bucks a month that could go to a legal service offering movies, and the 20 bucks extra in some locations for unlimited download cable over capped download ADSL is another $20 that could go to some legal source, and so on. How many people could get by with 8 or 10 year old PCs if they weren't torrenting? How many wouldn't bother with color ink cartridges if they weren't printing labels?
So, if most pirates are still paying something here and there, the real problem is music and movies in the *IAA formats don't seem like a good value compared to the alternatives. That means things such as unskippable trailers on DVDs or Region Encoding really do change perceived value enough to matter to sales, and it's not all accountable as "people are cheap".
Obviously, not all students or recent grads or young people in general stick to a budget. But isn't it better for society if more of them do, and more people learn to budget younger?
So long as there are tremendous interest rate differentials, society takes the hits for even a few idiots. One fool who signs a contract for a $4,000 big screen color TV at 36% and defaults, has as much negative impact as 18 wiser heads have positive impact by saving $4,000 each, if their return is only 2%. We could do a lot of financially educating people and never get anywhere near to where the ratio is better than 18/19ths wise people. So long as there are bail outs, you, me, and even the RIAA take a big economic hit waiting to get the fast growing economy we might have with better than 18/19ths smart budgeters.
You're claiming the grandparent argument is fundamentally flawed. Either you really meant to claim that no college student or recent grad can make a budget, which is obvious trolling, or I'll give you credit for sanity and assume you really meant not enough of them do. That's true, but when the rules are structured so that enough equals better than 18 in 19, what you really just said is the fundamental flaw is that the whole US economy can't work, period. So, are you a troll or a commie? I'm not really trying to make you look like either one here, but if we give the benefit of a doubt as to trolling, I think it's only fair to warn you you have reasoned your way to a point where the entire republican right would call you a dirty commie commie hippy libtard.
I use a couple of wireless mouses, both from Microsoft. One's an Arcmouse, the other's a Wireless Mobile 3000.
I recently switched to using rechargeable batteries for every device that could take them, everywhere in my home, and powering the chargers off a small solar panel on the roof. I did this primarily so now if I lose grid power for days or even weeks I'll still have flashlights, emergency radio and such, but I bought enough batteries for my MP3 players, mouses, and the rest as well. (And, for the thinking impaired, no I don't expect to have the computers run for days off the grid just because the mouses will).
While I'm pretty satisfied with these mouses over all, it's worth mentioning that they now 'fail funny' when the battery gets low. The red warning lights in the mouses don't even come on until the battery is so low the devices are malfunctioning, and instead of seeing hesitation or intermittent pointer movement, the failure mode seems to involve the pointer suddenly jumping across the screen, or several button clicks doing nothing and then suddenly being applied all at once, and other such odd effects. I'm not sure why there are rechargeable mouses yet non-rechargeable wireless mouses should have so much odd failing behavior when fitted with rechargeable batteries. This happens with both regular NiMH and Platinum rechargables as well.
I never have bought a mouse that was cradle rechargeable straight from the factory, which leads me to wonder, do these have a distinctive failure mode as well?
Any person who can represent a company in legal matters isn't a low paid drone. Ultimately, if a company has 'low paid drones' making decisions, or being the only point of contact to apply decisions, the company has made those people legal agents. If they aren't trained as legal agents, don't actually know what the law requires, don't have the right to sign contracts for the company and so on, yet they are the only people you can speak with, then the company is trying to do business without making its legal agents available.
I am currently a legal agent for two banks, and have had training in what I can and can't promise for those banks, plus I know damned well that the law requires me to make specific points and means of contact with our lawyers available in writing and explain certain legal rights to all clients both in writing and verbally.
Banks face tough rules (well lending banks do, maybe not the big boy investment banks, or prime lenders of resort), but everyone incorporated has to have a sharp line between general workers and people authorised to represent the company. If you ever find yourself doing business with someone and they can't explain which side of that line they fall on, the solution is to not do business with them. (I hate to even say this - it feels like saying, "If the wires appear to be carrying current, don't stick them in your ears" - but somehow, a lot of people don't get this one.).
There will be real effects. Consider - in the US we have had recent obscenity convictions against some porn producers seen as turning out content especially degrading to women (slapping, punching, spitting in faces, and faux rape.). We haven't had anything in well over a decade focused on non-violent porn, targeting gay porn selectively has apparently died out even in the south, and even such things as bondage and fisting videos get a pass, (but many of them are careful to have spoken discliamers from the submissives involved and various "no sluts were harmed in the making of this video" claims included to protect themselves). Scat probably would draw legal action, but the mainstream producers haven't tried that. The industry has been vocally extremely divided over violence for the last few years. .xxx to prove they are being responsible corporations and trying to keep their material out of the hands of minors, because that would be another way to protect themselves from prosecution, and they seem to be willing to go to some trouble over creating an image that they are not one of 'those' porn businesses, but rather one of the 'other' ones. Some will see it as a financial hit to move content exclusively to .xxx domains, but others will see it as another way to avoid being the rare porn producer singled out.
I'd just about bet real money that some porn producers will use
The bigest force actually working against this is the evangelical right, which usually sees no difference between a Girls Gone Wild video and Underaged Wet Mule Sodomizers part 83. If they focused their complaints on the companies that produce the kinkiest stuff, they'd get a lot more results from various justice departments, but then they would have to admit that some porn producers really do care if all the 'models' are over 18, really do show safe sex practices, or avoid violent sex, so don't hold your breath.
I've always wondered, did Von Braun deal with those statements as he was portrayed in the Right Stuff? Werner was both a pretty smart guy, and a former Nazi - I would kind of expect he would integrate the idea of using propaganda to manipulate the public in about 0.037 seconds and be enthusiastically telling the press whatever would push the right buttons.
Art is certainly rare in porn, but it's pretty rare in commercial television as well - perhaps the real question is, is it getting rarer? Satire and Parody tend to count as artistic values. I don't know if there's anything like parodies coming out nowdays, but back during the 70's - 80s, there were. Many films had titles such as '8 to 4' (parodying '9 to 5'), or Flesh Gordon (which ended up being distributed as nonporn or at least softcore, because the funny parts were, well, funny enough to stand on their own.) You could just about bet there would be a porno version of some films, because you could see how some of the parts that could easily be parodied would be sexual humor.
As for "minor", for some people, everything short of Shakespeare or at least Beckett is minor. Tons of directors could aspire to make the great XXX commentary on the human condition, and it's quite possible not one of them would hit such a high mark. Devil in Miss Jones definitely aspired to say something about religious repression of natural human desires, but did it actually say anything at all important? I doubt anyone in the porn industry today is even aiming that high, but I doubt that people in the TV industry get as much freedom and/or resource commitment when they try to break out of cliche land as they once did. Maybe porn is facing the same problem as video media in general, more than something unique to porn.
There's some real interest in theoretical physics circles in defining what 'impossible' means. For example, if the universe runs down, as in the classic big bang with an open value for Omega, there comes times when the probabilities of certain things happening that require large enough energy differentials to happen classically become less than 1/whole remaining lifetime of the universe. It may be that there's no meaningful distinction between an event having a chance of 1/2 to happen just once in just one location over the entire lifetime of the universe, and having a 1 in 400 or 1 in 957,623 chance under the same limitations. In some models, particularly if there aren't multiple 'parallel' universes, those all really mean ZERO, not just itty-bitty.
Does this really mean that those types of events become impossible rather than just very improbable? Is a non-classical event, i.e. quantum tunneling, ever completely impossible instead of just increasingly improbable, for the same models of the universe?
What this implies for your arbitrarily large values may be nothing at all, but depending on what type of universe this is, at the least, maybe all probabilities less than some deterministic value really equal exactly zero. And there are some fairly simple math tricks for expressing an 'arbitrarily' large chance as the opposite outcome of one or some really small chances, which could mean some of your "arbitrarily large"'s actually equal a very non-arbitrary 1.
This gets some weird predictions that seem to actually fit our (admittedly very limited) observations. The chance of life evolving somewhere in our particular universe could be 1, while the chance of it evolving more than once could still be 0. While such a thing sounds statistically unlikely, it stops being necessarily an extreme long shot, if our universe is both unique and destined to simply run down, approaching absolute zero temperature over many aeons. There's probably a simpler or more straight-forward explanation for why we are here but we haven't yet found evidence of anybody else.
So congratulations on asking a question which may one day be answerable, but it turns out isn't just yet.
Bill Gates could afford to drop out of Harvard for something that looked better. That's the typical situation for most of our wealthyest. Surely, if Warren Buffett's dad had sent him to an Ivy League school, it would have been with the understanding that that was THE big break and Warren needed to do everything he could to maximise it, but Warren's the exception. Note carefully what I am saying here. It's not just that most of our richest get starting conditions such as ivy league schools, it's that they get enough breaks to start them off that even attending Harvard without it needing a total commitment is just one of many such breaks.
You're citing a bunch of Corporations with limited liability by law in every single one of your examples. Your 'free market' would have to give no advantages to incorporation as a separate entity that retains any assets what-so-ever. That means a constitutional amendment 'clarifying' what the 14th amendment says, or losing all the benefits of the 14th. Since the US spent five bitter years 'litigating' that issue once, and the repercussions are still with us over a century later, do you have a plan to avoid a second Civil War, or are you calling for one? Really, and I don't say this to insult you, if you can't answer that question, your claims are valueless, because the issue you're addressing is really approaching that level of seriousness again.
Are you aware that a theoretical perfect free market is one where everyone knows all the relevant information to guide their decision making processes, and everyone is a rational actor? You can't argue for a John Stewart Mill style market by claiming that getting the government out will create a free market first and then all the irrational investors will lose out and be displaced from the system - that's just as paradoxical as when the Marxists advocated giving the state more power so it would eventually wither away. We don't have a free market until everyone is well informed and rational (in Mill's limited meaning of the word) first! Now how do we get there?