So maybe people should have specified GROSS profits? Yes, net profitability may go up if this cuts Eve's operating costs, and quarterly gross profit may go back up for separate reasons (i.e. this attracts new players or causes dissatisfied former players to return, or both.). Still, this move directly impacts immediate gross profit, and that's something we can reliably know (those of us who have studied small scale economics).
Since you didn't make the distinction in your comments either, I'm unclear what you think 'eldavojon' was being sloppy about. Maybe he or someone else should specify what they think will happen to reported quarterly gross and net profits, research whether Eve's parent company is publicly traded, and so on, and if it is, talk stock price effects, and so on, but that doesn't sound like what you mean, offhand, so I must confess I'm puzzled.
You're the second person to post some variation on the 'knowledge is power, and some people want to control that power' theme, and I just wanted to add that there's some real, specific reasons this applies at the present time to out of print books, for those who may think the meme is a little paranoid.
A few weeks ago, I read a book on higher dimensional geometry (Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension - by Rudolph v. B. Rucker). It was published in 1977 in a cheap Dover paperback edition. In the back, there's references to a large number of books and papers on Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and abstract math, by some of the most famous names of 20th century physics (Einstein, Wheeler, Hawking, Everett, Minkowski, etc.) A tremendous number of these turn out to be out of print and unavailable through Amazon or other common sources. In one case, I was offered a copy of one work for over 300 dollars.
There are also a lot of books on the 'occult' side of higher dimensions in the references. Rucker isn't pushing an esoteric knowledge angle - He quotes from several of these, but he's often very critical of the misinterpretations of science found in them, and while he sees some interesting features in the works of people like P. D. Ouspensky or J. W. Dunne, he comes down rather harder on Carlos Castaneda. A little checking on these found a surprising number of them were in print or available online at low costs, and most of the rest were being offered free online from various occult groups websites.
What all this implies is left as an exercise for the astute reader. One example does not, by itself, make much of a trend, but it would be interesting if other such cases exist.
There are some. I don't think I've ever seen one with no potatoes or basic white onions, but no green vegetables happens some places, as does no tomatoes, and in the north, no peppers. I've also seen places in the middle west where nobody in the area stocked iodized salt (even though they were in the worst part of the country for thyroid problems). And there's the seasonal shortage stuff (like anything with vitamin C in the winter, i.e. oranges) - Chicago used to be bad for that, all the way through the 80's.
'Going a few extra miles' is part of that problem. Some places don't have any public transit, and unless you have a car, you really can't go sufficient distances to find anything but little convenience stores. Arizona, New Mexico, that few extra miles is sometimes literally 100 extra.
Worse, I live in a nice, fairly metropolitan town with about 30,000 population, located on a tech corridor of sorts. It's still nominally part of the Appalachian coal mining region. I could go as little as 30 miles, as the crow flies, to either side of that corridor, and find people where a couple of guys driving a delapidated old school bus are the only local grocers. That bus comes by comes by about once a week loaded with food and notions. It has only a pretty limited cold section, for obvious reasons. Some places, people have one person who drives a truck that maybe looks like Jed Clampett's, who goes out to where there are roads good enough for the grocery bus, meets it, and then brings everything back in another ten miles or so into their isolated community. I've seen little old ladies who have lived in those places all their lives, in shacks or trailers, and who want nothing on Earth more than for that bus to bring some bananas this week.
I'm on my church's outreach comittee. It's a small chruch, and the budget for community support outside our parish is only about $25,000 a year. The rule is to put it first where people are the most desperately poor and miserable. As that works out, we give about equally to some of the poorest parts of Haiti and to communities right in our own state.
We also have a separate budget for providing some meals to families right in our area, four times a year. State employees with the school districts certify those families. We learned that they were sending us the families where the kids were doing the best about staying in school and making good grades, because we were considered the best church to get food from, because we were giving that fourth food distro in the summer. It consists mostly of some hamburger and hot dogs, peanut butter and potted meats, and is designed protein heavy and canned sources heavy, to see the kids get some protein throughout the period when they are out of the school lunch programs. What's trememdously out of keeping with most people's notions of poverty is these people understand why their kids need a good diet to do well in school, push their kids hard to stay in and make grades and do better, and yet so many people assume they are stupid, lazy or unmotivated or they wouldn't be poor.
So you're a liberal democrat too?
(You want to restrict state's rights to regulate insurance practice and you want to restrict state's rights to individually limit punitive damages, that sounds like a liberal democratic position to me).
No wait, that's what conservative Republicans would call a socialist agenda, except now they are the ones advocating it. That's the really odd thing about this - the party that claims to believe in states rights is the one insisting that the real solution is to further restrict state's rights.
"This is a non-sequitur, if you really dig into the numbers, you will find that the main reason for lowered life expectancies is obesity" This is only true because of a trick being played with what is basically a feedback loop, reinterpreting it as a one way process where "obesity causes X". There is a lot of evidence that diabetes actually affects the appetite, increasing cravings for sweets and fats, and making it so the person with that condition needs more willpower, exercised more consistently, than the average person, to diet. There's also abundant evidence the condition screws up the body in ways that make the same amount of exercise less beneficial, more painful, and more likely to cause other problems, than for a non diabetic.
As a diabetic who has gotten his weight under control (8% bodyfat), who has built enough muscle and lost enough fat to come off of first injectable insulin, and then oral med after oral med, and who can now enjoy an occasional desert just as often as I am willing to hit the track and the weight room, all that fits my experience - diabetes is not just about what we do to contribute to the disease, but what the disease tries in turn to do to us. You don't have to be lazy or eat poorly to get diabetes, you just have to have the genes, and an average amount of willpower and common sense and normal efforts at controlling weight will not save you.
You can beat it with exercise and diet - if you could also become a good tri-athelete if you didn't have the genes (and in fact, if you beat it all the way down to coming off of oral meds, you will be back in shape to run 10 K's competitively, bench more than your body weight, or earn a few dans on your black belt - that's the kind of exercise that really beats the condition, not "moderate 30 min. 3x/week"). Any person who can start off poor and become a self made millionaire by age 30 can certainly find the willpower to beat diabetes. If you have the willpower to be in the top few percent of your field, and your field is really worth doing, you can treat diabetes as just one more thing.
But if you're only in the average range, it's a death sentence. It will take 15 years off your life, not because you are lazier than most, or more of a pig than most, but because you are just like most.
And a better, better measure would be to take all sorts of people in all sorts of economic ranges, environments, and with all sorts of backgrounds into account proportionately. Looking at a person of average income, or one right on the poverty line, or below it. Looking at what happens if you have more kids than the average, or fewer. Looking at various age groups and whether they are doing better or worse as they reach certain ages, Looking at trends that are growing and negative, even if they aren't that common yet, to see where we may all end up if things go on as they trend. All this is what we need. A lot of claims are insignificant to irrelevant if we do all that. They become about as meaningful as evaluating coal mine safety only by the chance the corporate headquarters building collapses.
My ex wife got great care for an advanced malignant melanoma, and is now seven years past treatment when she once was told she had literally less than six weeks to live. (The exact quote was "It's the most advanced stage 5 I have ever seen, and the odds you'll make 2 months are at least 100 billion to one against. The top of the head is a particularly bad place, with all the lymph nodes so close by. Sorry.". She beat it. She and I didn't have to pay a lot for it all either. It was admittedly very reasonable after the part her insurance covered. Rah-rah USA!
Except, she was in a particular genotype that fit a number of experimental protocols that happened to be being tested nearby, and she had people who were willing and able to drive her or 250 miles each way for a monthly totally experimental treatment at Duke that just may have helped as well. Except there were a couple of dozen other times she needed transport to this and that program at some distant research school, and somehow it always happened. Except she tolerated her chemo very, very well, and one of the best oncologists in the country monitored her treatment at a lot less than he usually charged because he thought the person who diagnosed her first was an idiot with a horrible bedside manner when he heard about it. Except that, at those odds, it's probably as fair to call it Divine intervention as anything the USA's 'superior social structure' brought about. (And her surgeon swears 'something took control of his hand', and said "No no, resect this section all the way out to here along that vein! Cut that little flap! Now you've got it all.").
I don't know if my Ex's case proves even a moderate income person can get decent treatment under our system, or that a moderate income person with a mother-in-law that knew half a dozen exceptional practicioners, a husband that knew a really good plastic surgeon through his military contacts, and a support network willing to transport her hundreds of miles on short notice when she was too sick to drive, and a whole lot of lucky timing, can get decent treatment. Maybe it proves that some doctors, nurses, and even insurance company people admire an indominatible will to live and occasionally get behind and push. Maybe it was all one big miracle - and no, I'm not being facetious.
I think a lot of poorer people would have an impossible task just driving themselves to the treatments, or getting any of the exceptional help she got. I can't say I know that, though, because her case was so unusual it may prove nothing at all in any mundane context.
I see what you mean. I frequently deal with family members who buy the cheapest possible versions of some foods, then eat out when they want something 'good'. They are willing to pay for all white meat chicken breast in a sandwich, but buy pressed nuggets for at home, or cardboard pizzas, etc.
In particular, my parents are both in their 80's now, and if some of us kids don't check on them, accompany them to the grocery stores and steer them towards quality foods, their nutritional practices would probably swiftly put them both in the hospital. I caught my well educated father eating Hostess cupcakes three meals in a row once, and drinking nothing but Walmart sodas.
But, with occasional nudges that don't even feel like nagging, it turns out he'll still eat plenty of veggies if we let him pick them out - the biggest thing is we have to remind him that the reason prices for a lot of foods he remembers well from childhood are higher now is because prices are generally higher - otherwise he tends to too often buy things he doesn't remember from childhood at all, like cheese whiz.
We also have to cook batches for the whole family and drop stuff by sometimes. With my sister doing good wholesome stuff every week for Sunday dinners, and my Ex and I taking the parents with us when we shop and helping them find good food, offering to cook some of the stuff that isn't microwave fast food, and so on, we have a large extended family that are all fit, or heading that way. I think all this ramble matches what you are describing - it's often about personal choices.
I don't agree completely though - I think you could get a better idea of how much of the problem is poor judgment if you also compare what poor people buy when they use food stamp programs, where some of your examples are right out, such as cigarettes. To me, this looks like it is a partly self perpetuated problem, and it's partly perpetuated by other factors we should fix - as just one example, my state has lower sales taxes for regular food items, but the definition of food is strange. You can buy a candy bar with a really bad nutritional profile, and pay the full tax, which is around 10%. A cookie which has the exact same ingredients plus some milled flour, and which is no better nutritionally, gets a discount on sales taxes - evidently, because adding a little bleached wheat magically makes it good for you in the minds of my legislators. That's something which could be improved at the government level.
Even if we don't reflexively blame 'capitalism' or 'advertising', when a fast food chain decides a 'small' soft drink is 24 oz. and it goes up from there (Krystal), or starts selling nothing smaller than 1/3rd pound burgers (Hardees in my neighborhood), maybe it's time to talk about 'other-perpetuating' too,
As I understand it, President Obama wants a single payer system because it puts sufficient pressure on the companies to rein in costs, so it should help at least keep price adjustments in line with general inflation. That's different from single payer being an end in itself, and maybe he's open to suggestions about other ways to get insurance company costs in line with the more moderate costs of systems such as Medicare and stop premiums from rising at 3 to 4 times the inflation rate. From what I've read so far, Nancy Pelosi may or may not want single payer as an end in itself.
To my mind, there is a fundamental difference between the parties at this point. The Democrats fluctuate somewhat on big government, give in to the idea too often (IMHO), and are frequently unrealistic in estimating the effects of deficit spending, high levels of regulation and such, but the Republicans want a small federal government with an incredibly bloated Defense Dept., DEA, and FBI. Demanding a shrinking federal government that returns power to the states, while fighting wars that cost as much as Iraq, or spending as much on just one area of law enforcement as the war on drugs requires, isn't just a bit unrealistic, it's as absurd as Dehydrated Water. At this point, the Dems are like a basically sane person who never studied physics, and so doesn't really understand what it takes to send a rocket to the moon - the Republicans have become the people who want to fly there in a chariot drawn by swans.
OK, so let's assume you are 100% right. The distinction between rich and poor is really all about teh stupids. Still, the evidence you cite also strongly suggests we are splitting into two classes, permanently unequal, with one class perceiving strong grievances. You're arguing that this is proper, not that it isn't happening. You're arguing that one side has the moral superiority, but to do so, you're also admitting that there are sides.
Whenever the DNC brings this up, they are accused of encouraging class warfare. But, by your own argument, we really, objectively do have class warfare going on as an expression of social Darwinism, and it isn't just a "DNC talking point", it's an objective fact that results from your own analysis. What, you think both sides have to openly admit they are in a war before it's a war? You've just proved that if you can afford healthcare and all the toys, and I can't have both, it's me against you, and since I'm also presumably as stupid as you've also proved, I can't think of anything better to do than shout "Up against the wall Nazi Mutherfucker, we will crucify you when the socialist revolution comes! We will eat your children's brains! Death to AmeriKKKa!", and then get out the A-K. Assuming I make less than you, it's only if I'm smart enough to regard your argument as BS that it isn't remorselessly logical for me to develop a total commitment to seeing you and everybody you associate with die horribly.
Don't blame me, bro! You were dumb enough to argue that 30 million Americans ought to be aspiring to put a gasoline soaked tire around your neck and light it. If I'm stupider than you, that definitely makes me too stupid to do what's morally right and die quietly without bothering you. By your own argument, I literally can't know any better. Sounds like a tragedy all around. I'll die eventually of being a dumb animal, you'll die sooner or later of expecting dumb animals to have moral sense.
I've read a few books on how to write, and the way 'Clone Wars" was used in the first movie (4 - A New Hope), is a classic throwaway line. The writer wants to explain how two people knew each other, so he has them meet during 'the war'. He could have had them know each other from college, business, or politics instead. A halfway good writer (and Lucas is actually halfway good), makes it more specific - just like in a mundane fiction book set in the current time-frame, it's easy to claim two older people knew each other from "the Nam". A better writer might look up a bit of the history, mention a specific town or battle, something like that. A not so good writer might make up the name of a town that merely sounds Vietnamese - "Duk-Trang - your dad was with the 103rd Airborne, flying Seminole assault choppers.". SF and Fantasy are easier - there's no history books needed.
Either way, it's not intended to lead anywhere. When Lucas wrote the first screenplay, it was common to use the technique just for verisimulitude, although more modern writer's guides sometimes mention that these throwaways are good places to find raw material if the work results in demand for a sequel and writers should use lots of them so they aren't painted into a corner in developing a series.
Since Lucas was writing a film called "Star Wars", set up as part 4 of a serial, picking a war instead of one of the other options fit, and I would just about bet that when he wrote that line, he had no plans for a sequel, and hadn't really thought about which side the clones were to fight on, what the whole clone war was about, or any of that.
Ah, you've touched on one of my pet peeves - Thank you. Why do so many fans seem to respond differently to blowing up whole planets or 'novaing' stars than to burning off the entire surface of a world or otherwise messing up its ecology? For that matter, what's the real difference between eradicating all life on a world and killing off only the higher organisms? "I left the bacteria alive - they can re-evolve a new intelligent species in a mere billion years" is not much of a defense in court - rather it would probably come off worse than "I was only following orders.".
Look at Trek - Genesis devices, Nova torpedoes, and 'Red Matter'. The real question is, could a federation starship zortch the surface of a planet enough to kill billions? And if it can, why are any of the weapons that also ruin or disperse the underlying rocks any worse? Mirror, Mirror says a single original NCC1701 grade cruiser can kill a planet bound ecology, or at least the entire Halkan civilization. So why do so many plot lines involve the villain who is bad because he's building a weapon that does the same thing, plus a little more collateral damage?
When I read as far as the header, I thought you were going to say the robots should throw the Marines into the rooms. (And that part of the brain that still retains my old drill instructor's best routines said "makes sense"...).
My local exchange is in a cube with walls of steel reinforced concrete a meter thick, no windows, and two sets of double steel airlock style doors for access. Emerging lines are underground for at least half a mile before coming up at over 20 separate boxes. I know personally of at least a dozen other exchanges built like this. OMG! Anybody with a mere few thousand nukes and the ability to precision target them at all our major population centers could sabotage the whole country's landline phones.
I can think of several reasons why knowing some tropical regions are cold matters. For one, look at geopolitics:
South America - the left edge is where most of the mountains are, often leaving no more than narrow strips before you get to the seacoast. Peru and Argentina are both colder on average than is generally assumed by North Americans. So, is coca a tropical plant? Or is that just another assumption that follows from the first one? 'No one could grow coca in the Rocky mountains - it has to be imported from tropical countries like Columbia. We can win the war on drugs by fighting it there.'
Afghanistan - same situation, lots of areas above 10,000 feet mean it's colder than most people here assume. When they hear the stories about the Taliban or Al Quaida hiding in caves in the mountains, they believe them uncriticially, but the real situation involves many regions with incredibly dangerous winters, sometimes altitiudes and temperature combinations where most people cannot adapt, but simply weaken and die from long term exposure, and vast distances that must be crossed to to bring in water. There are serious reasons to doubt that many people can lay up in most of that terrain long term. There are places no one is desperate enough to try and farm, and anybody up that way is on the lam from someone. Either the government as a whole knows this and could narrow its searches for people such as Osama considerably, or they aren't listening to their geography experts at the CIA.
Why should I give a fuck if they prosecute someone for taking for free what I handed over hard earned money for? If I support the band enough to buy their stuff, why should I acre about people trying to rip the band off?
Not giving a fuck isn't the same as actively turning them in. Not caring (acring) isn't the same as demanding prosecution.
And actively doing something because you want to see the law observed is still different from doing something because it puts a competitor out of business.
And wanting to see a reasonable penalty enforced is not the same as wanting to see absolutely any penalty enforced - I support arresting shoplifters, but I don't want their left hands chopped off for the first offense, nor their heads for the second.
So, your answer to "Why not though?" - Because most of us haven't conflated and totally ignored obvious differences on at least all of the above three levels in making our moral judgments. I'm really hoping you don't either.
For most software, the alternative has all the same features, not just arguably similar ones. If Foxit reader opens and displays PDFs in the same way as Adobe, that's not alternative in the same sense that an alternative band is. 'Functionally identical' isn't the same 'as somewhat similar in style' or 'fulfilling a similar purpose'. Software is usually like the situation where I can buy a particular brand of claw hammer at Ace hardware, and I can probably find another brand there too, or go to Home Depot and find the other brand there - they are all still claw hammers. You're arguing that I can buy a claw hammer, a crow bar, or a rock to hit nails with, and they are all the same. A partial overlap of function does not map to near total overlap of function.
There are some decent arguments for at least a short, fixed time copyright (for music, video, writing, and even games at the very least). There's a whole lot more that's debatable about these options: 'Life plus' variable durations that favor some people more than others, terms longer than life in general, and unlimited ability to assign copyright to a corporation. Any of those should have required an extra burden of proof for the laws to be found constitutional.
Before people chime in to either wish Albert a roommate who thinks he has a pretty mouth, or 'explain' why the charges are bogus, just chill. This cracker was in trouble in 2004, turned state's evidence, and walked. There are people still on the inside who really miss him. It doesn't matter what the sentence is in his case, he literally is a dead man walking. It doesn't help either, that his Russian buds, still un-arrested and likely to remain so, may be worried about what new tales he will tell. They probably aren't worried enough to bother, but when somebody else does for lil' old 'soupnazi' they'll help enlarge the suspect list to where nobody will ever prove anything.
So discuss the security needs of the big credit card companies, or this crime in particular, all you want. Just remember, you already know how this one turns out.
A new XML extension certainly has potential to be trivial. That's kind of the point - that the XML designers have done a lot of the work in making the language so extensible. So some posters have siezed upon the point that there is potential for an XML project to run afoul of the obviousness test in patent law. You are correct, a particular extension, and its underlying implementation, aren't necessarily trivial, and the proportions of creative work that should be attributed to the patent holder and to the original XML designers will greatly vary. People shouldn't assume either that all patents involving XML would violate the obviousness test, nor that the court didn't deal with this point properly. We are hearing about what Microsoft's attorney did wrong, and there's no news story in going over parts of the trial where everyone did things correctly and with little fuss and bother attending.
As someone who is an Enrolled Agent, licensed to practice before the IRS, I think you've just demonstrated your ignorance in exactly the manner you claimed. (And provided support to your point - well done.). There is an alternative to an accountant, particularly to a CPA, which is what you actually mean if you want someone who can legally represent you before the IRS if his or her work triggers an audit. That's us EAs.
I'm not knocking every CPA out there, as I have met some who are as good at taxes as I am, and a few with 20 years in the business who are still a little better, but I have seen quite a few who were definitely not. After all, a CPA does more than just taxes, and some of them are primarily focused on the investment advice and wealth development side. For that matter, I would estimate that the odds an actual attorney will be complete and correct in doing any tax prep to be under 50%, for situations as simple as a sole proprietorship of a service only business with no physical inventory (and he will probably steer you wrong on whether you should incorporate as well). While I know some taxation specialist lawyers who are ethical, sharp, and really into the field, I have to say I know more who just kick back and do their client's taxes the same way they have for 20 years. I even know a few CPAs who have gone through the EA training and licensing later, even though they could already practice before the IRS.
There's a reason the IRS created the EA system to get non-CPAs and non-lawyers into representing clients at audits. We're the people they authorize directly, by their standards and not some state bar or school's standards. Statistically, we win audits for our clients at a marginally better rate than CPAs, a much better rate than lawyers, and since many of us work for large commercial preparers rather than hanging out our own shingles, we're frequently cheaper than either. Now if you have a 'C' corp big enough to require an M-3, by all means get a lawyer as well to handle your non-tax situations, and a CPA or someone like me who will work with them and keep them advised on the tax parts. Otherwise, we are your little known best option.
1. Perjury is not usually invoked in civil suits. The normal outcome of getting caught lying to the court in a civil case is financial for ordinary litigants, just as it is here.
2. Levenworth is properly spelled 'Leavenworth', whether you mean the Military prison, or the civilian penitentiary. Both are located in Leavenworth, Kansas. The Federal Penitentiary was downgraded from maximum to medium security in 2005, and so is actually a place where someone might serve time merely for perjury, but that is by no means traditional.
As an old fart, let me say "Hey, you meth addicted hookers, get off of my lawn!"
More seriously, I live in one of the 12 states that passed new laws limiting eminent domain after those recent takings you mentioned. For people in any of the other 38 states, how much would you be willing to bet your cops are on average as honest as mine are? (I don't think most in my area are up to the standards that should be met, but I'll predict the ones where eminent domain is less restrained tend to be worse.).
I agree with the axiom, 'Bad cases make bad law". But, I feel vaguely guilty for agreeing, because of Roe v. Wade for one. There, we have a case brought under a pseudonym, where the original plaintiff later claimed she felt used by a bunch of people with a political agenda from the beginning. By some arguments, that's a bad case. Yet, I don't like the thought of it being overturned, and I'm not at all comfortable with calling the long term result a bad law.
In this case, we might turn up evidence of the blogger having all sorts of motives besides publishing facts, or even show she had an interest in deliberately misreporting some information. What you call complexities, could in fact, be entire criminal acts on their own. And any jury that deals with the case looks fairly likely to have to hack through a tremendous lot of them just under the circumstances we already know. Where you are 'guilty of presumption', I'm guilty of feeling that the facts so far reported already point to a really complex tangle where none of us will really like the final result. Just the issue that it looks like she is deliberately refusing to post the $750 bail seems to point to this. I'm hoping it's a case of her being dirt poor instead, because being unwilling seems to point to a complex political motive, as yet not really revealed.
Great Bunazinni, presenting a lot of information in an easily accessible format to unscreened people certainly can reduce security. Why, when a criminal or spy could get all the information himself? For just one, compiling that info usually takes time, effort, and other risks, and the person who wants to misuse that same info risks coming under suspicion themselves while using that time or making that effort.
For example, I could probably make a list of people in my own neighborhood who have nice stuff without coming under suspicion. If I make that same list available to persons who wish to burgle and don't live in that neighborhood, I save those people the risks that come with spending hours driving through the area slowly to gather the same data. Just because some clever criminals could come up with other dodges, such as dressing like a meter reader, that might cut their risks casing the neighborhood, doesn't mean all potential criminals are nearly that clever. In fact, even if they used such methods, my providing some information they would otherwise have to get themselves could still cut the amount of time they need to prepare and still improve their chances of not getting caught.
As LihTox points out, this is a matter of probabilities. A smart and sufficiently determined person may be able to get away with a crime without any help, but there are always less skilled or trained people who won't, and providing help which adds them to the potential risks pool means the probabilities have gone up. In fact, the law frequently holds people responsible based on such probabilities and not just certainties - laws regarding normally negligent and criminally negligent acts are almost by definition about probabilities.
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So maybe people should have specified GROSS profits? Yes, net profitability may go up if this cuts Eve's operating costs, and quarterly gross profit may go back up for separate reasons (i.e. this attracts new players or causes dissatisfied former players to return, or both.). Still, this move directly impacts immediate gross profit, and that's something we can reliably know (those of us who have studied small scale economics).
Since you didn't make the distinction in your comments either, I'm unclear what you think 'eldavojon' was being sloppy about. Maybe he or someone else should specify what they think will happen to reported quarterly gross and net profits, research whether Eve's parent company is publicly traded, and so on, and if it is, talk stock price effects, and so on, but that doesn't sound like what you mean, offhand, so I must confess I'm puzzled.
You're the second person to post some variation on the 'knowledge is power, and some people want to control that power' theme, and I just wanted to add that there's some real, specific reasons this applies at the present time to out of print books, for those who may think the meme is a little paranoid.
A few weeks ago, I read a book on higher dimensional geometry (Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension - by Rudolph v. B. Rucker). It was published in 1977 in a cheap Dover paperback edition. In the back, there's references to a large number of books and papers on Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and abstract math, by some of the most famous names of 20th century physics (Einstein, Wheeler, Hawking, Everett, Minkowski, etc.) A tremendous number of these turn out to be out of print and unavailable through Amazon or other common sources. In one case, I was offered a copy of one work for over 300 dollars.
There are also a lot of books on the 'occult' side of higher dimensions in the references. Rucker isn't pushing an esoteric knowledge angle - He quotes from several of these, but he's often very critical of the misinterpretations of science found in them, and while he sees some interesting features in the works of people like P. D. Ouspensky or J. W. Dunne, he comes down rather harder on Carlos Castaneda. A little checking on these found a surprising number of them were in print or available online at low costs, and most of the rest were being offered free online from various occult groups websites.
What all this implies is left as an exercise for the astute reader. One example does not, by itself, make much of a trend, but it would be interesting if other such cases exist.
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There are some. I don't think I've ever seen one with no potatoes or basic white onions, but no green vegetables happens some places, as does no tomatoes, and in the north, no peppers. I've also seen places in the middle west where nobody in the area stocked iodized salt (even though they were in the worst part of the country for thyroid problems). And there's the seasonal shortage stuff (like anything with vitamin C in the winter, i.e. oranges) - Chicago used to be bad for that, all the way through the 80's.
'Going a few extra miles' is part of that problem. Some places don't have any public transit, and unless you have a car, you really can't go sufficient distances to find anything but little convenience stores. Arizona, New Mexico, that few extra miles is sometimes literally 100 extra.
Worse, I live in a nice, fairly metropolitan town with about 30,000 population, located on a tech corridor of sorts. It's still nominally part of the Appalachian coal mining region. I could go as little as 30 miles, as the crow flies, to either side of that corridor, and find people where a couple of guys driving a delapidated old school bus are the only local grocers. That bus comes by comes by about once a week loaded with food and notions. It has only a pretty limited cold section, for obvious reasons. Some places, people have one person who drives a truck that maybe looks like Jed Clampett's, who goes out to where there are roads good enough for the grocery bus, meets it, and then brings everything back in another ten miles or so into their isolated community. I've seen little old ladies who have lived in those places all their lives, in shacks or trailers, and who want nothing on Earth more than for that bus to bring some bananas this week.
I'm on my church's outreach comittee. It's a small chruch, and the budget for community support outside our parish is only about $25,000 a year. The rule is to put it first where people are the most desperately poor and miserable. As that works out, we give about equally to some of the poorest parts of Haiti and to communities right in our own state.
We also have a separate budget for providing some meals to families right in our area, four times a year. State employees with the school districts certify those families. We learned that they were sending us the families where the kids were doing the best about staying in school and making good grades, because we were considered the best church to get food from, because we were giving that fourth food distro in the summer. It consists mostly of some hamburger and hot dogs, peanut butter and potted meats, and is designed protein heavy and canned sources heavy, to see the kids get some protein throughout the period when they are out of the school lunch programs. What's trememdously out of keeping with most people's notions of poverty is these people understand why their kids need a good diet to do well in school, push their kids hard to stay in and make grades and do better, and yet so many people assume they are stupid, lazy or unmotivated or they wouldn't be poor.
So you're a liberal democrat too?
(You want to restrict state's rights to regulate insurance practice and you want to restrict state's rights to individually limit punitive damages, that sounds like a liberal democratic position to me).
No wait, that's what conservative Republicans would call a socialist agenda, except now they are the ones advocating it. That's the really odd thing about this - the party that claims to believe in states rights is the one insisting that the real solution is to further restrict state's rights.
"This is a non-sequitur, if you really dig into the numbers, you will find that the main reason for lowered life expectancies is obesity"
This is only true because of a trick being played with what is basically a feedback loop, reinterpreting it as a one way process where "obesity causes X". There is a lot of evidence that diabetes actually affects the appetite, increasing cravings for sweets and fats, and making it so the person with that condition needs more willpower, exercised more consistently, than the average person, to diet. There's also abundant evidence the condition screws up the body in ways that make the same amount of exercise less beneficial, more painful, and more likely to cause other problems, than for a non diabetic.
As a diabetic who has gotten his weight under control (8% bodyfat), who has built enough muscle and lost enough fat to come off of first injectable insulin, and then oral med after oral med, and who can now enjoy an occasional desert just as often as I am willing to hit the track and the weight room, all that fits my experience - diabetes is not just about what we do to contribute to the disease, but what the disease tries in turn to do to us. You don't have to be lazy or eat poorly to get diabetes, you just have to have the genes, and an average amount of willpower and common sense and normal efforts at controlling weight will not save you.
You can beat it with exercise and diet - if you could also become a good tri-athelete if you didn't have the genes (and in fact, if you beat it all the way down to coming off of oral meds, you will be back in shape to run 10 K's competitively, bench more than your body weight, or earn a few dans on your black belt - that's the kind of exercise that really beats the condition, not "moderate 30 min. 3x/week"). Any person who can start off poor and become a self made millionaire by age 30 can certainly find the willpower to beat diabetes. If you have the willpower to be in the top few percent of your field, and your field is really worth doing, you can treat diabetes as just one more thing.
But if you're only in the average range, it's a death sentence. It will take 15 years off your life, not because you are lazier than most, or more of a pig than most, but because you are just like most.
And a better, better measure would be to take all sorts of people in all sorts of economic ranges, environments, and with all sorts of backgrounds into account proportionately. Looking at a person of average income, or one right on the poverty line, or below it. Looking at what happens if you have more kids than the average, or fewer. Looking at various age groups and whether they are doing better or worse as they reach certain ages, Looking at trends that are growing and negative, even if they aren't that common yet, to see where we may all end up if things go on as they trend. All this is what we need. A lot of claims are insignificant to irrelevant if we do all that. They become about as meaningful as evaluating coal mine safety only by the chance the corporate headquarters building collapses.
My ex wife got great care for an advanced malignant melanoma, and is now seven years past treatment when she once was told she had literally less than six weeks to live. (The exact quote was "It's the most advanced stage 5 I have ever seen, and the odds you'll make 2 months are at least 100 billion to one against. The top of the head is a particularly bad place, with all the lymph nodes so close by. Sorry.". She beat it. She and I didn't have to pay a lot for it all either. It was admittedly very reasonable after the part her insurance covered. Rah-rah USA!
Except, she was in a particular genotype that fit a number of experimental protocols that happened to be being tested nearby, and she had people who were willing and able to drive her or 250 miles each way for a monthly totally experimental treatment at Duke that just may have helped as well. Except there were a couple of dozen other times she needed transport to this and that program at some distant research school, and somehow it always happened. Except she tolerated her chemo very, very well, and one of the best oncologists in the country monitored her treatment at a lot less than he usually charged because he thought the person who diagnosed her first was an idiot with a horrible bedside manner when he heard about it. Except that, at those odds, it's probably as fair to call it Divine intervention as anything the USA's 'superior social structure' brought about. (And her surgeon swears 'something took control of his hand', and said "No no, resect this section all the way out to here along that vein! Cut that little flap! Now you've got it all.").
I don't know if my Ex's case proves even a moderate income person can get decent treatment under our system, or that a moderate income person with a mother-in-law that knew half a dozen exceptional practicioners, a husband that knew a really good plastic surgeon through his military contacts, and a support network willing to transport her hundreds of miles on short notice when she was too sick to drive, and a whole lot of lucky timing, can get decent treatment. Maybe it proves that some doctors, nurses, and even insurance company people admire an indominatible will to live and occasionally get behind and push. Maybe it was all one big miracle - and no, I'm not being facetious.
I think a lot of poorer people would have an impossible task just driving themselves to the treatments, or getting any of the exceptional help she got. I can't say I know that, though, because her case was so unusual it may prove nothing at all in any mundane context.
I see what you mean. I frequently deal with family members who buy the cheapest possible versions of some foods, then eat out when they want something 'good'. They are willing to pay for all white meat chicken breast in a sandwich, but buy pressed nuggets for at home, or cardboard pizzas, etc.
In particular, my parents are both in their 80's now, and if some of us kids don't check on them, accompany them to the grocery stores and steer them towards quality foods, their nutritional practices would probably swiftly put them both in the hospital. I caught my well educated father eating Hostess cupcakes three meals in a row once, and drinking nothing but Walmart sodas.
But, with occasional nudges that don't even feel like nagging, it turns out he'll still eat plenty of veggies if we let him pick them out - the biggest thing is we have to remind him that the reason prices for a lot of foods he remembers well from childhood are higher now is because prices are generally higher - otherwise he tends to too often buy things he doesn't remember from childhood at all, like cheese whiz.
We also have to cook batches for the whole family and drop stuff by sometimes. With my sister doing good wholesome stuff every week for Sunday dinners, and my Ex and I taking the parents with us when we shop and helping them find good food, offering to cook some of the stuff that isn't microwave fast food, and so on, we have a large extended family that are all fit, or heading that way. I think all this ramble matches what you are describing - it's often about personal choices.
I don't agree completely though - I think you could get a better idea of how much of the problem is poor judgment if you also compare what poor people buy when they use food stamp programs, where some of your examples are right out, such as cigarettes. To me, this looks like it is a partly self perpetuated problem, and it's partly perpetuated by other factors we should fix - as just one example, my state has lower sales taxes for regular food items, but the definition of food is strange. You can buy a candy bar with a really bad nutritional profile, and pay the full tax, which is around 10%. A cookie which has the exact same ingredients plus some milled flour, and which is no better nutritionally, gets a discount on sales taxes - evidently, because adding a little bleached wheat magically makes it good for you in the minds of my legislators. That's something which could be improved at the government level.
Even if we don't reflexively blame 'capitalism' or 'advertising', when a fast food chain decides a 'small' soft drink is 24 oz. and it goes up from there (Krystal), or starts selling nothing smaller than 1/3rd pound burgers (Hardees in my neighborhood), maybe it's time to talk about 'other-perpetuating' too,
As I understand it, President Obama wants a single payer system because it puts sufficient pressure on the companies to rein in costs, so it should help at least keep price adjustments in line with general inflation. That's different from single payer being an end in itself, and maybe he's open to suggestions about other ways to get insurance company costs in line with the more moderate costs of systems such as Medicare and stop premiums from rising at 3 to 4 times the inflation rate. From what I've read so far, Nancy Pelosi may or may not want single payer as an end in itself.
To my mind, there is a fundamental difference between the parties at this point. The Democrats fluctuate somewhat on big government, give in to the idea too often (IMHO), and are frequently unrealistic in estimating the effects of deficit spending, high levels of regulation and such, but the Republicans want a small federal government with an incredibly bloated Defense Dept., DEA, and FBI. Demanding a shrinking federal government that returns power to the states, while fighting wars that cost as much as Iraq, or spending as much on just one area of law enforcement as the war on drugs requires, isn't just a bit unrealistic, it's as absurd as Dehydrated Water. At this point, the Dems are like a basically sane person who never studied physics, and so doesn't really understand what it takes to send a rocket to the moon - the Republicans have become the people who want to fly there in a chariot drawn by swans.
OK, so let's assume you are 100% right. The distinction between rich and poor is really all about teh stupids. Still, the evidence you cite also strongly suggests we are splitting into two classes, permanently unequal, with one class perceiving strong grievances. You're arguing that this is proper, not that it isn't happening. You're arguing that one side has the moral superiority, but to do so, you're also admitting that there are sides.
Whenever the DNC brings this up, they are accused of encouraging class warfare. But, by your own argument, we really, objectively do have class warfare going on as an expression of social Darwinism, and it isn't just a "DNC talking point", it's an objective fact that results from your own analysis. What, you think both sides have to openly admit they are in a war before it's a war? You've just proved that if you can afford healthcare and all the toys, and I can't have both, it's me against you, and since I'm also presumably as stupid as you've also proved, I can't think of anything better to do than shout "Up against the wall Nazi Mutherfucker, we will crucify you when the socialist revolution comes! We will eat your children's brains! Death to AmeriKKKa!", and then get out the A-K. Assuming I make less than you, it's only if I'm smart enough to regard your argument as BS that it isn't remorselessly logical for me to develop a total commitment to seeing you and everybody you associate with die horribly.
Don't blame me, bro! You were dumb enough to argue that 30 million Americans ought to be aspiring to put a gasoline soaked tire around your neck and light it. If I'm stupider than you, that definitely makes me too stupid to do what's morally right and die quietly without bothering you. By your own argument, I literally can't know any better. Sounds like a tragedy all around. I'll die eventually of being a dumb animal, you'll die sooner or later of expecting dumb animals to have moral sense.
I've read a few books on how to write, and the way 'Clone Wars" was used in the first movie (4 - A New Hope), is a classic throwaway line. The writer wants to explain how two people knew each other, so he has them meet during 'the war'. He could have had them know each other from college, business, or politics instead. A halfway good writer (and Lucas is actually halfway good), makes it more specific - just like in a mundane fiction book set in the current time-frame, it's easy to claim two older people knew each other from "the Nam". A better writer might look up a bit of the history, mention a specific town or battle, something like that. A not so good writer might make up the name of a town that merely sounds Vietnamese - "Duk-Trang - your dad was with the 103rd Airborne, flying Seminole assault choppers.". SF and Fantasy are easier - there's no history books needed.
Either way, it's not intended to lead anywhere. When Lucas wrote the first screenplay, it was common to use the technique just for verisimulitude, although more modern writer's guides sometimes mention that these throwaways are good places to find raw material if the work results in demand for a sequel and writers should use lots of them so they aren't painted into a corner in developing a series.
Since Lucas was writing a film called "Star Wars", set up as part 4 of a serial, picking a war instead of one of the other options fit, and I would just about bet that when he wrote that line, he had no plans for a sequel, and hadn't really thought about which side the clones were to fight on, what the whole clone war was about, or any of that.
Ah, you've touched on one of my pet peeves - Thank you. Why do so many fans seem to respond differently to blowing up whole planets or 'novaing' stars than to burning off the entire surface of a world or otherwise messing up its ecology? For that matter, what's the real difference between eradicating all life on a world and killing off only the higher organisms? "I left the bacteria alive - they can re-evolve a new intelligent species in a mere billion years" is not much of a defense in court - rather it would probably come off worse than "I was only following orders.".
Look at Trek - Genesis devices, Nova torpedoes, and 'Red Matter'. The real question is, could a federation starship zortch the surface of a planet enough to kill billions? And if it can, why are any of the weapons that also ruin or disperse the underlying rocks any worse? Mirror, Mirror says a single original NCC1701 grade cruiser can kill a planet bound ecology, or at least the entire Halkan civilization. So why do so many plot lines involve the villain who is bad because he's building a weapon that does the same thing, plus a little more collateral damage?
When I read as far as the header, I thought you were going to say the robots should throw the Marines into the rooms. (And that part of the brain that still retains my old drill instructor's best routines said "makes sense"...).
My local exchange is in a cube with walls of steel reinforced concrete a meter thick, no windows, and two sets of double steel airlock style doors for access. Emerging lines are underground for at least half a mile before coming up at over 20 separate boxes. I know personally of at least a dozen other exchanges built like this. OMG! Anybody with a mere few thousand nukes and the ability to precision target them at all our major population centers could sabotage the whole country's landline phones.
I can think of several reasons why knowing some tropical regions are cold matters. For one, look at geopolitics:
South America - the left edge is where most of the mountains are, often leaving no more than narrow strips before you get to the seacoast. Peru and Argentina are both colder on average than is generally assumed by North Americans. So, is coca a tropical plant? Or is that just another assumption that follows from the first one? 'No one could grow coca in the Rocky mountains - it has to be imported from tropical countries like Columbia. We can win the war on drugs by fighting it there.'
Afghanistan - same situation, lots of areas above 10,000 feet mean it's colder than most people here assume. When they hear the stories about the Taliban or Al Quaida hiding in caves in the mountains, they believe them uncriticially, but the real situation involves many regions with incredibly dangerous winters, sometimes altitiudes and temperature combinations where most people cannot adapt, but simply weaken and die from long term exposure, and vast distances that must be crossed to to bring in water. There are serious reasons to doubt that many people can lay up in most of that terrain long term. There are places no one is desperate enough to try and farm, and anybody up that way is on the lam from someone. Either the government as a whole knows this and could narrow its searches for people such as Osama considerably, or they aren't listening to their geography experts at the CIA.
Why should I give a fuck if they prosecute someone for taking for free what I handed over hard earned money for?
If I support the band enough to buy their stuff, why should I acre about people trying to rip the band off?
Not giving a fuck isn't the same as actively turning them in.
Not caring (acring) isn't the same as demanding prosecution.
And actively doing something because you want to see the law observed is still different from doing something because it puts a competitor out of business.
And wanting to see a reasonable penalty enforced is not the same as wanting to see absolutely any penalty enforced - I support arresting shoplifters, but I don't want their left hands chopped off for the first offense, nor their heads for the second.
So, your answer to "Why not though?" - Because most of us haven't conflated and totally ignored obvious differences on at least all of the above three levels in making our moral judgments. I'm really hoping you don't either.
For most software, the alternative has all the same features, not just arguably similar ones. If Foxit reader opens and displays PDFs in the same way as Adobe, that's not alternative in the same sense that an alternative band is. 'Functionally identical' isn't the same 'as somewhat similar in style' or 'fulfilling a similar purpose'. Software is usually like the situation where I can buy a particular brand of claw hammer at Ace hardware, and I can probably find another brand there too, or go to Home Depot and find the other brand there - they are all still claw hammers. You're arguing that I can buy a claw hammer, a crow bar, or a rock to hit nails with, and they are all the same. A partial overlap of function does not map to near total overlap of function.
There are some decent arguments for at least a short, fixed time copyright (for music, video, writing, and even games at the very least). There's a whole lot more that's debatable about these options: 'Life plus' variable durations that favor some people more than others, terms longer than life in general, and unlimited ability to assign copyright to a corporation. Any of those should have required an extra burden of proof for the laws to be found constitutional.
Before people chime in to either wish Albert a roommate who thinks he has a pretty mouth, or 'explain' why the charges are bogus, just chill. This cracker was in trouble in 2004, turned state's evidence, and walked. There are people still on the inside who really miss him. It doesn't matter what the sentence is in his case, he literally is a dead man walking. It doesn't help either, that his Russian buds, still un-arrested and likely to remain so, may be worried about what new tales he will tell. They probably aren't worried enough to bother, but when somebody else does for lil' old 'soupnazi' they'll help enlarge the suspect list to where nobody will ever prove anything.
So discuss the security needs of the big credit card companies, or this crime in particular, all you want. Just remember, you already know how this one turns out.
A new XML extension certainly has potential to be trivial. That's kind of the point - that the XML designers have done a lot of the work in making the language so extensible. So some posters have siezed upon the point that there is potential for an XML project to run afoul of the obviousness test in patent law. You are correct, a particular extension, and its underlying implementation, aren't necessarily trivial, and the proportions of creative work that should be attributed to the patent holder and to the original XML designers will greatly vary. People shouldn't assume either that all patents involving XML would violate the obviousness test, nor that the court didn't deal with this point properly. We are hearing about what Microsoft's attorney did wrong, and there's no news story in going over parts of the trial where everyone did things correctly and with little fuss and bother attending.
As someone who is an Enrolled Agent, licensed to practice before the IRS, I think you've just demonstrated your ignorance in exactly the manner you claimed. (And provided support to your point - well done.). There is an alternative to an accountant, particularly to a CPA, which is what you actually mean if you want someone who can legally represent you before the IRS if his or her work triggers an audit. That's us EAs.
I'm not knocking every CPA out there, as I have met some who are as good at taxes as I am, and a few with 20 years in the business who are still a little better, but I have seen quite a few who were definitely not. After all, a CPA does more than just taxes, and some of them are primarily focused on the investment advice and wealth development side. For that matter, I would estimate that the odds an actual attorney will be complete and correct in doing any tax prep to be under 50%, for situations as simple as a sole proprietorship of a service only business with no physical inventory (and he will probably steer you wrong on whether you should incorporate as well). While I know some taxation specialist lawyers who are ethical, sharp, and really into the field, I have to say I know more who just kick back and do their client's taxes the same way they have for 20 years. I even know a few CPAs who have gone through the EA training and licensing later, even though they could already practice before the IRS.
There's a reason the IRS created the EA system to get non-CPAs and non-lawyers into representing clients at audits. We're the people they authorize directly, by their standards and not some state bar or school's standards. Statistically, we win audits for our clients at a marginally better rate than CPAs, a much better rate than lawyers, and since many of us work for large commercial preparers rather than hanging out our own shingles, we're frequently cheaper than either. Now if you have a 'C' corp big enough to require an M-3, by all means get a lawyer as well to handle your non-tax situations, and a CPA or someone like me who will work with them and keep them advised on the tax parts. Otherwise, we are your little known best option.
1. Perjury is not usually invoked in civil suits. The normal outcome of getting caught lying to the court in a civil case is financial for ordinary litigants, just as it is here.
2. Levenworth is properly spelled 'Leavenworth', whether you mean the Military prison, or the civilian penitentiary. Both are located in Leavenworth, Kansas. The Federal Penitentiary was downgraded from maximum to medium security in 2005, and so is actually a place where someone might serve time merely for perjury, but that is by no means traditional.
As an old fart, let me say "Hey, you meth addicted hookers, get off of my lawn!"
More seriously, I live in one of the 12 states that passed new laws limiting eminent domain after those recent takings you mentioned. For people in any of the other 38 states, how much would you be willing to bet your cops are on average as honest as mine are? (I don't think most in my area are up to the standards that should be met, but I'll predict the ones where eminent domain is less restrained tend to be worse.).
I agree with the axiom, 'Bad cases make bad law". But, I feel vaguely guilty for agreeing, because of Roe v. Wade for one. There, we have a case brought under a pseudonym, where the original plaintiff later claimed she felt used by a bunch of people with a political agenda from the beginning. By some arguments, that's a bad case. Yet, I don't like the thought of it being overturned, and I'm not at all comfortable with calling the long term result a bad law.
In this case, we might turn up evidence of the blogger having all sorts of motives besides publishing facts, or even show she had an interest in deliberately misreporting some information. What you call complexities, could in fact, be entire criminal acts on their own. And any jury that deals with the case looks fairly likely to have to hack through a tremendous lot of them just under the circumstances we already know. Where you are 'guilty of presumption', I'm guilty of feeling that the facts so far reported already point to a really complex tangle where none of us will really like the final result. Just the issue that it looks like she is deliberately refusing to post the $750 bail seems to point to this. I'm hoping it's a case of her being dirt poor instead, because being unwilling seems to point to a complex political motive, as yet not really revealed.
Great Bunazinni, presenting a lot of information in an easily accessible format to unscreened people certainly can reduce security. Why, when a criminal or spy could get all the information himself? For just one, compiling that info usually takes time, effort, and other risks, and the person who wants to misuse that same info risks coming under suspicion themselves while using that time or making that effort.
For example, I could probably make a list of people in my own neighborhood who have nice stuff without coming under suspicion. If I make that same list available to persons who wish to burgle and don't live in that neighborhood, I save those people the risks that come with spending hours driving through the area slowly to gather the same data. Just because some clever criminals could come up with other dodges, such as dressing like a meter reader, that might cut their risks casing the neighborhood, doesn't mean all potential criminals are nearly that clever. In fact, even if they used such methods, my providing some information they would otherwise have to get themselves could still cut the amount of time they need to prepare and still improve their chances of not getting caught.
As LihTox points out, this is a matter of probabilities. A smart and sufficiently determined person may be able to get away with a crime without any help, but there are always less skilled or trained people who won't, and providing help which adds them to the potential risks pool means the probabilities have gone up. In fact, the law frequently holds people responsible based on such probabilities and not just certainties - laws regarding normally negligent and criminally negligent acts are almost by definition about probabilities.