Personally, I think Amazon has lost sight of what it started out to be -- a community of book lovers.
What it started out to be is irrelevant. Important is what it is now: A publicly-traded company. Thus, any love for books or decency takes the back seat to the one rule, which would supersede even God himself: Increase shareholder value for the next quarter. It doesn't matter if you ruin entire industries doing it, shareholder value absolutely, positively has to increase.
And Amazon does base the decision of what's deemed offensive based on which criteria? I hope it's local rating systems like the BPjM the FSK or the USK in Germany, the PEGI in Europe and the ESRB or the MPAA rating in the USA. Rstricting search results based on such ratings is okay, as long as adults can reactivate them. Arbitrary restrictions, however, are not okay. We already have rating systems in place and I don't see how Amazon's decisions would be superior to theirs.
Well, applying for energy subsidies is not stealing. Stealing is taking someone else's possession away without having the legal right to do so. Since the subsidy explicitly goes to everyone who uses a diesel fuel mix for using a diesel fuel mix, taking advantage of it is legal.
Of course you could argue that "stealing" can be interpreted to also cover this but then again someone could interpret "stealing" to also cover anything taking up his time without him wanting it to. And then he sues NBC for daring to air a commercial break during his favourite show. Without having defined what "stealing" is supposed to mean every judge would have to resort to case law to determine whether feeding stray cats counts as murder* or not.
Effectively, you'd make case law the sole legal framework, thus not only overburdening the courts but also allowing anyone with enough money to directly manipulate the law. Through venue shopping and conspiring to bring fake lawsuits, sufficiently wealthy individuals or companies could generate precedence cases (= effective laws) for virtually everything they want to.
As much as we hate legalese and ignoring the incredibly verbose directives the European Union sometimes generates, laws should actually be rather specific, simply to keep people from interpreting them in ways they never were intended to. That admittedly makes the legal corpus less understandable as a whole but one cannot expect to deliver a suitable framework for something as complex as a whole society in a dozen paragraphs. At least not if one wants to see any kind of consistency in how the law gets applied.
* Without "killing" being legally defined, one could argue that feeding stray cats violates "thou shalt not kill" as those cats will later catch mice so everyone who feeds them is complicit in murder.
That proves it: The design requirements for this thing were "produce some artsy crap". They clearly spent more time interpreting what they meant to express by putting three different kinds of metal finish next to each other than they did thinking about hardware specs.
"With edge-to-edge glass, adamo was designed to elicit desire and redefine the image of power." Holy shit. That's a bit like Ferrari building a Segway clone and shipping it with a ten-page treatise on why it still counts as a penis extension.
As I pointed out in another post, Windows 7 can have very confusing installation quirks. Of course I hope that the bug I mentioned will be corrected, but when I look at my experience with the Win7 installer I'd have to say that even Gentoo is actually more straightforward (because well-documented) to install.
Without that bug Win7 would indeed be easy to install, though. Still leagues behind OS X's install disc but more or less equal to most Linux distributions.
The last beta had a funny "install-time complication" I hope will be fixed before launch: It can only be installed on the first HDD; attempting to install it on any other drive will lead to a message about not being able to locate any "system partitions" (a "system partition" appears to be a primary partition with the boot flag set, of which all HDDs contained one). I only found out that the HDD has to be the first one through trial and error - and trial and error involving the physical hardware configuration is one hell of a disincentive to continue the installation.
Of course I later changed the Windows HDD to be the second hard drive and Win 7 boots happily. So if anyone tries to install a beta or RC and is denied due to "system partition" problems: Mess around with the SATA plugs so that the intended target drive is the first one. After installation, return everything to the original state if you want to.
I don't think they're neccessarily worse. It's bad enough that they aren't better. Great power, great respnsibility, that kind of thing. In essence I expect people who hold significant power to be more stable than average people because they can cause much more damage by screwing up.
Besides, I didn't even point out the nukes as the main problem. The nukes merely allow them to do whatever they feel like - and that's the main problem.
I expected the army was about discipline. A soldier incapable of resisting base urges like that reflects badly on his organization. How many other soldiers like that exist in the best-equipped army with the most devastating nuclear capacity in the world?
The USA are capable of setting the world on fire. I'd expect people with that kind of power to be the very example of professionalism. Their sense of self-preservation should already dictate that.
Countries make mistakes in their history. Things that are seen as atrocities in hindsight.
For example the firebombing of civilians by the RAF and the USAF during WWII. It's really hard for any party involved in that war to declare moral superiority; while relatively speaking the Germans were worst, absolutely speaking all parties performed atrocities.
Everyone outside the USA. The USA have nuclear weapons and ignore the sovereignty of other countries, which means their operatives can do pretty much everything everywhere if they feel like it. And those very persons are not-just-slightly unprofessional. Holy shit.
You know, after the USSR is gone the USA seem pretty determined to become the scariest country on the planet. You have the biggest guns and (at least lately) a track record of unprofessionalism, sloppy intel work and bad decisions based on both the unprefessionalism and the sloppy intel. That makes me as a European very uncomfortable being a mere 6,000 kilometers away from you guys.
One of the features of the German Basic Law: The very first article is "Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority."
I'm not sure whether the American Constitution directly protects human dignity (but I seriously doubt it). If not I'd recommend it to be amended with something like the text above, but I know it'd only be a lip service to human dignity anyway. All articles of the Constitution have the unwritten-but-effective ending "unless the state feels otherwise".
[...] it reflects poorly on the professionalism of our soldiers and our entire army.
In fact, it makes the army look thoroughly unprofessional and ethically challenged - truly scary attributes when applied to an army with nuclear capabilities.
Actually, you're wrong on that one. Scientists attached a harmless suction cup to a deaf guy's head and measured his brainwaves. Then they blasted him with 203 dB of noise. The brainwave measurements showed that afterwards he couldn't hear a thing.
Other tests showed that flashbangs do an admirable job of keeping blind people from seeing and that shooting a wheelchair-less paraplegic in the leg keeps him from running away. Also, that the police is not easily amused and that it's surprisingly hard to write a scientific paper in jail.
I assumed dBA, since that's what I usually hear used when talking about noise and noise is what non-telecommunications people usually mean with "decibels": A-weighted sound pressure (dB re 20 Pa emphasized around 3-6 KHz).
A-weighting is probably relatively useless in this scenario as it models loudness to the human ear under normal conditions, but without further knowledge I'd expect the 20 Pa thing to hold. We are talking about noise, after all.
For reference, 203 dB is approximately twice the noise your average convention hall. Or one fifth if it's that one hall where every single vendor had to hire a second-grade sound technician and a third-grade animator.
In Germany, caffeine is already regulated: Cola/soda can't contain more of it than 2.5 grams per liter. Caffeinated beverages above a certain limit (1 gram per liter?) have to state how much caffeine they contain and all caffeinated beverages have to state that they're caffeinated. That's it. I can live with that. If I need more caffeine than a 2.5g/l energy drink can provide I go to the pharmacy and buy it in tablet form.
Children don't get much caffeine (at least not before they can buy their own cola) not through government regulation but because parents are usually sensible enough to not supply them with a diet of cola and energy drinks.
If one really wants to protect children from caffeine, have it mentioned in biology class (no scaremongering, just the facts) and make it easy for parents to be informed about what it does and doesn't do. Also, have caffeinated products labeled - which has the pleasant side effects of allowing you to select your beverage based on how much caffeine it contains.
Regulation can mean "ban it and then ban it again", but it can also mean "make it easy for people to make informed decisions". The latter can already be enough and isn't much of a hassle to anyone.
You could run YUM? My father's netbook (can't remember the model right now) came with SLES, as well - but SLES wouldn't let us connect to the repository without providing a registration number, which didn't come with the notebook. We ultimately returned the thing and bought the Windows version as it would have taken too long to install Ubuntu and set up everything properly.
Note: It's very much possible that we could've easily obtained the number from Novell, but I'm neither familiar with enterprise Linux nor do I expect the average netbook buyer to be. When the resident Linux guy has no idea how to install software that's a pretty sure sign the distro is badly chosen.
Additional fun bit: While the Windows version of the netbook comes with a rescue partition, the Linux version comes with a SLES DVD. Of course, being a netbook, the device does not have an optical drive, so if the user manages to damage the OS they'll have to shell out another hundred bucks for an external drive that may or may not be recognized by the BIOS. Brillant.
Over here in Germany you can order Linux netbooks online. In fact, you might end up inadvertantly buying one as the only difference in advertising is that the Windows model has "with Windows XP" at the end of the description while the Linux model doesn't.
As far as a few individuals who got sent to Gitmo or Syria, they were Muslim extremists who *happened* to be Canadians.
However, there's a number of well-documented cases where innocent people were abducted by American forces in other countries and sent off to countries with more lax views on proper interrogation techniques. Often it's a matter of the Americans not doing their job properly (confosing similar names or mistranslating telephone conversations).
Quite seriously, I don't feel safe knowing that not only do the States intercept my communications and (completely ignoring the sovereignty of the country I'm in) may randomly abduct me if I say something they don't like -- no, they're also incompetent! The people who can randomly abduct and torture you anywhere on the globe are not even good at what they're doing! Holy shit.
In case you want to defend them for not being infallible: For something as severe, inhuman and illegal as extraordinary rendition, any nonzero false positive rate is completely inacceptable. If you can't afford to double- and triple-check your shit you either call off the War On Terror(TM) or take the money from somewhere else. Doing a half-assed job of violating other countries' sovereignty and basic human rights just makes you look like an unusually rich third-world banana republic.
You can fulfill her request and become extremely blessed.
Why the hell would I want the pope walking in and blessing me every time I have sex? I mean, "extremely blessed" sounds like something only the pope can do.
Poke her from her vagina to her throat with your new enormous dick from Penis Enlarge Patch.
Do they distribute diffs or do they use some kind of binary patcher? One the one hand I'd like to review their changes, on the other hand I don't want to have to recompile my penis. This is quite the conundrum.
Go back a couple hundred years and people believed all sorts of weird things. Baths were bad.
Which was actually based on the observation that the plague spread most effectively through the then-popular bathing houses. Of course this was a function of many people being close together, but with germs being unknown the most obvious conclusion was "people visiting bathing houses get ill -> bathing houses harbor illness".
I would liken "bathing is bad" to "giving antibiotics to feedstock is a good idea" - at the time it was a sound idea based on then-current knowledge and observations; today we know that while on the surface true, in retrospect it was actually a fallacy.
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What it started out to be is irrelevant. Important is what it is now: A publicly-traded company. Thus, any love for books or decency takes the back seat to the one rule, which would supersede even God himself: Increase shareholder value for the next quarter. It doesn't matter if you ruin entire industries doing it, shareholder value absolutely, positively has to increase.
And Amazon does base the decision of what's deemed offensive based on which criteria? I hope it's local rating systems like the BPjM the FSK or the USK in Germany, the PEGI in Europe and the ESRB or the MPAA rating in the USA. Rstricting search results based on such ratings is okay, as long as adults can reactivate them. Arbitrary restrictions, however, are not okay. We already have rating systems in place and I don't see how Amazon's decisions would be superior to theirs.
Well, applying for energy subsidies is not stealing. Stealing is taking someone else's possession away without having the legal right to do so. Since the subsidy explicitly goes to everyone who uses a diesel fuel mix for using a diesel fuel mix, taking advantage of it is legal.
Of course you could argue that "stealing" can be interpreted to also cover this but then again someone could interpret "stealing" to also cover anything taking up his time without him wanting it to. And then he sues NBC for daring to air a commercial break during his favourite show. Without having defined what "stealing" is supposed to mean every judge would have to resort to case law to determine whether feeding stray cats counts as murder* or not.
Effectively, you'd make case law the sole legal framework, thus not only overburdening the courts but also allowing anyone with enough money to directly manipulate the law. Through venue shopping and conspiring to bring fake lawsuits, sufficiently wealthy individuals or companies could generate precedence cases (= effective laws) for virtually everything they want to.
As much as we hate legalese and ignoring the incredibly verbose directives the European Union sometimes generates, laws should actually be rather specific, simply to keep people from interpreting them in ways they never were intended to. That admittedly makes the legal corpus less understandable as a whole but one cannot expect to deliver a suitable framework for something as complex as a whole society in a dozen paragraphs. At least not if one wants to see any kind of consistency in how the law gets applied.
* Without "killing" being legally defined, one could argue that feeding stray cats violates "thou shalt not kill" as those cats will later catch mice so everyone who feeds them is complicit in murder.
I also like how they couldn't decide on one kind of finish so they just threw little bits of every finish they liked onto the machine.
This might be a taste issue but I think the backside of the Adamo's screen simply looks bad. Like it was randomly thrown together.
That proves it: The design requirements for this thing were "produce some artsy crap". They clearly spent more time interpreting what they meant to express by putting three different kinds of metal finish next to each other than they did thinking about hardware specs.
"With edge-to-edge glass, adamo was designed to elicit desire and redefine the image of power." Holy shit. That's a bit like Ferrari building a Segway clone and shipping it with a ten-page treatise on why it still counts as a penis extension.
As I pointed out in another post, Windows 7 can have very confusing installation quirks. Of course I hope that the bug I mentioned will be corrected, but when I look at my experience with the Win7 installer I'd have to say that even Gentoo is actually more straightforward (because well-documented) to install.
Without that bug Win7 would indeed be easy to install, though. Still leagues behind OS X's install disc but more or less equal to most Linux distributions.
The last beta had a funny "install-time complication" I hope will be fixed before launch: It can only be installed on the first HDD; attempting to install it on any other drive will lead to a message about not being able to locate any "system partitions" (a "system partition" appears to be a primary partition with the boot flag set, of which all HDDs contained one). I only found out that the HDD has to be the first one through trial and error - and trial and error involving the physical hardware configuration is one hell of a disincentive to continue the installation.
Of course I later changed the Windows HDD to be the second hard drive and Win 7 boots happily. So if anyone tries to install a beta or RC and is denied due to "system partition" problems: Mess around with the SATA plugs so that the intended target drive is the first one. After installation, return everything to the original state if you want to.
I don't think they're neccessarily worse. It's bad enough that they aren't better. Great power, great respnsibility, that kind of thing. In essence I expect people who hold significant power to be more stable than average people because they can cause much more damage by screwing up.
Besides, I didn't even point out the nukes as the main problem. The nukes merely allow them to do whatever they feel like - and that's the main problem.
I expected the army was about discipline. A soldier incapable of resisting base urges like that reflects badly on his organization. How many other soldiers like that exist in the best-equipped army with the most devastating nuclear capacity in the world?
The USA are capable of setting the world on fire. I'd expect people with that kind of power to be the very example of professionalism. Their sense of self-preservation should already dictate that.
For example the firebombing of civilians by the RAF and the USAF during WWII. It's really hard for any party involved in that war to declare moral superiority; while relatively speaking the Germans were worst, absolutely speaking all parties performed atrocities.
War does bring out the worst in man.
Everyone outside the USA. The USA have nuclear weapons and ignore the sovereignty of other countries, which means their operatives can do pretty much everything everywhere if they feel like it. And those very persons are not-just-slightly unprofessional. Holy shit.
You know, after the USSR is gone the USA seem pretty determined to become the scariest country on the planet. You have the biggest guns and (at least lately) a track record of unprofessionalism, sloppy intel work and bad decisions based on both the unprefessionalism and the sloppy intel. That makes me as a European very uncomfortable being a mere 6,000 kilometers away from you guys.
One of the features of the German Basic Law: The very first article is "Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority."
I'm not sure whether the American Constitution directly protects human dignity (but I seriously doubt it). If not I'd recommend it to be amended with something like the text above, but I know it'd only be a lip service to human dignity anyway. All articles of the Constitution have the unwritten-but-effective ending "unless the state feels otherwise".
In fact, it makes the army look thoroughly unprofessional and ethically challenged - truly scary attributes when applied to an army with nuclear capabilities.
Actually, you're wrong on that one. Scientists attached a harmless suction cup to a deaf guy's head and measured his brainwaves. Then they blasted him with 203 dB of noise. The brainwave measurements showed that afterwards he couldn't hear a thing.
Other tests showed that flashbangs do an admirable job of keeping blind people from seeing and that shooting a wheelchair-less paraplegic in the leg keeps him from running away. Also, that the police is not easily amused and that it's surprisingly hard to write a scientific paper in jail.
I assumed dBA, since that's what I usually hear used when talking about noise and noise is what non-telecommunications people usually mean with "decibels": A-weighted sound pressure (dB re 20 Pa emphasized around 3-6 KHz).
A-weighting is probably relatively useless in this scenario as it models loudness to the human ear under normal conditions, but without further knowledge I'd expect the 20 Pa thing to hold. We are talking about noise, after all.
For reference, 203 dB is approximately twice the noise your average convention hall. Or one fifth if it's that one hall where every single vendor had to hire a second-grade sound technician and a third-grade animator.
In Germany, caffeine is already regulated: Cola/soda can't contain more of it than 2.5 grams per liter. Caffeinated beverages above a certain limit (1 gram per liter?) have to state how much caffeine they contain and all caffeinated beverages have to state that they're caffeinated. That's it. I can live with that. If I need more caffeine than a 2.5g/l energy drink can provide I go to the pharmacy and buy it in tablet form.
Children don't get much caffeine (at least not before they can buy their own cola) not through government regulation but because parents are usually sensible enough to not supply them with a diet of cola and energy drinks.
If one really wants to protect children from caffeine, have it mentioned in biology class (no scaremongering, just the facts) and make it easy for parents to be informed about what it does and doesn't do. Also, have caffeinated products labeled - which has the pleasant side effects of allowing you to select your beverage based on how much caffeine it contains.
Regulation can mean "ban it and then ban it again", but it can also mean "make it easy for people to make informed decisions". The latter can already be enough and isn't much of a hassle to anyone.
You could run YUM? My father's netbook (can't remember the model right now) came with SLES, as well - but SLES wouldn't let us connect to the repository without providing a registration number, which didn't come with the notebook. We ultimately returned the thing and bought the Windows version as it would have taken too long to install Ubuntu and set up everything properly.
Note: It's very much possible that we could've easily obtained the number from Novell, but I'm neither familiar with enterprise Linux nor do I expect the average netbook buyer to be. When the resident Linux guy has no idea how to install software that's a pretty sure sign the distro is badly chosen.
Additional fun bit: While the Windows version of the netbook comes with a rescue partition, the Linux version comes with a SLES DVD. Of course, being a netbook, the device does not have an optical drive, so if the user manages to damage the OS they'll have to shell out another hundred bucks for an external drive that may or may not be recognized by the BIOS. Brillant.
Over here in Germany you can order Linux netbooks online. In fact, you might end up inadvertantly buying one as the only difference in advertising is that the Windows model has "with Windows XP" at the end of the description while the Linux model doesn't.
The Ministry of Agriculture denied being involved so it must be true.
However, there's a number of well-documented cases where innocent people were abducted by American forces in other countries and sent off to countries with more lax views on proper interrogation techniques. Often it's a matter of the Americans not doing their job properly (confosing similar names or mistranslating telephone conversations).
Quite seriously, I don't feel safe knowing that not only do the States intercept my communications and (completely ignoring the sovereignty of the country I'm in) may randomly abduct me if I say something they don't like -- no, they're also incompetent! The people who can randomly abduct and torture you anywhere on the globe are not even good at what they're doing! Holy shit.
In case you want to defend them for not being infallible: For something as severe, inhuman and illegal as extraordinary rendition, any nonzero false positive rate is completely inacceptable. If you can't afford to double- and triple-check your shit you either call off the War On Terror(TM) or take the money from somewhere else. Doing a half-assed job of violating other countries' sovereignty and basic human rights just makes you look like an unusually rich third-world banana republic.
Why the hell would I want the pope walking in and blessing me every time I have sex? I mean, "extremely blessed" sounds like something only the pope can do.
Do they distribute diffs or do they use some kind of binary patcher? One the one hand I'd like to review their changes, on the other hand I don't want to have to recompile my penis. This is quite the conundrum.
You must be new here.
Which was actually based on the observation that the plague spread most effectively through the then-popular bathing houses. Of course this was a function of many people being close together, but with germs being unknown the most obvious conclusion was "people visiting bathing houses get ill -> bathing houses harbor illness".
I would liken "bathing is bad" to "giving antibiotics to feedstock is a good idea" - at the time it was a sound idea based on then-current knowledge and observations; today we know that while on the surface true, in retrospect it was actually a fallacy.