Because thrift store and libraries do not exist simply to collect, store, and present the books to be used for purely commercial purposes.
This.
Arbitrage is an essential part of the free market. It's mechanism is a correction, pushing towards the better allocation of scarce resources.
In this context, our arbitrator buys books where they are cheapest and sells them where they are more expensive. The impact is to raise the selling price in the cheap places and lower them where expensive. Given sufficient arbitrage, the price, quantity demanded and supplied will arrive at the optimum point. The fairest point for all involved.
Aside from possible issues relating to these people spending a lot of time blocking the isles, I do not see purpose in retail shops kicking out the scanners. They make them sales, which is their whole point.
Libraries, however, have other objectives. They are not intending to make a profit from the sale of surplus stocks; they're not intending to create a profit at all, ever. They are there for something else, and scanners are detracting from that. They are themselves likely well positioned to take advantage of Amazon. I expect that In many cases they are deliberately pricing below the market.
Just to exemplify the ignorance of the parent, hatred between Ian Hislop and a union leader does not personify class divisions. Please bear in mind Hislop is editor of Private Eye, infamous for satirising the "ruling elite" and annihilating politicians (and anybody else with power) on all sides. Consider his comment on the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition: "I like the idea of this coalition neutralizing the loonies on both sides".
Union leaders fall well within his scope for attack. Most of the prominent union leaders are claim to represent the "working man" yet are nothing more than the bastard merger of a politician and fat-cat executive. They spout propagandist bullshit to elevate themselves and their agendas and the union members are as far from being their primary interests as shareholders are to company executives. The general public meanwhile are nothing but pawns to be disrupted and rendered as unhappy as possible, because they're nothing more than leverage.
I assume the HIGNFY reference is to this episode with Bob Crow. Members of the audience booing him at the introduction might provide a little context, if you want some more how about a clip of the Sun (in 1999 still extremely in support of the socialist Labour Party) also having a go. Hatred of union leaders is not a class war thing, it's working people trying to get to work or go on holiday that hate union leaders.
Unfortunately the remainder of the post is full of examples like this of a little knowledge being a bad thing.
If you do what you want based on what you feel is right, we might just not have any laws at all. There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest.
So, just as an analogy, if the police decided to stop enforcing laws against auto theft, you believe it would be wrong for others to do so. I don't think that holds water. What this guys is doing is indeed illegal, but not immoral; when our government is unwilling or unable to enforce or prosecute laws it becomes incumbent upon non-sanctioned individuals to protect society by doing so. The simple fact is that the government is not able to even begin to scratch the sheer volume of spam, nor is it interested in going after spammers unless it can wrench a large settlement and some headlines out of the deal. If we wish to preserve the Internet as a medium for the exchange of ideas, some of us must take action to protect it from those who exploit it at a very real, monetary cost to innocent people.
The analogy is incorrect; it should say "if the government decided to redact laws against auto theft". A point covered by the parent is that the police deciding to do or not do something is not close to "society as a whole". Many argue the government isn't either, but there's at least a pretence and theoretical association. This goes a long way to explaining why there is a slight air of plausibility that the police may one day cease bothering to enforce auto theft, yet the idea that the government may legalise it seems so absurd.
Secondly how laws are enforced is not the same as whether laws exist nor whether they are effective; for example the police generally do not enforce civil law (only criminal law).
But most important is the concept of due process. It is not only that auto-theft laws are designed by society and enforced by those appointed by and accountable to it, but the way in which this is done. This is utterly fundamental and without it any moral good that arises is merely by chance.
Age progression has always been an issue with the Civ games. I've always preferred the "marathon" setting where each turn consumes less years and technology is researched much slower, yet build speed is the same. This gives much more time for unit and base building, and to make use of them.
Personally I think this game is looking good. Maybe not as good as Civ IV BtS, but remember previous Civ games have always started out a bit ropey before hitting their stride after some good support from Firaxis and the community.
One thing I'm wary of Social Policies seem to have been dumbed down somewhat. They're more like perks than the absolutely key strategic choices from previous games. Presenting information seems to have taken a step backwards, though the more I play the more I'm getting used to it, so this may just be bias from having become so used to IV.
p.s. in the late game hit F10 to go into Strategic View before ending the turn. This speeds up turn waits noticeably, which seems to suggest there's a bug. This screen might also be useful if you're trying to play on a netbook or something.
There's no bait-and-switch here. People are getting exactly what is advertised. Where's the problem?
This has nothing to do with bait-and switch. The problem is that the strategy is only possible in a non-competitive position. Intel can only turn an i5 into an i7 if it is restricting supply of i7s through monopoly power.
Going back to the penknife analogy, the point is all penknives physically have the compass. All penknives have incurred the cost of having the compass. Clearly either (a) the cheaper penknife price actually includes the cost of the defunct compass or (b) the more expensive version is subsidising the cost of the compass in the non-compass penknives.
This would not be possible in competition because (a) there would be another company selling a knife with no compass and therefore cheaper, and (b) there would be a company selling a compass-knife that is not subsidising non-compass knives and is therefore cheaper.
This is not at all the same as binning, which is more or less where they try to make a compass-knife but the compass is defective so it is sold as a non-compass knife. As the compass does not work this always was a non-compass knife, and the cost of the faulty component actually is a cost of the compass knives (it's effectively wastage that has been recycled).
People totally bind to Captain Obvious answers, ignoring the bleeding obvious to the point of gross incompetence, is sadly not uncommon in many lines of work. In particular it appears desirable in the media, essential in politics and, interestingly perhaps, there appears to be a causal relationship with middle management.
This is probably just an agreement not to pinch staff in order to stymie a competitor. Sure you can recruit staff because you want to do something better, and in general this is good for the public, but you can also do it just to stop the competitor doing something better than you. Like grab key staff in a key department, not because you have any particular use to them but because frankly it's worth you paying them just to not go and work at the other guy. This is a tactic that involves everybody losing, but you losing a little less than everyone else. It protects losers and is underhand bad practice, it's not any good for the consumer.
This only really applies to the high-fliers or significant numbers of a department/branch/project/whatever (particularly those on collaborations). The objective is not some kind of conspiracy to hold down wages, and any hope of achieving that would be pretty laughable. I've no sympathy for employees complaining that stopping the above underhand tactics loses them financial opportunities as it is just as unethical to take advantage of it.
Agreements would only extend headhunting/approaching employees, if they apply for jobs under their own volition they're completely fair game.
But economics is not actually a zero sum game.. There's lots of imaginary money (stocks, bonds, loans, etc.) that pops into existence from time to time, and disappears just as quickly. Economics is like alchemy, in that it doesn't actually have to work, only make others think it works.
No. Economics is by definition a zero-sum game. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. Economics is not "about" money, money is merely a very convenient medium of exchange - essentially a complex unit of measurement.
When a stock rises in value there is not any additional money. The stock represents a legal right to assets that people consider to be worth more of their resources to acquire, thus people consider it to have a value and this is expressed in the money measurement. When a stock or a bond "pops into existence", nothing new of value is created, there is no new money in any sense. When a stock/bond is acquired, money changes hands.
It's not important if the quantity of money units changes anyway. If the government managed to force everyone to put all their money in a bank account, and then halved the "amount of money" in all accounts, you would have half as much money in the sense of the measurement units but you would have exactly the same amount of money in the sense of function (since all prices would halve). The point to take away is the scarcity of resources has remained the same, all that has changed is the measurement interval.
Economics and alchemy both claim an attempt to alleviate the scarcity problem. However, the latter promises false science while the former attempts to provide information in order to allocate existing resources in a more efficient manner. An alchemist might say he could create you some gold by growing it in your field; an economist might say that due to the nature of your land and because wheat is currently more scarce than corn, if you switched production to wheat you could trade half your harvest for the corn and sell the remainder for gold. The alchemist might then applaud this creating gold out of corn for the economist to retort that he's an idiot. Nothing is being magicked into existence, growing corn was simply relatively inefficient.
I really don't see the point in these machines. In the UK votes are counted by volunteers, with quite basic fundamental (i.e. strong) overlapping controls. I fail to imagine an approach that could be any more secure, cheaper or better suited to audit.
Better yet it's obviously so. People can observe the entire process in motion, volunteer yourself and take part if you like. With an electronic system everyone's utterly reliant on controls implemented and only observable by other people who they don't know the names of and will never meet.
Sure it takes at least a day to get through it; almost certainly the day of the most interest and participation of the voting public. Between that and the volunteering, votes feel like they are conducted by the public (it also helps voting centres are usually community centres), not merely having one input to a government activity.
Why would anybody want a machine for a problem that is already optimally solved?
Did the news submitter? The Slashdot editor? Frankly I'm inclined to wonder if an editor at the Post read it either.
The article kicks off with a paragraph designed to mislead in order to maximise views, eventually the real story is revealed as a relatively uninteresting screwup over green-lighting sensitive information. The submitter (and Slashdot) then goes and promotes this sensationalist journalism by copy and pasting the offending paragraph.
Laziness of parent is the least of the problems here.
No, the EULA doesn't apply to Vernor. But it doesn't have to. CTA never had title to pass to Vernor. Vernor never owned it, he merely thought he did.
Here's the issue at stake: in the first court case, the court basically decided that the licence CTA obtained was consistent with ownership, therefore first sale doctrine applied. The appeals court however appears to consider the licence to be a licence - for the sake of principle lets say a licence consistent with hiring the work. Therefore CTA never owned the software either; never held title therefore never could have transferred title to Vernor.
It is spelled out quite plainly in the decision: (my comment in [ ])
We determine that Autodesk’s direct customers [i.e. CTA] are licensees of their copies of the software rather than owners, which has two ramifications. Because Vernor did not purchase the Release 14 copies from an owner, he may not invoke the first sale doctrine, and he also may not assert an essential step defense on behalf of his customers.
To follow the principle in the more familiar ground of physical goods: say you buy a stolen TV, or a store accidentally ships you a TV that another customer had brought in for repair. You paid your money in good faith, but you do not have title to the TV and it is not yours to enjoy, the seller never owned the TV in order to sell it to you. That a physical TV was moved around is not relevant.
I'm not saying I agree/welcome the decision (or otherwise), but there is a clear logic and consistency of principle with other law. The debate, both moral and legal, is about whether CTA owned the software: whether their acquisition of the software is consistent with purchase or hire.
It is likely significant to the purchase/hire debate in this case that:
i) CTA was a business customer (here in UK at least the courts tend to favour consumers while allowing businesses freedom to contract);
ii) CTA acquired the software as part of a settlement in a legal dispute with Autodesk (presumably CTA had been using pirated versions), thus clearly there was availability for negotiation over terms (in other words, even if in normal situations the terms would generally be unenforceable, in this case it can be demonstrated that CTA specifically agreed to them);
iii) the licence terms were printed on the outside of the packaging; and
iv) CTA sold to Verner v14 after it purchased the upgrade to v15 - an upgrade that required to already have v14 and hence applying v15 upgrade relinquished all rights CTA had to v14. Thus even if the v14 could be seen as a purchase of transferable title, by applying v15 they then transferred title back to Autodesk.
Hence I doubt it would be straightforward for a lawyer to try and apply this case to the second-hand sale of software generally.
There is a lot of belief in politics that if we make something illegal, people will stop doing it.
They are fully aware that this is not true; but stopping people doing it isn't the objective. That's not even close to being foremost on their minds. Politicians are driven by personal power and political motives. They want to be seen to be "doing something", "being tough" and "sending a strong message".
Due to recent well covered events it's easier to demonstrate my point when discussing drugs. Whilst it obviously isn't the same issue, it's an area I think most people would agree that has many similar issues, is highly related and is subject to similar attitudes from politicians, the public and the media.
Politicians have numerous advisers with a very solid understanding of the situation. However (at least here in the UK) when the experts give actual opinions based on expertise, they get sacked. Or they get frustrated by the sole political motivation and quit.
Claudia Rubin from Release – a national centre of expertise on drugs and drugs law – said the expert should not have been penalised. "It's a real shame and a real indictment of the Government's refusal to take any proper advice on this subject," she said.
Meanwhile we rely on unelected Lords for a bit of reason. The then (unelected) Science Minister reacted furiously:
As science champion in Government' I can't just stand aside on this one.
Prof Nutt (the guy who got sacked see above) himself wrote more recently:
the niceties of legal process and proper procedure on drug classification are as nothing beside the media-driven political demand that something must be done, and done now.
(I'll point out the sources above are across the political spectrum, as far as the broadsheets go the "Torygraph" is perhaps the furthest to the right and the Guardian furthest to the left; the Independent supposedly dead-centre but generally considered to be a lefty. The government they're all criticising was the centre-left Labour Party.)
Looks like it's just turning a profit for the current year. A milestone for sure, but a long way from the investment being profitable, though how you measure that is another question.
If they paid $1.65b 4 years ago and lost half a billion a year for 3 years (to ~October 2009) and broke even for this year then YouTube would have to be worth around $5.5b by the end of this month just to "break-even" (in real terms) if we were to say that cost of capital+inflation etc is 15%. I seriously doubt a 15% return would be even close to good enough for a dot com investment, but anyway.
This is probably a naive however. YouTube expanded the reach of the advertising business and more importantly they had to cover off the possibility for someone else to move in, take the momentum and market share. Just like they had to do with smartphones and are now wondering what the hell to do about Facebook. The new revenue opportunities are important, but defending their position far more so.
My initial reaction was that it looked like an awfully expensive place to host a website financed through donations, probably based on considerations involving no small measure of publicity and grandstanding. But, it occurs to me that a coloc taking these physical security measures are probably operating in a niche market which also requires various other controls more relevant to Wikileaks. Maybe they have a specialised legal team in place enabling a much more aggressive approach to legal risks, for example.
Look up CNC. Probably quite expensive unless you have one at work or know someone using one at college - they'll be quite expensive capital equipment so while the incremental cost to actually use it is probably quite small, anywhere doing it as a business is looking to recoup the cost of the machine.
(I'd be more helpful but I'd only be looking it up myself.)
Some sites slow down loading significantly if I block them. There are several sites that I can open and they appear to do nothing for a few moments before loading, yet if I disable AdBlock (in some cases rename hosts file and reboot) there is no initial pause. Granted, it's much better overall though.
You should probably also have added the caveat that some site features like video will not work if you block the ads. AdBlock is useful over the hosts file here because you can disable it on individual pages and domains, either for the current visit or permanently.
Hardly surprising, I doubt it would be in any way economical.
According to Wikipedia, while noting there are major caveats to the data collection, there are more than 5x as many OSX than Linux users. Furthermore, I think it's a reasonable assumption to say that far more Linux users will be dual-booting or whatever into Windows for gaming, or using Wine. There's also the potential PR backfire if it doesn't work great, or even just by the more extreme open source (or anti-DRM, or whatever) evangelists.
On the Mac, by contrast, nearly all sales are going to be extra. In fact it's practically a captive market - if Steam didn't instantly create a monopoly on Mac gaming then I doubt they'll have to try very hard to achieve it.
Is there any kind of legal backing for the scheme? I'm from UK but I'd be amazed if you can just stick up a speed trap and issue penalties in "someplace in the Middle East". Even if you're allowed to stick the cameras up, you can't enforce the penalties until given legal privilege to do so. You say "the country is not important" and you couldn't have it more wrong. Government roads, government controlled, it's all about the country. If you were in the UK I'd say simply write to your MP then if nothing happens set up a pressure/lobby group.
The technology is easy, there's the "GATSO" speed cameras that just sit on a pole. "SPECS" systems are more of an investment but monitor speed over the distance rather than just cause everyone to brake just for the camera. I'm not sure speed traps are going to resolve the stated issues however, I'd hesitantly wager a guess that your starting point would be setting up a major charity running national road safety and awareness education campaigns.
First thing to do when reading someone's defence arguments is to consider if they actually are related to the original complaint. Here we see trade body/corporate/politician PR defence #1: deflect criticism by confusing the public about the original complaint simply by defending something related but different. As long as you can control the conversation, you're always going to come out smelling of roses.
Nobody cares about using RFID to track shipping. The concern is about using RFID to track personal data, like identity documents. The authorities may find use from using a reader to track who is using a bus station, perhaps with the best of intentions, but I'd rather they not be maintaining a record of my travels thanks. Certainly I am not looking forward to the day when I examine a pair of shoes at a shopping mall, decide against it only to receive a text suggestion of another pair l might like, and later hitting the web only to see a Google advert for similar shoes.
I don't even want to consider the potential for it's use illegally. Which, by the way, probably is not being performed much because at present there isn't much RFID use in this area. Remember how secure unpopular web browsers reportedly were, right until they started getting popular and suddenly it's all critical security bugs? Security is about risk, which means not only how weak something is but also how attractive it is as a target.
Scottish Scientists Develop Whisky byproduct Biofuel, is what the headline should read. The current one announces a ridiculous insanity involving using one even more scarce resource when the actual significance is that they've created a use out of a waste product. This is better than something from nothing, since the waste product was itself a problem (though I understand some distilleries were already converting it into fuel to power the plant).
p.s. I never understood the draw to whisky when I'd tried and found "meh" even the supposed coveted bottles that are semi-widely available until I was signed into the Whisky Society in Edinburgh one night. Sure selling whisky by number without identifying the source is probably another marketing tactic but this was one of those rare "wow" moments where all the hype and marketing hyperbole actually seemed understated. Water of life indeed.
I'm surprised to learn that occasionally, even during grand prix weekends, they continue to use a test driver in the simulator and feed information back to the team trackside.
I'm not. Not at all.
The high reliance on simulators is not necessarily because it is in any way better than physical testing. The FIA now severely limit the amount of physical testing that can be done.
It's now regular for a team to receive updated parts mid week straight from the factory and the first real-world testing is the Friday practice session, the day before qualifying. This Friday is effectively the only testing day, since the car you complete your time in during qualifying is literally put in a bag and only opened shortly before the race. This is also why drivers who for whatever reason have no chance of gaining anything from finishing a race do so anyway; they use it as free testing time.
WTF is that meant to mean? My issue is not the = but rather the ( ).
Surely the question should be:
"If 4+3+2=x+2
then what is the value of x?"
Or, if you've not gotten into the whole letters representing numbers thing yet, follow the textbook staple of the underline for filling in the blanks, i.e. "4+3+2=__+2".
If I see ( ) my assumption is there is meant to be a self-contained operation going on there, it's an instruction of the order of calculations. Everything that happens inside the brackets either has to be calculated first before you can calculate the rest, or you need to first rearrange the formula.
x(y+z) means you either add y+z before you can multiply result by x, or rearrange formula to xy+xz.
The students probably misunderstood the parenthesis as if it was "(4+3+2=___)+2=?". This probably still isn't right but there's a logic to it.
Oh and I failed by Higher maths mock exam. My dad's friend, an engineer, started tutoring me and I got a good B (67-69%, probably scraping me into the upper quartile) in the end. The tutoring did it's job within the first hour. We went through my answers where he was immediately surprised I'd beaten some difficult questions. Turned out there was one thing I didn't know about which repeatedly gave me no chance in certain topics, as I recall we wondered if I'd simply been off sick the day it had been taught. 10 minutes of discussion and a few examples later it was learned and the next couple of lessons were clearly unnecessary and we decided to stop.
If the mock papers hadn't been marked by a pool of teachers, and/or our class size had been less than the 30-something we had, then the teacher probably would have picked it up himself.
What about the issue of time though? You're suing people for doing something at an event that hasn't even taken place yet. How are they even allowed to file that suit? I understand not having a specific target for the suit, but how can you sue someone for doing something in the future?
I think the trick here is they file a pre-emptive suit in order to acquire the use of law-enforcement officials and the legal abilities they have. Usually this is a means to an end, but I think here that actually is the objective. I wouldn't be surprised if the idea behind it is simply that their presence is a deterrent.
I don't think it matters if the original suit holds any water. It's a John Doe so there is nobody there to contest it. If they do happen to catch bootleggers then they can sue them with a new suit if necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Because thrift store and libraries do not exist simply to collect, store, and present the books to be used for purely commercial purposes.
This.
Arbitrage is an essential part of the free market. It's mechanism is a correction, pushing towards the better allocation of scarce resources.
In this context, our arbitrator buys books where they are cheapest and sells them where they are more expensive. The impact is to raise the selling price in the cheap places and lower them where expensive. Given sufficient arbitrage, the price, quantity demanded and supplied will arrive at the optimum point. The fairest point for all involved.
Aside from possible issues relating to these people spending a lot of time blocking the isles, I do not see purpose in retail shops kicking out the scanners. They make them sales, which is their whole point.
Libraries, however, have other objectives. They are not intending to make a profit from the sale of surplus stocks; they're not intending to create a profit at all, ever. They are there for something else, and scanners are detracting from that. They are themselves likely well positioned to take advantage of Amazon. I expect that In many cases they are deliberately pricing below the market.
Just to exemplify the ignorance of the parent, hatred between Ian Hislop and a union leader does not personify class divisions. Please bear in mind Hislop is editor of Private Eye, infamous for satirising the "ruling elite" and annihilating politicians (and anybody else with power) on all sides. Consider his comment on the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition: "I like the idea of this coalition neutralizing the loonies on both sides".
Union leaders fall well within his scope for attack. Most of the prominent union leaders are claim to represent the "working man" yet are nothing more than the bastard merger of a politician and fat-cat executive. They spout propagandist bullshit to elevate themselves and their agendas and the union members are as far from being their primary interests as shareholders are to company executives. The general public meanwhile are nothing but pawns to be disrupted and rendered as unhappy as possible, because they're nothing more than leverage.
I assume the HIGNFY reference is to this episode with Bob Crow. Members of the audience booing him at the introduction might provide a little context, if you want some more how about a clip of the Sun (in 1999 still extremely in support of the socialist Labour Party) also having a go. Hatred of union leaders is not a class war thing, it's working people trying to get to work or go on holiday that hate union leaders.
Unfortunately the remainder of the post is full of examples like this of a little knowledge being a bad thing.
If you do what you want based on what you feel is right, we might just not have any laws at all. There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest.
So, just as an analogy, if the police decided to stop enforcing laws against auto theft, you believe it would be wrong for others to do so. I don't think that holds water. What this guys is doing is indeed illegal, but not immoral; when our government is unwilling or unable to enforce or prosecute laws it becomes incumbent upon non-sanctioned individuals to protect society by doing so. The simple fact is that the government is not able to even begin to scratch the sheer volume of spam, nor is it interested in going after spammers unless it can wrench a large settlement and some headlines out of the deal. If we wish to preserve the Internet as a medium for the exchange of ideas, some of us must take action to protect it from those who exploit it at a very real, monetary cost to innocent people.
The analogy is incorrect; it should say "if the government decided to redact laws against auto theft". A point covered by the parent is that the police deciding to do or not do something is not close to "society as a whole". Many argue the government isn't either, but there's at least a pretence and theoretical association. This goes a long way to explaining why there is a slight air of plausibility that the police may one day cease bothering to enforce auto theft, yet the idea that the government may legalise it seems so absurd.
Secondly how laws are enforced is not the same as whether laws exist nor whether they are effective; for example the police generally do not enforce civil law (only criminal law).
But most important is the concept of due process. It is not only that auto-theft laws are designed by society and enforced by those appointed by and accountable to it, but the way in which this is done. This is utterly fundamental and without it any moral good that arises is merely by chance.
Age progression has always been an issue with the Civ games. I've always preferred the "marathon" setting where each turn consumes less years and technology is researched much slower, yet build speed is the same. This gives much more time for unit and base building, and to make use of them.
Personally I think this game is looking good. Maybe not as good as Civ IV BtS, but remember previous Civ games have always started out a bit ropey before hitting their stride after some good support from Firaxis and the community.
One thing I'm wary of Social Policies seem to have been dumbed down somewhat. They're more like perks than the absolutely key strategic choices from previous games. Presenting information seems to have taken a step backwards, though the more I play the more I'm getting used to it, so this may just be bias from having become so used to IV.
p.s. in the late game hit F10 to go into Strategic View before ending the turn. This speeds up turn waits noticeably, which seems to suggest there's a bug. This screen might also be useful if you're trying to play on a netbook or something.
This has nothing to do with bait-and switch. The problem is that the strategy is only possible in a non-competitive position. Intel can only turn an i5 into an i7 if it is restricting supply of i7s through monopoly power.
Going back to the penknife analogy, the point is all penknives physically have the compass. All penknives have incurred the cost of having the compass. Clearly either (a) the cheaper penknife price actually includes the cost of the defunct compass or (b) the more expensive version is subsidising the cost of the compass in the non-compass penknives.
This would not be possible in competition because (a) there would be another company selling a knife with no compass and therefore cheaper, and (b) there would be a company selling a compass-knife that is not subsidising non-compass knives and is therefore cheaper.
This is not at all the same as binning, which is more or less where they try to make a compass-knife but the compass is defective so it is sold as a non-compass knife. As the compass does not work this always was a non-compass knife, and the cost of the faulty component actually is a cost of the compass knives (it's effectively wastage that has been recycled).
People totally bind to Captain Obvious answers, ignoring the bleeding obvious to the point of gross incompetence, is sadly not uncommon in many lines of work. In particular it appears desirable in the media, essential in politics and, interestingly perhaps, there appears to be a causal relationship with middle management.
This is probably just an agreement not to pinch staff in order to stymie a competitor. Sure you can recruit staff because you want to do something better, and in general this is good for the public, but you can also do it just to stop the competitor doing something better than you. Like grab key staff in a key department, not because you have any particular use to them but because frankly it's worth you paying them just to not go and work at the other guy. This is a tactic that involves everybody losing, but you losing a little less than everyone else. It protects losers and is underhand bad practice, it's not any good for the consumer.
This only really applies to the high-fliers or significant numbers of a department/branch/project/whatever (particularly those on collaborations). The objective is not some kind of conspiracy to hold down wages, and any hope of achieving that would be pretty laughable. I've no sympathy for employees complaining that stopping the above underhand tactics loses them financial opportunities as it is just as unethical to take advantage of it.
Agreements would only extend headhunting/approaching employees, if they apply for jobs under their own volition they're completely fair game.
No. Economics is by definition a zero-sum game. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. Economics is not "about" money, money is merely a very convenient medium of exchange - essentially a complex unit of measurement.
When a stock rises in value there is not any additional money. The stock represents a legal right to assets that people consider to be worth more of their resources to acquire, thus people consider it to have a value and this is expressed in the money measurement. When a stock or a bond "pops into existence", nothing new of value is created, there is no new money in any sense. When a stock/bond is acquired, money changes hands.
It's not important if the quantity of money units changes anyway. If the government managed to force everyone to put all their money in a bank account, and then halved the "amount of money" in all accounts, you would have half as much money in the sense of the measurement units but you would have exactly the same amount of money in the sense of function (since all prices would halve). The point to take away is the scarcity of resources has remained the same, all that has changed is the measurement interval.
Economics and alchemy both claim an attempt to alleviate the scarcity problem. However, the latter promises false science while the former attempts to provide information in order to allocate existing resources in a more efficient manner. An alchemist might say he could create you some gold by growing it in your field; an economist might say that due to the nature of your land and because wheat is currently more scarce than corn, if you switched production to wheat you could trade half your harvest for the corn and sell the remainder for gold. The alchemist might then applaud this creating gold out of corn for the economist to retort that he's an idiot. Nothing is being magicked into existence, growing corn was simply relatively inefficient.
I really don't see the point in these machines. In the UK votes are counted by volunteers, with quite basic fundamental (i.e. strong) overlapping controls. I fail to imagine an approach that could be any more secure, cheaper or better suited to audit.
Better yet it's obviously so. People can observe the entire process in motion, volunteer yourself and take part if you like. With an electronic system everyone's utterly reliant on controls implemented and only observable by other people who they don't know the names of and will never meet.
Sure it takes at least a day to get through it; almost certainly the day of the most interest and participation of the voting public. Between that and the volunteering, votes feel like they are conducted by the public (it also helps voting centres are usually community centres), not merely having one input to a government activity.
Why would anybody want a machine for a problem that is already optimally solved?
Did the news submitter? The Slashdot editor? Frankly I'm inclined to wonder if an editor at the Post read it either.
The article kicks off with a paragraph designed to mislead in order to maximise views, eventually the real story is revealed as a relatively uninteresting screwup over green-lighting sensitive information. The submitter (and Slashdot) then goes and promotes this sensationalist journalism by copy and pasting the offending paragraph.
Laziness of parent is the least of the problems here.
No, the EULA doesn't apply to Vernor. But it doesn't have to. CTA never had title to pass to Vernor. Vernor never owned it, he merely thought he did.
Here's the issue at stake: in the first court case, the court basically decided that the licence CTA obtained was consistent with ownership, therefore first sale doctrine applied. The appeals court however appears to consider the licence to be a licence - for the sake of principle lets say a licence consistent with hiring the work. Therefore CTA never owned the software either; never held title therefore never could have transferred title to Vernor.
It is spelled out quite plainly in the decision: (my comment in [ ])
To follow the principle in the more familiar ground of physical goods: say you buy a stolen TV, or a store accidentally ships you a TV that another customer had brought in for repair. You paid your money in good faith, but you do not have title to the TV and it is not yours to enjoy, the seller never owned the TV in order to sell it to you. That a physical TV was moved around is not relevant.
I'm not saying I agree/welcome the decision (or otherwise), but there is a clear logic and consistency of principle with other law. The debate, both moral and legal, is about whether CTA owned the software: whether their acquisition of the software is consistent with purchase or hire.
It is likely significant to the purchase/hire debate in this case that:
i) CTA was a business customer (here in UK at least the courts tend to favour consumers while allowing businesses freedom to contract);
ii) CTA acquired the software as part of a settlement in a legal dispute with Autodesk (presumably CTA had been using pirated versions), thus clearly there was availability for negotiation over terms (in other words, even if in normal situations the terms would generally be unenforceable, in this case it can be demonstrated that CTA specifically agreed to them);
iii) the licence terms were printed on the outside of the packaging; and
iv) CTA sold to Verner v14 after it purchased the upgrade to v15 - an upgrade that required to already have v14 and hence applying v15 upgrade relinquished all rights CTA had to v14. Thus even if the v14 could be seen as a purchase of transferable title, by applying v15 they then transferred title back to Autodesk.
Hence I doubt it would be straightforward for a lawyer to try and apply this case to the second-hand sale of software generally.
They are fully aware that this is not true; but stopping people doing it isn't the objective. That's not even close to being foremost on their minds. Politicians are driven by personal power and political motives. They want to be seen to be "doing something", "being tough" and "sending a strong message".
Due to recent well covered events it's easier to demonstrate my point when discussing drugs. Whilst it obviously isn't the same issue, it's an area I think most people would agree that has many similar issues, is highly related and is subject to similar attitudes from politicians, the public and the media.
Politicians have numerous advisers with a very solid understanding of the situation. However (at least here in the UK) when the experts give actual opinions based on expertise, they get sacked. Or they get frustrated by the sole political motivation and quit.
Meanwhile we rely on unelected Lords for a bit of reason. The then (unelected) Science Minister reacted furiously:
Prof Nutt (the guy who got sacked see above) himself wrote more recently:
(I'll point out the sources above are across the political spectrum, as far as the broadsheets go the "Torygraph" is perhaps the furthest to the right and the Guardian furthest to the left; the Independent supposedly dead-centre but generally considered to be a lefty. The government they're all criticising was the centre-left Labour Party.)
Looks like it's just turning a profit for the current year. A milestone for sure, but a long way from the investment being profitable, though how you measure that is another question.
If they paid $1.65b 4 years ago and lost half a billion a year for 3 years (to ~October 2009) and broke even for this year then YouTube would have to be worth around $5.5b by the end of this month just to "break-even" (in real terms) if we were to say that cost of capital+inflation etc is 15%. I seriously doubt a 15% return would be even close to good enough for a dot com investment, but anyway.
This is probably a naive however. YouTube expanded the reach of the advertising business and more importantly they had to cover off the possibility for someone else to move in, take the momentum and market share. Just like they had to do with smartphones and are now wondering what the hell to do about Facebook. The new revenue opportunities are important, but defending their position far more so.
more equal than others
My initial reaction was that it looked like an awfully expensive place to host a website financed through donations, probably based on considerations involving no small measure of publicity and grandstanding. But, it occurs to me that a coloc taking these physical security measures are probably operating in a niche market which also requires various other controls more relevant to Wikileaks. Maybe they have a specialised legal team in place enabling a much more aggressive approach to legal risks, for example.
Look up CNC. Probably quite expensive unless you have one at work or know someone using one at college - they'll be quite expensive capital equipment so while the incremental cost to actually use it is probably quite small, anywhere doing it as a business is looking to recoup the cost of the machine.
(I'd be more helpful but I'd only be looking it up myself.)
Some sites slow down loading significantly if I block them. There are several sites that I can open and they appear to do nothing for a few moments before loading, yet if I disable AdBlock (in some cases rename hosts file and reboot) there is no initial pause. Granted, it's much better overall though.
You should probably also have added the caveat that some site features like video will not work if you block the ads. AdBlock is useful over the hosts file here because you can disable it on individual pages and domains, either for the current visit or permanently.
Hardly surprising, I doubt it would be in any way economical.
According to Wikipedia, while noting there are major caveats to the data collection, there are more than 5x as many OSX than Linux users. Furthermore, I think it's a reasonable assumption to say that far more Linux users will be dual-booting or whatever into Windows for gaming, or using Wine. There's also the potential PR backfire if it doesn't work great, or even just by the more extreme open source (or anti-DRM, or whatever) evangelists.
On the Mac, by contrast, nearly all sales are going to be extra. In fact it's practically a captive market - if Steam didn't instantly create a monopoly on Mac gaming then I doubt they'll have to try very hard to achieve it.
Is there any kind of legal backing for the scheme? I'm from UK but I'd be amazed if you can just stick up a speed trap and issue penalties in "someplace in the Middle East". Even if you're allowed to stick the cameras up, you can't enforce the penalties until given legal privilege to do so. You say "the country is not important" and you couldn't have it more wrong. Government roads, government controlled, it's all about the country. If you were in the UK I'd say simply write to your MP then if nothing happens set up a pressure/lobby group.
The technology is easy, there's the "GATSO" speed cameras that just sit on a pole. "SPECS" systems are more of an investment but monitor speed over the distance rather than just cause everyone to brake just for the camera. I'm not sure speed traps are going to resolve the stated issues however, I'd hesitantly wager a guess that your starting point would be setting up a major charity running national road safety and awareness education campaigns.
First thing to do when reading someone's defence arguments is to consider if they actually are related to the original complaint. Here we see trade body/corporate/politician PR defence #1: deflect criticism by confusing the public about the original complaint simply by defending something related but different. As long as you can control the conversation, you're always going to come out smelling of roses.
Nobody cares about using RFID to track shipping. The concern is about using RFID to track personal data, like identity documents. The authorities may find use from using a reader to track who is using a bus station, perhaps with the best of intentions, but I'd rather they not be maintaining a record of my travels thanks. Certainly I am not looking forward to the day when I examine a pair of shoes at a shopping mall, decide against it only to receive a text suggestion of another pair l might like, and later hitting the web only to see a Google advert for similar shoes.
I don't even want to consider the potential for it's use illegally. Which, by the way, probably is not being performed much because at present there isn't much RFID use in this area. Remember how secure unpopular web browsers reportedly were, right until they started getting popular and suddenly it's all critical security bugs? Security is about risk, which means not only how weak something is but also how attractive it is as a target.
Scottish Scientists Develop Whisky byproduct Biofuel, is what the headline should read. The current one announces a ridiculous insanity involving using one even more scarce resource when the actual significance is that they've created a use out of a waste product. This is better than something from nothing, since the waste product was itself a problem (though I understand some distilleries were already converting it into fuel to power the plant).
p.s. I never understood the draw to whisky when I'd tried and found "meh" even the supposed coveted bottles that are semi-widely available until I was signed into the Whisky Society in Edinburgh one night. Sure selling whisky by number without identifying the source is probably another marketing tactic but this was one of those rare "wow" moments where all the hype and marketing hyperbole actually seemed understated. Water of life indeed.
I'm not. Not at all.
The high reliance on simulators is not necessarily because it is in any way better than physical testing. The FIA now severely limit the amount of physical testing that can be done.
It's now regular for a team to receive updated parts mid week straight from the factory and the first real-world testing is the Friday practice session, the day before qualifying. This Friday is effectively the only testing day, since the car you complete your time in during qualifying is literally put in a bag and only opened shortly before the race. This is also why drivers who for whatever reason have no chance of gaining anything from finishing a race do so anyway; they use it as free testing time.
Speaking as someone never that great at maths...
4+3+2=( )+2
WTF is that meant to mean? My issue is not the = but rather the ( ).
Surely the question should be:
"If 4+3+2=x+2
then what is the value of x?"
Or, if you've not gotten into the whole letters representing numbers thing yet, follow the textbook staple of the underline for filling in the blanks, i.e. "4+3+2=__+2".
If I see ( ) my assumption is there is meant to be a self-contained operation going on there, it's an instruction of the order of calculations. Everything that happens inside the brackets either has to be calculated first before you can calculate the rest, or you need to first rearrange the formula.
x(y+z) means you either add y+z before you can multiply result by x, or rearrange formula to xy+xz.
The students probably misunderstood the parenthesis as if it was "(4+3+2=___)+2=?". This probably still isn't right but there's a logic to it.
Oh and I failed by Higher maths mock exam. My dad's friend, an engineer, started tutoring me and I got a good B (67-69%, probably scraping me into the upper quartile) in the end. The tutoring did it's job within the first hour. We went through my answers where he was immediately surprised I'd beaten some difficult questions. Turned out there was one thing I didn't know about which repeatedly gave me no chance in certain topics, as I recall we wondered if I'd simply been off sick the day it had been taught. 10 minutes of discussion and a few examples later it was learned and the next couple of lessons were clearly unnecessary and we decided to stop.
If the mock papers hadn't been marked by a pool of teachers, and/or our class size had been less than the 30-something we had, then the teacher probably would have picked it up himself.
I think the trick here is they file a pre-emptive suit in order to acquire the use of law-enforcement officials and the legal abilities they have. Usually this is a means to an end, but I think here that actually is the objective. I wouldn't be surprised if the idea behind it is simply that their presence is a deterrent.
I don't think it matters if the original suit holds any water. It's a John Doe so there is nobody there to contest it. If they do happen to catch bootleggers then they can sue them with a new suit if necessary.
As highlighted in my post. Canada uses the imperial gallon, 4.55L.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Metrication_in_Canada