Virgin is asking to be protected from paying insurance on the full cost of the risk it is creating.
Read TFA:
Smith said the protections being proposed in the new legislation are similar to those which New Mexico offers to the ski industry. âoeWhen you buy a ski ticket, you waive your right to sue the ski operator if certain rules are properly followedâ¦. When you buy a ticket to go to space, you willingly assume all of the risk.â
It's not a subsidy. It's a simple disclaimer that space launches are known to be risky, and the buyer of the ticket assumes all the risk and cannot sue in the event of death or injury (presumably as long as Virgin Galactic follows certain safety rules established by the government).
If skiing or being launched into space were required parts of life, then I'd agree you don't want to limit the legal liability. But they're optional leisure activities. If someone wants to take high risks in their optional activities, then more power to them. Just don't try to pin the blame on someone else if something goes wrong. Virgin isn't creating the risk. The people wanting to do the activity are. Virgin is simply providing them a means to conduct the activity.
Boeing doesn't have legislation protecting them if one of their airliners crashes onto somebody's house. They carry private insurance for that. If affordable insurance isn't available from the private sector, the technology isn't safe enough for use by private parties.
The problem is that the liability for human fatalities scales based on rarity and how spectacular an accident is. You'd think a human life is a human life, so the liability for any death would be the same regardless of cause. But a mundane death is worth less from a legal liability standpoint than a spectacular death (especially if it's widely televised). A death caused by a car accident is worth less than a death caused by an airliner accident, and both will certainly be minuscule compared to a death caused by a space launch accident.
The accountants in the insurance industry are appraising the economic risk correctly. It's just that the economic risk of legal liability scales based on a nonsensical, emotional parameter.
It is not a coincidence that Apple made its first tablet so large- at that size you can fit a large-capacity battery in the case. The 4:3 aspect ratio helps here too. 7" tablets with a 16:9 ratio are extremely compromised with respect to case space for the battery. As the SoC gains 4 64-bit cores and a very powerful GPU, battery capacity is going to become a very important factor.
Dude, we live in 3 dimensions. If your case isn't big enough in width and height, you just make it a little thicker.
"Itâ(TM)s also why weâ(TM)ll push deeper into the cloud,"
As any pilot can tell you, pushing deeply into clouds often results in disorientation and losing one's way. Of course if one is already lost, I guess you're not really risking much.
As near as I can find, it doesn't look like Samsung raised any of these references during the trial to show the patents were invalid. Why not?
A good chunk of Samsung's prior art evidence wrt phones (the violations they were fined $1b for - they were cleared of copying the iPad) was disallowed because they missed a filing deadline. Kinda defeated the whole purpose of having the trial IMHO, but Judge Koh decided her schedule was more important.
Wasn't Groklaw complaining just a few days ago that the jury foreman brought in external evidence, and therefore committed misconduct? And now, Groklaw is saying the jury should have conducted its own prior art search and brought in external evidence that wasn't raised by Samsung? What is it, the rules don't apply if it hurts Apple?
Groklaw is referring to an erroneous instruction given by the jury foreman to the other jurors. He (wrongly) told them that software claiming to be prior art to features on the iPhone were only relevant if the code would run on the iPhone. Since all of the code submitted as prior art runs on other systems and thus doesn't run on the iPhone, he told the jury they could dismiss all the prior art claims out of hand without even having to look at it. So the jury never looked at the software prior art which was submitted at trial. Groklaw is just saying they should have.
The jury ignored prior art only for patents where they found no infringement. It there is no patent infringement, the 'prior art' argument is moot.
Except the $1 billion award is based on Samsung infringing the iPhone's design patent. The judge disallowed evidence of
prior art to that patent because Samsung missed a filing deadline. Specifically, the pic shows internal Samsung prototypes before anyone outside of Apple had ever seen the iPhone.
Carpooling and intelligent work scheduling works too. Before the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, there were predictions of massive gridlock and athletes failing to make it to events because they were stuck in traffic. As a result, the L.A. metro area instituted a massive voluntary anti-traffic campaign. Individuals were encouraged to carpool. Companies were encouraged to spread out their business hours. Instead of having everyone work 9-5, start times ranged from 6, 6:30, 7, 7:30, etc. to 10.
When the Olympics happened, it was beautiful. I (while carpooling) didn't get stuck in traffic once during those two weeks. The only times I've seen the freeways less congested were on Thanksgiving evening or Christmas morning. Then the Olympics ended and everyone decided if the freeways were that clear, it was ok for them to drive again. Sigh.
People need to get over this. Hard drive prices aren't going back down to "normal". The problem was that "normal" was too low. The hard drive industry was one of the most cut-throat in the tech industry (which is already pretty cut-throat). The margins were so slim that IBM (who had been in the HDD business since the beginning) decided it was more profitable just to sell off their entire storage division to Hitachi rather than try to compete. A decade later, Hitachi decided the same thing and sold it to WD.
So with too much competition, prices were too low and HDD companies were struggling to remain afloat. That's why they've now consolidated into 2.5 competitors (Seagate and WD; Toshiba only makes 2.5" drives). Probably an overshoot due to the extremely low margins, but that just means in the future there will be room for 1-2 new HDD manufacturers (in so far as HDDs remain a viable product in the face of SSDs). The flooding just happened to coincide with when this was going on (my BIL worked at Hitachi's storage division, and long before the flooding he told me the department was in financial trouble and Hitachi was shopping around for a buyer).
Yes this means you'll be paying more for your HDD storage. No that is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. Now that the industry has healthy margins, the manufactures will be making enough profit to invest in R&D to advance the state of the technology more quickly. Whereas before most of the companies were going broke just trying to produce what they could sell.
Yeah, I noticed that too. On a recent trip I was going to assert my privacy rights and refuse to go through the scanners. At both LAX and ORD, the scanners were sitting unused in closed lines, and people were being directed through the regular metal detectors.
Privacy is the only real issue with the scanners. You get a much higher radiation dose from the flight (less atmosphere to block cosmic rays) than you do from the scanners. Complaining about radiation from the scanners is kinda like complaining the cooling mister the public swimming pool has set up is getting you wet just before you jump into the pool. If you're that worried about getting cancer you'd drive instead of fly, just like if you were that worried about getting wet you wouldn't be swimming.
Example: new 1600 MW power plant in France: latest estimated build cost: 8.000.000.000 Euros (form original 3.3B). It should have been up and running by now, but they are nowhere near that, 2016 is an optimistic estimate.
[...]
So form the construction start, it takes about 40 years to break even. If cheap solar makes wholesale electricity prices drop an extra cent over the next decade, a nuclear power station may never break even at all.
How do you figure that? Solar panels right now are around US$1/Watt.
Nuclear has a 0.9 capacity factor, so the 1600 MW plant will on average generate 1440 MW.
Solar at those latitudes has about a 0.14 capacity factor, so you'd need 10285 MW of solar installed to generate 1440 MW average.
10285 MW at $1/Watt is $10.3 billion = 7.9 billion Euros just for the panels. And we haven't even considered mounting, land, permits, construction, interest - all of which is included in your 8 billion Euro price tag for the nuclear plant.
So how do you figure generating power more expensively than nuclear will make a nuclear plant not break even?
16.000.000.000 Euros / (1600.000 kW * 24 hour * 356.25 days * 4 cents) = 28.5 years (excluding build time!)
In a previous thread on electrical power, some Germans remarked their electricity cost about 25 cents per kWh (US$0.32/kWH). Is it really 4 cents per kWh in France? Why not just build the nuclear plant, sell the electricity to Germany, and pay for the plant in 4.7 years instead?
It's not just coal. Hydroelectric dams create a large reservoir behind them, making that land unusable. China had to permanently relocate 1.3 million people to build Three Gorges Dam. And ice throws from wind turbines are now recognized as a hazard, with a recommended setback distance of 1.5x(D+H), or about a quarter kilometer radius for a standard GE 1.5 MW turbine (80-100 meters high, 77-82.5 m diameter blades). Figure the exclusion zone front/back is one-fifth that (eyeballing the diagrams), for a total of 0.5*.05 = 0.025 km^2 per turbine. Nuclear's capacity factor is about 0.9, so the 4700 MW Fukushima plant generated on average 4230 MW. To match that with wind at a (optimistic) capacity factor of 0.25, you'd need 16920 MW nameplate capacity, or 11280 of the 1.5 MW turbines. That works out to 282 km^2 of unusable land (well you might be able to farm on it provided the insurance company was ok with the liability to the farmer). Yes Fukushima's evacuation zone is bigger, but that was only after an accident. The exclusion zone around a turbine in ice-prone climates would be unavoidable and permanent as long as the turbine is there.
Everything has its drawbacks. The moment you start comparing assuming one of the choices has no drawbacks, you're doing it wrong.
The problem isn't limited to Japan, nor is it limited to nuclear power. It's human nature to overemphasize large high-impact events, while overlooking small low-impact events. Even when cumulatively the low-impact events have a greater effect than the high-impact event. Wind power killed more people than nuclear power last year (mostly falling deaths of maintenance workers), despite generating about 1/10th the power of nuclear and the second-worst nuclear accident in history happening that year. The difference is that each wind-caused death only made the local news, while Fukushima made global news. (Don't even get me started on how many people are killed by the pollution spewing out of coal plants.)
Same thing happens with a mass shooting. The average of over 30 homicides a day by guns in the U.S. is not enough to stoke a debate about gun control, but if 26 of them happen in one place it is. How does that make any sense? Or with plane crashes. About 100 people are killed per year in the U.S. in commercial airliner accidents, and after each crash we have criticism of how the system failed, and we have to make air travel safer. Yet 40,000 people are killed in car accidents a year in the U.S. and nobody questions automobile or traffic safety.
It's just how we are wired, and we need to start recognizing and addressing this flaw in human nature. We have to stop making policy based on anecdotes and emotional response to large statistical outliers. We need to be making it based on averages and overall trends. (Or I guess you could just give up and exploit it, like states do with lotteries. Millions of people losing a few bucks is glossed over, while the though of being the one person who wins millions prevails and overrides our better judgement. So they've enshrined a system which is negative sum and thus destroys productivity into state law.)
Marx talks how capital's need to grow lead to technological innovation to make production more efficient. This in principle could allow for people to work much less and still maintain very high standards of living. However, our production is oriented toward maximizing profits, not human needs, therefore we work longer hours in spite of the mechanization of most of production.
Henry Ford figured out why this was wrong nearly 100 years ago. He didn't pay his workers minimum wage. He paid his workers substantially more than workers at other factories. So much that they could afford to buy the cars they were assembling. As a result, demand skyrocketed and Ford made gobs more money than he ever could have saved by paying them less.
It's a matter of spin. NYCL emphasizes "illegal downloading" because then he can pretend that the total damage done to the copyright holders was 99c multiplied by the number of song titles Thomas downloaded.
The copyright holders (and I'm in agreement with them, FWIW) would point out that the problem was "making available to millions of anonymous strangers", which causes greater damage, both directly (number of times each title was uploaded from Thomas's PC multipled by 99c) and indirectly (more people, thanks to Thomas's action, avoiding legit vendors because they know that there's a wide variety of music available "for free" on whatever P2P systems Thomas was using, wider thanks to Thomas's actions.)
That is the jist of the problem. On a filesharing network, by definition the number of uploads equals the number of downloads, and each person is only interested in one copy of the song. So the average number of copies of a song uploaded/downloaded by each filesharer is 1 (one). That's where the 99c x number of songs figure comes from.
The alternative view (the one you're presenting) is that Ms. Thomas is some criminal mastermind behind an empire dedicated to illegally copying songs. All downloads by 100,000 filesharers stem from her, and thus she needs to be punished for all those illegal copies. This is the intent of copyright law as intended - to go after the commercial bootleg violater pumping out hundreds of thousands of bootleg CDs. I don't think most people have a problem with this if this were the case.
But the problem is the RIAA is trying to have their cake and eat it too. In the second case, only the criminal mastermind pays the fine. The customers who bought those bootleg CDs aren't guilty of anything. But in filesharing, the RIAA wants to penalize Ms. Thomas as the criminal mastermind, AND they want to be able to prosecute all the other filesharers as if they were the cirminal mastermind. In essence, if 100,000 people were filesharing with Ms. Thomas, then 100,000 illegal copies were made. But under the RIAA's reasoning, you're penalizing as if (100,000 filesharers) * (100,000 copies) = 1 billion copies were made.
Pick one or the other. Either each filesharer is responsible for a single copy. Or one filesharer is responsible for all copies and the rest are innocent. Saying that all filesharers are responsible for all copies doesn't make legal, mathematical, nor common sense.
Even better, with Apple pushing his own map app, Google will not be able to keep as under-featured as before.
That's what I said. But then I was told that Apple was the one who wrote the Google Maps app for iPhone. They merely licensed the rights to use Google's data in their app. Apparently Apple was not willing to pay the extra to license turn by turn navigation. So it was in fact Apple which chose to keep the original app under-featured, not Google.
Unfortunately, the US attitude always seems to be to disagree with any international standardisation process rather than reach a compromise
Phone networks originated in the U.S. If the international standard differs from and is incompatible with that of the U.S., you need to be asking why it differs. Not why the U.S. had the temerity to keep its existing system, instead of uprooting it and replacing it wholesale it to comply with a different standard.
That's not to say the standard is illegitimate - maybe the U.S. system was stupidly designed and not conducive to expansion across the globe, in which case it would be perfectly justified. But your assumption should be that the first system was the standard. And if a different standard was chosen elsewhere, you should be questioning that decision first. Not immediately criticizing the first system developed for not changing to adopt the new standard.
The problem with designing something to be completely foolproof is that people underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. Compare having to read the first four lines of that message vs. clicking a "spam" button on your email program. A not insignificant number of people are going to click the spam button, at which point the mail hosts start to classify it as spam.
I suspect what's needed is a "verified legitimate mass mailer" list. Sort of an inverse-spamhaus list. Legitimate mass mail services can somehow prove to the satisfaction of the major mail hosts that they're completely opt-in. Then the hosts know that if a user clicks "spam" for one of the mails sent from these services, that the message isn't really spam and the user is an idiot.
That's what I mean. There was a disjoint between how loudness was defined by the law governing TV commercials, vs. what people interpreted "loudness" to mean.
And when, exactly, does the 'market' ever 'fix itself'?
This notional abstraction of the 'market' as an entity which resolves problems for the better is, well, a myth. It's missing all of the mechanisms which would cause it to self correct.
This is control systems engineering 101. Anything with a negative feedback loop fixes itself. If a store owner sets its prices too high, people stop buying there, he loses money (negative feedback), and is forced to lower his prices. There - the market just fixed itself. There isn't an "unseen hand of the market" which dictates this behavior. It's entirely caused by whether the defining coefficients of the system make it fall on the positive or negative side of the Laplace domain.
There are certainly situations which cause positive feedback loops (fall on the positive side of the Laplace domain. e.g. monopolies, where increasing control of the market results in increased control over prices, resulting in even more control of the market). Unfortunately, it's become fashionable to look only at these situations and pretend they encompass the entirety of market activity. The market doesn't favor* one side or the other. You can create systems which fall anywhere within the spectrum. Pretending systems on the negative side don't exist merely because it makes it easier to justify your political beliefs is intellectually dishonest. They do exist. All our analog technology (except for explosives) is based on them existing.
* While mathematically it doesn't favor either side, over time systems on the negative side of the Laplace domain will dominate because they survive longer. Those on the positive side tend to blow themselves up. This is the entire basis of evolution. It's not that viable life forms are favored. Its that unvialble life forms kill themselves off quicker. That's why the market appears to work. Places where bribery and corruption allows companies to thwart market forces don't advance and develop as quickly. They fall behind competitively, and are eventually overwhelmed by the economies of the places with less corruption.
Whatever it is, it's not a weather satellite. Those are put into geosynchronous or geostationary orbits (west to east with slight inclination or directly over the equator with zero inclination), so they'll have the same view of the Earth all the time. e.g. If India launches a weather satellite, they want it hanging over India 24/7 so, y'know, it'll show them pictures of the weather over India all the time. Because geosynchronous orbits are so much higher (42,000 km), they require a lot more energy than low earth orbit (150-300 km).
The North Korean satellite is in a polar orbit (north to south). You only put stuff into those highly inclined orbits if you want to maximize coverage of the Earth's surface - typically a spy satellite, though NASA's Landsat satellites are also in highly inclined orbits. The loiter time over any one spot on Earth is short, typically with a ~24 hour gap between flyovers (the Earth rotates underneath a stable orbit). Meaning without a communications satellite network or an array of receiving stations spanning the globe, you're only in communications with the satellite for a few minutes every 24 hours. But you do get coverage of the entire globe. Unless something went wildly wrong with the launch, this orbit was intentional since the spent stages fell towards the south-southwest. Most countries' early launches are to the east since you get free energy from the Earth's rotation if you launch in that direction.
The contingency plan to invade the Netherlands probably dates back from the Cold War. Assuming a Soviet advance across Western Europe resulting in an a situation similar to WWII with most of continental Europe under Soviet control, you need to pick likely landing sites to open up a second front as was done in Normandy and Incheon. The Netherlands, being large and flat with good ports, is a logical choice.
And for the record, the U.S. has already invaded Canada. After Pearl Harbor was bombed, the U.S. Army was worried about Japanese attacks on the Aleutian Islands. They wanted to be able to get supplies and equipment up there without being vulnerable to Japanese attack by sea - they needed a road built. But such a road would have to go partly through Canada. The U.S. submitted a request to Canada to begin construction of this road through British Columbia, but the Canadian government dragged its feet. After a few days, the Army said enough and just crossed the border with all its equipment to began building the road. A few days later the Canadian government belatedly granted approval. The U.S. view is that Canada rolled over and accepted what the U.S. wanted. The Canadian view is that they tricked the U.S. into building the ALCAN highway for them, all expenses paid.
Slashdot Mirror
Read TFA:
It's not a subsidy. It's a simple disclaimer that space launches are known to be risky, and the buyer of the ticket assumes all the risk and cannot sue in the event of death or injury (presumably as long as Virgin Galactic follows certain safety rules established by the government).
If skiing or being launched into space were required parts of life, then I'd agree you don't want to limit the legal liability. But they're optional leisure activities. If someone wants to take high risks in their optional activities, then more power to them. Just don't try to pin the blame on someone else if something goes wrong. Virgin isn't creating the risk. The people wanting to do the activity are. Virgin is simply providing them a means to conduct the activity.
The problem is that the liability for human fatalities scales based on rarity and how spectacular an accident is. You'd think a human life is a human life, so the liability for any death would be the same regardless of cause. But a mundane death is worth less from a legal liability standpoint than a spectacular death (especially if it's widely televised). A death caused by a car accident is worth less than a death caused by an airliner accident, and both will certainly be minuscule compared to a death caused by a space launch accident.
The accountants in the insurance industry are appraising the economic risk correctly. It's just that the economic risk of legal liability scales based on a nonsensical, emotional parameter.
Dude, we live in 3 dimensions. If your case isn't big enough in width and height, you just make it a little thicker.
As any pilot can tell you, pushing deeply into clouds often results in disorientation and losing one's way. Of course if one is already lost, I guess you're not really risking much.
A good chunk of Samsung's prior art evidence wrt phones (the violations they were fined $1b for - they were cleared of copying the iPad) was disallowed because they missed a filing deadline. Kinda defeated the whole purpose of having the trial IMHO, but Judge Koh decided her schedule was more important.
Groklaw is referring to an erroneous instruction given by the jury foreman to the other jurors. He (wrongly) told them that software claiming to be prior art to features on the iPhone were only relevant if the code would run on the iPhone. Since all of the code submitted as prior art runs on other systems and thus doesn't run on the iPhone, he told the jury they could dismiss all the prior art claims out of hand without even having to look at it. So the jury never looked at the software prior art which was submitted at trial. Groklaw is just saying they should have.
Here's pinch to zoom in 1988.
Except the $1 billion award is based on Samsung infringing the iPhone's design patent. The judge disallowed evidence of prior art to that patent because Samsung missed a filing deadline. Specifically, the pic shows internal Samsung prototypes before anyone outside of Apple had ever seen the iPhone.
Carpooling and intelligent work scheduling works too. Before the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, there were predictions of massive gridlock and athletes failing to make it to events because they were stuck in traffic. As a result, the L.A. metro area instituted a massive voluntary anti-traffic campaign. Individuals were encouraged to carpool. Companies were encouraged to spread out their business hours. Instead of having everyone work 9-5, start times ranged from 6, 6:30, 7, 7:30, etc. to 10.
When the Olympics happened, it was beautiful. I (while carpooling) didn't get stuck in traffic once during those two weeks. The only times I've seen the freeways less congested were on Thanksgiving evening or Christmas morning. Then the Olympics ended and everyone decided if the freeways were that clear, it was ok for them to drive again. Sigh.
People need to get over this. Hard drive prices aren't going back down to "normal". The problem was that "normal" was too low. The hard drive industry was one of the most cut-throat in the tech industry (which is already pretty cut-throat). The margins were so slim that IBM (who had been in the HDD business since the beginning) decided it was more profitable just to sell off their entire storage division to Hitachi rather than try to compete. A decade later, Hitachi decided the same thing and sold it to WD.
So with too much competition, prices were too low and HDD companies were struggling to remain afloat. That's why they've now consolidated into 2.5 competitors (Seagate and WD; Toshiba only makes 2.5" drives). Probably an overshoot due to the extremely low margins, but that just means in the future there will be room for 1-2 new HDD manufacturers (in so far as HDDs remain a viable product in the face of SSDs). The flooding just happened to coincide with when this was going on (my BIL worked at Hitachi's storage division, and long before the flooding he told me the department was in financial trouble and Hitachi was shopping around for a buyer).
Yes this means you'll be paying more for your HDD storage. No that is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. Now that the industry has healthy margins, the manufactures will be making enough profit to invest in R&D to advance the state of the technology more quickly. Whereas before most of the companies were going broke just trying to produce what they could sell.
Yeah, I noticed that too. On a recent trip I was going to assert my privacy rights and refuse to go through the scanners. At both LAX and ORD, the scanners were sitting unused in closed lines, and people were being directed through the regular metal detectors.
Privacy is the only real issue with the scanners. You get a much higher radiation dose from the flight (less atmosphere to block cosmic rays) than you do from the scanners. Complaining about radiation from the scanners is kinda like complaining the cooling mister the public swimming pool has set up is getting you wet just before you jump into the pool. If you're that worried about getting cancer you'd drive instead of fly, just like if you were that worried about getting wet you wouldn't be swimming.
How do you figure that? Solar panels right now are around US$1/Watt.
Nuclear has a 0.9 capacity factor, so the 1600 MW plant will on average generate 1440 MW.
Solar at those latitudes has about a 0.14 capacity factor, so you'd need 10285 MW of solar installed to generate 1440 MW average.
10285 MW at $1/Watt is $10.3 billion = 7.9 billion Euros just for the panels. And we haven't even considered mounting, land, permits, construction, interest - all of which is included in your 8 billion Euro price tag for the nuclear plant.
So how do you figure generating power more expensively than nuclear will make a nuclear plant not break even?
In a previous thread on electrical power, some Germans remarked their electricity cost about 25 cents per kWh (US$0.32/kWH). Is it really 4 cents per kWh in France? Why not just build the nuclear plant, sell the electricity to Germany, and pay for the plant in 4.7 years instead?
It's not just coal. Hydroelectric dams create a large reservoir behind them, making that land unusable. China had to permanently relocate 1.3 million people to build Three Gorges Dam. And ice throws from wind turbines are now recognized as a hazard, with a recommended setback distance of 1.5x(D+H), or about a quarter kilometer radius for a standard GE 1.5 MW turbine (80-100 meters high, 77-82.5 m diameter blades). Figure the exclusion zone front/back is one-fifth that (eyeballing the diagrams), for a total of 0.5*.05 = 0.025 km^2 per turbine. Nuclear's capacity factor is about 0.9, so the 4700 MW Fukushima plant generated on average 4230 MW. To match that with wind at a (optimistic) capacity factor of 0.25, you'd need 16920 MW nameplate capacity, or 11280 of the 1.5 MW turbines. That works out to 282 km^2 of unusable land (well you might be able to farm on it provided the insurance company was ok with the liability to the farmer). Yes Fukushima's evacuation zone is bigger, but that was only after an accident. The exclusion zone around a turbine in ice-prone climates would be unavoidable and permanent as long as the turbine is there.
Everything has its drawbacks. The moment you start comparing assuming one of the choices has no drawbacks, you're doing it wrong.
The problem isn't limited to Japan, nor is it limited to nuclear power. It's human nature to overemphasize large high-impact events, while overlooking small low-impact events. Even when cumulatively the low-impact events have a greater effect than the high-impact event. Wind power killed more people than nuclear power last year (mostly falling deaths of maintenance workers), despite generating about 1/10th the power of nuclear and the second-worst nuclear accident in history happening that year. The difference is that each wind-caused death only made the local news, while Fukushima made global news. (Don't even get me started on how many people are killed by the pollution spewing out of coal plants.)
Same thing happens with a mass shooting. The average of over 30 homicides a day by guns in the U.S. is not enough to stoke a debate about gun control, but if 26 of them happen in one place it is. How does that make any sense? Or with plane crashes. About 100 people are killed per year in the U.S. in commercial airliner accidents, and after each crash we have criticism of how the system failed, and we have to make air travel safer. Yet 40,000 people are killed in car accidents a year in the U.S. and nobody questions automobile or traffic safety.
It's just how we are wired, and we need to start recognizing and addressing this flaw in human nature. We have to stop making policy based on anecdotes and emotional response to large statistical outliers. We need to be making it based on averages and overall trends. (Or I guess you could just give up and exploit it, like states do with lotteries. Millions of people losing a few bucks is glossed over, while the though of being the one person who wins millions prevails and overrides our better judgement. So they've enshrined a system which is negative sum and thus destroys productivity into state law.)
Congratulation. A post which tries to spin the event as being due to economic woes, while simultaneously criticizing Fox News for trying to spin it.
Henry Ford figured out why this was wrong nearly 100 years ago. He didn't pay his workers minimum wage. He paid his workers substantially more than workers at other factories. So much that they could afford to buy the cars they were assembling. As a result, demand skyrocketed and Ford made gobs more money than he ever could have saved by paying them less.
That is the jist of the problem. On a filesharing network, by definition the number of uploads equals the number of downloads, and each person is only interested in one copy of the song. So the average number of copies of a song uploaded/downloaded by each filesharer is 1 (one). That's where the 99c x number of songs figure comes from.
The alternative view (the one you're presenting) is that Ms. Thomas is some criminal mastermind behind an empire dedicated to illegally copying songs. All downloads by 100,000 filesharers stem from her, and thus she needs to be punished for all those illegal copies. This is the intent of copyright law as intended - to go after the commercial bootleg violater pumping out hundreds of thousands of bootleg CDs. I don't think most people have a problem with this if this were the case.
But the problem is the RIAA is trying to have their cake and eat it too. In the second case, only the criminal mastermind pays the fine. The customers who bought those bootleg CDs aren't guilty of anything. But in filesharing, the RIAA wants to penalize Ms. Thomas as the criminal mastermind, AND they want to be able to prosecute all the other filesharers as if they were the cirminal mastermind. In essence, if 100,000 people were filesharing with Ms. Thomas, then 100,000 illegal copies were made. But under the RIAA's reasoning, you're penalizing as if (100,000 filesharers) * (100,000 copies) = 1 billion copies were made.
Pick one or the other. Either each filesharer is responsible for a single copy. Or one filesharer is responsible for all copies and the rest are innocent. Saying that all filesharers are responsible for all copies doesn't make legal, mathematical, nor common sense.
That's what I said. But then I was told that Apple was the one who wrote the Google Maps app for iPhone. They merely licensed the rights to use Google's data in their app. Apparently Apple was not willing to pay the extra to license turn by turn navigation. So it was in fact Apple which chose to keep the original app under-featured, not Google.
Phone networks originated in the U.S. If the international standard differs from and is incompatible with that of the U.S., you need to be asking why it differs. Not why the U.S. had the temerity to keep its existing system, instead of uprooting it and replacing it wholesale it to comply with a different standard.
That's not to say the standard is illegitimate - maybe the U.S. system was stupidly designed and not conducive to expansion across the globe, in which case it would be perfectly justified. But your assumption should be that the first system was the standard. And if a different standard was chosen elsewhere, you should be questioning that decision first. Not immediately criticizing the first system developed for not changing to adopt the new standard.
The problem with designing something to be completely foolproof is that people underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. Compare having to read the first four lines of that message vs. clicking a "spam" button on your email program. A not insignificant number of people are going to click the spam button, at which point the mail hosts start to classify it as spam.
I suspect what's needed is a "verified legitimate mass mailer" list. Sort of an inverse-spamhaus list. Legitimate mass mail services can somehow prove to the satisfaction of the major mail hosts that they're completely opt-in. Then the hosts know that if a user clicks "spam" for one of the mails sent from these services, that the message isn't really spam and the user is an idiot.
That's what I mean. There was a disjoint between how loudness was defined by the law governing TV commercials, vs. what people interpreted "loudness" to mean.
This is control systems engineering 101. Anything with a negative feedback loop fixes itself. If a store owner sets its prices too high, people stop buying there, he loses money (negative feedback), and is forced to lower his prices. There - the market just fixed itself. There isn't an "unseen hand of the market" which dictates this behavior. It's entirely caused by whether the defining coefficients of the system make it fall on the positive or negative side of the Laplace domain.
There are certainly situations which cause positive feedback loops (fall on the positive side of the Laplace domain. e.g. monopolies, where increasing control of the market results in increased control over prices, resulting in even more control of the market). Unfortunately, it's become fashionable to look only at these situations and pretend they encompass the entirety of market activity. The market doesn't favor* one side or the other. You can create systems which fall anywhere within the spectrum. Pretending systems on the negative side don't exist merely because it makes it easier to justify your political beliefs is intellectually dishonest. They do exist. All our analog technology (except for explosives) is based on them existing.
* While mathematically it doesn't favor either side, over time systems on the negative side of the Laplace domain will dominate because they survive longer. Those on the positive side tend to blow themselves up. This is the entire basis of evolution. It's not that viable life forms are favored. Its that unvialble life forms kill themselves off quicker. That's why the market appears to work. Places where bribery and corruption allows companies to thwart market forces don't advance and develop as quickly. They fall behind competitively, and are eventually overwhelmed by the economies of the places with less corruption.
My understanding is that that is the point of this legislation. That previously, "loudness" was defined as peak amplitude, not the average.
Whatever it is, it's not a weather satellite. Those are put into geosynchronous or geostationary orbits (west to east with slight inclination or directly over the equator with zero inclination), so they'll have the same view of the Earth all the time. e.g. If India launches a weather satellite, they want it hanging over India 24/7 so, y'know, it'll show them pictures of the weather over India all the time. Because geosynchronous orbits are so much higher (42,000 km), they require a lot more energy than low earth orbit (150-300 km).
The North Korean satellite is in a polar orbit (north to south). You only put stuff into those highly inclined orbits if you want to maximize coverage of the Earth's surface - typically a spy satellite, though NASA's Landsat satellites are also in highly inclined orbits. The loiter time over any one spot on Earth is short, typically with a ~24 hour gap between flyovers (the Earth rotates underneath a stable orbit). Meaning without a communications satellite network or an array of receiving stations spanning the globe, you're only in communications with the satellite for a few minutes every 24 hours. But you do get coverage of the entire globe. Unless something went wildly wrong with the launch, this orbit was intentional since the spent stages fell towards the south-southwest. Most countries' early launches are to the east since you get free energy from the Earth's rotation if you launch in that direction.
The contingency plan to invade the Netherlands probably dates back from the Cold War. Assuming a Soviet advance across Western Europe resulting in an a situation similar to WWII with most of continental Europe under Soviet control, you need to pick likely landing sites to open up a second front as was done in Normandy and Incheon. The Netherlands, being large and flat with good ports, is a logical choice.
And for the record, the U.S. has already invaded Canada. After Pearl Harbor was bombed, the U.S. Army was worried about Japanese attacks on the Aleutian Islands. They wanted to be able to get supplies and equipment up there without being vulnerable to Japanese attack by sea - they needed a road built. But such a road would have to go partly through Canada. The U.S. submitted a request to Canada to begin construction of this road through British Columbia, but the Canadian government dragged its feet. After a few days, the Army said enough and just crossed the border with all its equipment to began building the road. A few days later the Canadian government belatedly granted approval. The U.S. view is that Canada rolled over and accepted what the U.S. wanted. The Canadian view is that they tricked the U.S. into building the ALCAN highway for them, all expenses paid.