I see no reason why any country should bow to pressure to stop developing weaponry.
For one thing, it speaks to the sovereignty of the nation in question in the most basic way possible. Weapons can be used to protect citizens from the overbearing dictates of another country. Open yourself to unbridled foreign dictates and they could sack your country.
It's hypocritical to justify procuring weapons as a means to protect your citizens, when you're simultaneously allowing about 10% of them to starve to death. North Korea's military expenditure is grossly disproportionate to the size of its economy compared to any other country on earth. I think the international community is perfectly justified in telling them to stop spending so much on weapons and spend more on helping out their own people. If it weren't for their closed society making it virtually impossible to obtain reliable information and downtown Seoul being within artillery range, the UN long ago would've authorized international intervention purely on humanitarian grounds.
The problem is the remote. Setting up an add-on HTPC, adding a USB IR remote receiver, then programming a universal remote to operate both it and the TV (and your blu-ray player and cable box) is no problem for tech people like you and me. But the preceding sentence is utter gibberish to the vast majority of people. So a Smart TV which combines the TV with networked HTPC out of the box is attractive to those folks.
In a way, it makes sense. If you take apart a rear projection or LCD HDTV, you'll find it's basically a monitor with a computer inside which handles the video processing (the ones I took apart even used a DVI port to connect the two). So making a Smart TV isn't really adding on separate internet functionality, as it is beefing up the already-present computer to be able to handle it. In fact if they were to open it up so you could install and run a copy of XBMC on it instead of their custom Smart TV software, it'd probably be ideal.
Just to add some numbers to this, cell phones transmit voice at about 6-13 kbps. A regular analog landline phone has about 30-56 kbps of bandwidth (as those of us who lived through the analog modem days know well). VoIP typically encodes at 16-64 kbps (compressed, so 56 kbps VoIP is superior to 56 kbps analog)..
Your choices all have the same outcome. It is not the number of american jobs that is important to the economy, it is the number of american jobs that provide a livable wage.
You're not thinking into this deeply enough. The goal isn't a livable wage. The goal is increased productivity per person. A livable wage is a consequence of that goal - higher productivity per person means increased standard of living and higher wages.
In a robotic plant, most of the workers are the ones who box things up at the end of the process. Usually the minimum qualifications are a high school diploma, if that. How is that a well paying job?
Transitioning over to (1) a few thousand Americans operating robotic plants is most preferable. Operating those boxing robots may be no more difficult than boxing up products manually. But if the robots can box up 100 products in the time it takes a person to box up one, that's a 100-fold increase in productivity. That means the company could increase each worker's salary 10x and they're still coming out 10x ahead compared to boxing up products manually. (In reality, most of that productivity gain goes to decreasing the final cost of the product instead of increased wages - you may not be paid much more, but you can buy more with each dollar because prices are lower).
(2) A few hundred thousand Chinese workers doing menial labor is second preferable for us (it's most preferable for the world as a whole, up until option (1) becomes cheaper), since that'll raise the standard of living there, increasing their wages (they're people too, and raising their wages is also a good thing). And more importantly for us, the cost of manufacturing there increases, making it more viable to manufacture domestically again.
(3) Hundreds of thousands of minimum wage jobs here in the U.S at a 30% price increase is the least preferable option. If you're not careful, it could even result in less productivity (since Apple will have less money to spend on other things which could generate more productivity) and thus cause a decrease in the standard of living. Remember, standard of living only increases when productivity per person increases. If you try to raise wages without a corresponding increase in productivity, all that happens is prices rise to cancel out the wage increase. So the key goal has to be to raise productivity, not wages.
Synthetics like nylon are generally made by going down the energy gradient. That is, you start with something high in energy like petroleum, then run it through a bunch of chemical reactions which use up bits of the energy contained therein to make your synthetic fiber. This works because the energy gradient makes the raw chemicals want to combine the way you want them to, and all you have to do is mix them in the right amounts at the right time (and sometimes right temperature and pressure).
Naturals like silk and cotton go up the energy gradient. Start with raw materials, add energy, and build the fibers out of sugars (cellulose - cotton) or proteins (silk). If you mix a bunch of the raw ingredients in a beaker, they won't combine they way you want them to because it's going up the energy gradient. You need little machines which take energy and combine the materials in the shape you want. Our nano-technology isn't good enough yet to compete with nature''s nano-technology, so it's easier to have plants and animals do the nano-assembly and just harvest the final product.
Unless the fibers from hagfish slime buck the trend and go down the energy gradient, they're unlikely to replace synthetics. All you'll end up doing is raising hagfish on a farm to harvest their slime, which you refine into these fibers. Production capacity will be limited by the number of hagfish you can raise, as opposed to synthetics whose production is limited by the raw materials you can acquire. In other words, don't expect this to replace plastics unless hagfish turn out to be extraordinarily easy to farm in huge numbers.
"Practice what you preach" only works in totality. Say I'm a landlord and raise the rent from $700/mo to $800/mo, but I now pay for the utilities instead of the tenants having to pay. If a tenant complains that he'd prefer to pay his own utilities and keep his rent at $700/mo, I cannot make him pay his own utilities and raise his rent to $800/mo and say I'm just making him practice what he preaches. I cannot consider what I want and what he wants, take only the parts which favor me, and truthfully call it making him practice what he preaches. I'm gonna have to let him pay his own utilities but keep his rent at $700/mo.
They never saw the most damning piece of prior art - Samsung's internal documents showing their iPhone-like prototypes in the design phasebefore anyone outside of Apple had ever laid eyes on the iPhone. That was the evidence Judge Koh disallowed from the trial because Samsung missed a filing deadline.
I said at the time that this was a huge judicial error. That she was ignoring the spirit of the law to follow the letter of the law. The reason for having filing deadlines is to prevent one side from dragging out a trial for so long that the cost of the trial exceeds any award amount, thus making justice uneconomical. But in this case the potential outcome was worth billions of dollars, while a few days extension would've cost at most a few tens of thousands. So clearly the spirit of the law would not have been violated by allowing the evidence, with perhaps a stern reprimand to Samsung's lawyers for missing the deadline. But she disallowed it, and now we're most likely gonna have to waste millions of dollars on a new trial because of her decision.
It is long past time for the major engines to work together for a week to simply pull all of the news items from those nations.
No, because then that would be collusion, and could end up with nasty things like the government mandating the search engines pay newspapers to "license" their content.
Just leave it to the free market. The search engines which want to pay the newspapers to index them can. The search engines which don't won't. If the newspaper content is as valuable to search engine users as the newspapers think they are, then those search engines will do well and the other search engines will eventually pay the newspapers to index them. OTOH if the newspaper content isn't as valuable as the newspapers think, then a bunch of newspapers are going to disappear from the web and probably go bankrupt. That's the ultimate judge of who's right and who's wrong.
In many ways, there are parallels between Iran and what is happening in Egypt right now, where relatively liberal protesters overthrow one dictator, only to see the Muslim Brotherhood in power.
Egypt is a bit different from Iran where the revolution overthrew a dictator, and were betrayed by one of their supporting elements which installed another quasi-dictatorship. In Egypt, the revolution overthrew a dictator, and the people voted to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power.
Which raises a question I've had for some time now. What happens if you install a democracy, and the people vote for a non-democracy? Should democratic principles override people's right to choice of self government, and the non-democratic government be disallowed? Or should the people be free to choose their form of government, even if that choice deprives future generations of the right to choose their form of government?
What give the United States the right to decide who rules a country?
Nothing. But if the U.S. didn't decide who ruled the country, the Soviets would have. And you'd be asking why the hell the U.S. didn't do anything to stop them from installing a repressive Communist dictatorship there. The Shah for all his faults (basically looting the country), was at least progressive and intent on modernizing the country.
That's the thing about life. The perfect choice is almost never available, and you frequently have to pick from two bad choices. It's a common mistake to then blame the chooser for all the bad that results from that choice, while stripping out the context and ignoring the even worse outcome that would've resulted from the other choice. That's a common error I see people making. Comparing to a vacuum (assuming everything would be ok if the choice had not been made) instead of properly accounting for opportunity costs.
Not gonna happen. The potential liability for automakers when someone crashes due to watching YouTube while driving is just too huge. Whatever in-dash system they install in the factory has to be locked down so you can't install entertainment apps on a display visible from the driver's seat. If you want to rip it out and install your own tablet in its place, you can. But then the liability for distracted driving is squarely on your shoulders.
I ran the numbers a few years ago. The waste generated from running a single nuclear reactor for a year is about enough to fill a bathtub. The solid waste from generating the same amount of power from coal would fill about 4-6 oil tankers.
And that's ignoring the waste vented to the atmosphere. You know how you can't eat too much tuna because of the high levels of mercury? Did you ever wonder where that mercury comes from? That's right - burning coal.
While I agree extraditing this guy is ridiculous, the handgun analogy doesn't really work. This guy was operating in the UK, but the links on his site was available to Americans. A closer handgun analogy would be extraditing someone in the U.S. providing links to UK citzens of stores which would sell and ship them handguns.
No, in the UK at least it was created to provide artists like Dickens with a way of earning money from their creations. Obviously, places like the US ignored our copyright laws, which makes the current RIAA/MAFIAA hysteria somewhat ironic, as the US economy was basically built on infringement of intellectual property laws.
It's not ironic at all. It only seems ironic if you misunderstand what's actually going on. During the 1700-1800s, it was to the financial advantage of the U.S. to violate copyright, so we did. During the present era, it's to the financial advantage of the U.S. to defend copyright, so we do.
When I was growing up in Michigan in the 1970s, $1 CAD was worth about $1 USD. The exchange rate was stable enough that most places near the border accepted both Canadian and US bills for the same price. Canadian coins (back then they were just pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters too) were not a problem anywhere in the U.S.
I dunno what caused the CAD to drop to about 65 cents US. But to me, the fact that they're near parity again just means things are back to normal.
Ah yes, the safety argument. Do you want to know what else would reduce T-bone accidents? Increasing the length of time after a light turns red, before the cross light turns green. That's a helluva lot cheaper than installing a red light camera and the enormous technological and bureaucratic overhead needed to operate them. But it's income first, safety second, so the dirt cheap and more effective but zero revenue solution is passed up in favor of the expensive and less effective but positive revenue solution.
I've posted this so many times on/. I feel like I'm pounding my head against a brick wall. I know it goes against people's political inclinations here, but it's the truth so here it is again.
Wouldn't it be great if there were a non-partisan government body which went over all the government accounting books and figured out what's causing the budget to blow up out of control? Guess what? There is. It's called the Congressional Budget Office. Every year or two they put out a long-term budget outlook where they outline where we're headed, and what's causing the problems, and how changes we can make to the budget can change that course. Please read it, or at least read the summary if you can't read the whole thing.
For the last 12 years, they've pointed out over and over that the primary cause of our budget woes is Medicare/Medicaid and to a lesser extent Social Security. The historical average for federal tax revenue is about 18% of GDP. Did you know that on our current course, Medicare/Medicaid will grow to consume 18% of GDP some time around 2050-2070? That's right, 100% of tax receipts will go to pay for Medicare/Medicaid and nothing else. We're not being driven to bankruptcy by banks or the military industrial complex. We're being driven to bankruptcy by voters wanting stuff in their old age without having to pay for (most of) it.
Please, for a moment put aside everything you hear your peers say and ask yourself with an open mind: "what if military spending isn't the problem?" Read the link. The vast majority of the $200 trillion is unfunded entitlements (net difference between estimated outlays vs receipts).
This matches with what the Congressional Budget Office reports have been saying for 12 years now. Social Security and especially Medicare/Medicaid are driving us to bankruptcy. That's not saying we have to get rid of them, but they need to be seriously overhauled to keep their costs within realistic levels (e.g. raise retirement/benefit ages to keep pace with life expectancy).
Military spending is a red herring. Yes it can be cut. But even if we completely eliminated it we'd still be on a path to bankruptcy due to the above entitlements. The only route to fiscal solvency is entitlement reform. The longer people refuse to listen to what the CBO has been telling us for over a decade because it's inconvenient to their political ideology, the worse it will get.
Apparently the smaller films were negatively affected by the shutdown of the site (made less money). The larger films (500 or more screens) were positively affected by the shut down (made more money).
Didn't read TFA so dunno how valid it is. But that would actually makes sense.
Big movie advertised everywhere. Person wants to watch it but doesn't want to pay. Before the shutdown they'd download it from Megaupload and watch it. But after the shutdown they really want to watch it, so they fork over the money at the theater.
Small movie without much advertising. Person hears about it through the Internet, downloads it from Megaupload and watches it. They love it so they tell all their friends about it, some of whom go to watch it at the theater. After the shutdown, the person never watches it, their friends never hear about him raving about how good it is, so they never go to the theater to watch it. Since Megaupload's effect on box office sales is a secondary effect in this case (it affects the person's friends' behavior), the magnitude of the effect is smaller, small enough to be statistically insignificant in this sample.
I will say it's odd how a lot of people who claim to be for more limited government tend to also be for giving government the ability to end a life.
People rarely decide things based on a single factor. When you characterize their decisions in terms of that single factor, you usually arrive at an incorrect assessment of their motivations. Unfortunately, it's become popular to pick the one factor which makes people with opposing viewpoints look the worst, and then boldly claim that that's their sole motivation. Great for getting cheap acknowledgement from those with similar viewpoints to yours, very bad for creating rational debate about an issue.
For the death penalty, people who support it are generally strongly in favor of individual responsibility. You should reap the rewards of the good you do, bear the consequences of the bad. More succinctly, the priority they assign to punishment for bad deeds is higher than the priority they assign to preservation of life. Deliberately depriving another fellow human being of their life without justification is the ultimate bad, and so being deprived of yours seems an equitable punishment (this is simplified, as obviously degree of mitigating factors can play into it - e.g. abused wife kills husband).
That the government is acting as the agent for the penalty is inconsequential. Most of them would probably vote to acquit a posse who lynched a murderer if they were sitting on the jury. Now, if these people believed government should be so limited it doesn't have the right to punish a convicted criminal, then you'd be correct that they're being hypocrites. But they universally believe government does have that right, so the only variable is degree of punishment. Limitations of government powers simply isn't a factor on this issue for them.
And FWIW, I agree with the reasoning of those for the death penalty. But I oppose it because I don't think our legal systems are sophisticated enough to mete it out in a just manner. There are an uncomfortable number of people on death row whose cases have reasonable doubt in my mind. We have to keep in mind that people and our systems are not perfect, and will inevitably sometimes fail. If it fails and you jail someone, hopefully at some point the person can be released. But if it fails and you execute someone, you can't bring them back from the dead.
That way each one individually get to spend their current share without overloading the planet.
Thing is, increased consumption and population growth are inversely correlated. There's something about living in a modern industrialized society which makes people want to have fewer kids. Nearly all industrialized countries have close to zero population growth, with a few actually shrinking in population (Japan is the biggest one). The countries with the highest population growth are the undeveloped poor nations - agricultural with people living on subsistence diets.
So if you want to slow down the world's population growth, simply encourage industrialization of undeveloped countries. And the way to do that is more cheap energy, not less. The idyllic vision of everyone living on their own plot of land, working their own fields, and growing their own crops to eat results in the high population growth its proponents think the lifestyle will prevent.
The anti-domain squatting restrictions work against Google here. He's running a search engine business whose name contains the word duck. Google is not. If they acquired duck.com and had just put a holding page on it, they'd be ok. But by redirecting it their website - a commercial site which competes with DuckDuckGo, they've committed the example violation listed in section 4(b)(iv) of the Uniform Domain Resolution Policy
By using the domain name, the domain name registrant intentionally attempted to attract for financial gain, Internet users to the registrant's website or other on-line location, by creating a likelihood of confusion with the complainant's mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of the registrant's website or location or of a product or service on the registrant's website or location.
That is grounds for losing the domain name and having it turned over to the complainant regardless of how Google came to acquire it. The only thing that's really questionable is whether "duck.com" is sufficiently similar to DuckDuckGo to cause confusion.
If you have some domain whose name is similar to a commercial trademark, you're in the clear as long as you steer clear of their business. But the moment you try to compete with them using that name, you're liable to lose the domain. e.g. If I owned apple.com and used it to sell apples (the red and green edible kind), there is nothing Apple Computer could do about it. But if I started using it to sell computers, they could complain and I could lose the domain.
something more awesome than a weapons system like Iron Dome is not needing it in the first place, and that the increase of hostilities in the middle could have scary consequences.
Your thinking is 20th century. When only nation-states had the power to wage war on a scale which caused massive casualties, and missile defense systems like this actually increased the chance of war by increasing the odds of a first strike succeeding.
As technology progresses, so does the power which can be wielded by smaller groups and even individuals. In cave man times, one guy with a club could hack down a couple people before he was overwhelmed by everyone else. In medieval times, a swordsman could hack down maybe a dozen before being overwhelmed. With guns and especially the machine gun, that number began to approach a hundred. On 9/11, a single pilot at the controls of an airliner brought the number up to a thousand.
Eventually, some terrorist group or a lone nut-case is going to acquire a nuke. And they're going to try to lob it somewhere. We need point defense systems like this to deal with that new reality. Nation-states are no longer the only ones who can possess weapons of mass destruction. Once you factor in stability and propensity for self-preservation, the biggest threat is no longer nation-states starting a war with each other. The biggest threat is a small group of people deciding they want to take out another small group of people, with little to no regard for innocent bystanders. You can't just consider a USSR vs US type confrontation anymore. You also have to consider regional gangs and paramilitaries deciding to go at each other.
Steam will cut you off of your sizeable and paid for and possibly extensive games library simply for moving into another region.
Amazon will cut you off of your whole Kindle library simply for moving into another region.
It gets worse than that. I was on vacation in Germany last month, and had a couple extra hours to kill at the hotel one night. So I fired up my Amazon Prime account to watch some movies on Amazon instant video. Not authorized in the area. Same with Netflix and Hulu.
I had to run an SSH proxy through one of my web hosting servers to trick these services into thinking I was still in the U.S., but very few people know how to and have the resources to do that. This whole anachronistic distribution and publishing rights by region has got to die. I try to be a legit customer, paying for my movies and music. But if this is what's going to happen, I'm ripping everything I buy and making my own copies regardless of what silly laws they get passed. If I can't bypass the DRM, I'm downloading the pirated version of my legitimately bought media.
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It's hypocritical to justify procuring weapons as a means to protect your citizens, when you're simultaneously allowing about 10% of them to starve to death. North Korea's military expenditure is grossly disproportionate to the size of its economy compared to any other country on earth. I think the international community is perfectly justified in telling them to stop spending so much on weapons and spend more on helping out their own people. If it weren't for their closed society making it virtually impossible to obtain reliable information and downtown Seoul being within artillery range, the UN long ago would've authorized international intervention purely on humanitarian grounds.
The problem is the remote. Setting up an add-on HTPC, adding a USB IR remote receiver, then programming a universal remote to operate both it and the TV (and your blu-ray player and cable box) is no problem for tech people like you and me. But the preceding sentence is utter gibberish to the vast majority of people. So a Smart TV which combines the TV with networked HTPC out of the box is attractive to those folks.
In a way, it makes sense. If you take apart a rear projection or LCD HDTV, you'll find it's basically a monitor with a computer inside which handles the video processing (the ones I took apart even used a DVI port to connect the two). So making a Smart TV isn't really adding on separate internet functionality, as it is beefing up the already-present computer to be able to handle it. In fact if they were to open it up so you could install and run a copy of XBMC on it instead of their custom Smart TV software, it'd probably be ideal.
Just to add some numbers to this, cell phones transmit voice at about 6-13 kbps. A regular analog landline phone has about 30-56 kbps of bandwidth (as those of us who lived through the analog modem days know well). VoIP typically encodes at 16-64 kbps (compressed, so 56 kbps VoIP is superior to 56 kbps analog)..
You're not thinking into this deeply enough. The goal isn't a livable wage. The goal is increased productivity per person. A livable wage is a consequence of that goal - higher productivity per person means increased standard of living and higher wages.
Transitioning over to (1) a few thousand Americans operating robotic plants is most preferable. Operating those boxing robots may be no more difficult than boxing up products manually. But if the robots can box up 100 products in the time it takes a person to box up one, that's a 100-fold increase in productivity. That means the company could increase each worker's salary 10x and they're still coming out 10x ahead compared to boxing up products manually. (In reality, most of that productivity gain goes to decreasing the final cost of the product instead of increased wages - you may not be paid much more, but you can buy more with each dollar because prices are lower).
(2) A few hundred thousand Chinese workers doing menial labor is second preferable for us (it's most preferable for the world as a whole, up until option (1) becomes cheaper), since that'll raise the standard of living there, increasing their wages (they're people too, and raising their wages is also a good thing). And more importantly for us, the cost of manufacturing there increases, making it more viable to manufacture domestically again.
(3) Hundreds of thousands of minimum wage jobs here in the U.S at a 30% price increase is the least preferable option. If you're not careful, it could even result in less productivity (since Apple will have less money to spend on other things which could generate more productivity) and thus cause a decrease in the standard of living. Remember, standard of living only increases when productivity per person increases. If you try to raise wages without a corresponding increase in productivity, all that happens is prices rise to cancel out the wage increase. So the key goal has to be to raise productivity, not wages.
Synthetics like nylon are generally made by going down the energy gradient. That is, you start with something high in energy like petroleum, then run it through a bunch of chemical reactions which use up bits of the energy contained therein to make your synthetic fiber. This works because the energy gradient makes the raw chemicals want to combine the way you want them to, and all you have to do is mix them in the right amounts at the right time (and sometimes right temperature and pressure).
Naturals like silk and cotton go up the energy gradient. Start with raw materials, add energy, and build the fibers out of sugars (cellulose - cotton) or proteins (silk). If you mix a bunch of the raw ingredients in a beaker, they won't combine they way you want them to because it's going up the energy gradient. You need little machines which take energy and combine the materials in the shape you want. Our nano-technology isn't good enough yet to compete with nature''s nano-technology, so it's easier to have plants and animals do the nano-assembly and just harvest the final product.
Unless the fibers from hagfish slime buck the trend and go down the energy gradient, they're unlikely to replace synthetics. All you'll end up doing is raising hagfish on a farm to harvest their slime, which you refine into these fibers. Production capacity will be limited by the number of hagfish you can raise, as opposed to synthetics whose production is limited by the raw materials you can acquire. In other words, don't expect this to replace plastics unless hagfish turn out to be extraordinarily easy to farm in huge numbers.
"Practice what you preach" only works in totality. Say I'm a landlord and raise the rent from $700/mo to $800/mo, but I now pay for the utilities instead of the tenants having to pay. If a tenant complains that he'd prefer to pay his own utilities and keep his rent at $700/mo, I cannot make him pay his own utilities and raise his rent to $800/mo and say I'm just making him practice what he preaches. I cannot consider what I want and what he wants, take only the parts which favor me, and truthfully call it making him practice what he preaches. I'm gonna have to let him pay his own utilities but keep his rent at $700/mo.
They never saw the most damning piece of prior art - Samsung's internal documents showing their iPhone-like prototypes in the design phase before anyone outside of Apple had ever laid eyes on the iPhone. That was the evidence Judge Koh disallowed from the trial because Samsung missed a filing deadline.
I said at the time that this was a huge judicial error. That she was ignoring the spirit of the law to follow the letter of the law. The reason for having filing deadlines is to prevent one side from dragging out a trial for so long that the cost of the trial exceeds any award amount, thus making justice uneconomical. But in this case the potential outcome was worth billions of dollars, while a few days extension would've cost at most a few tens of thousands. So clearly the spirit of the law would not have been violated by allowing the evidence, with perhaps a stern reprimand to Samsung's lawyers for missing the deadline. But she disallowed it, and now we're most likely gonna have to waste millions of dollars on a new trial because of her decision.
No, because then that would be collusion, and could end up with nasty things like the government mandating the search engines pay newspapers to "license" their content.
Just leave it to the free market. The search engines which want to pay the newspapers to index them can. The search engines which don't won't. If the newspaper content is as valuable to search engine users as the newspapers think they are, then those search engines will do well and the other search engines will eventually pay the newspapers to index them. OTOH if the newspaper content isn't as valuable as the newspapers think, then a bunch of newspapers are going to disappear from the web and probably go bankrupt. That's the ultimate judge of who's right and who's wrong.
Egypt is a bit different from Iran where the revolution overthrew a dictator, and were betrayed by one of their supporting elements which installed another quasi-dictatorship. In Egypt, the revolution overthrew a dictator, and the people voted to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power.
Which raises a question I've had for some time now. What happens if you install a democracy, and the people vote for a non-democracy? Should democratic principles override people's right to choice of self government, and the non-democratic government be disallowed? Or should the people be free to choose their form of government, even if that choice deprives future generations of the right to choose their form of government?
Nothing. But if the U.S. didn't decide who ruled the country, the Soviets would have. And you'd be asking why the hell the U.S. didn't do anything to stop them from installing a repressive Communist dictatorship there. The Shah for all his faults (basically looting the country), was at least progressive and intent on modernizing the country.
That's the thing about life. The perfect choice is almost never available, and you frequently have to pick from two bad choices. It's a common mistake to then blame the chooser for all the bad that results from that choice, while stripping out the context and ignoring the even worse outcome that would've resulted from the other choice. That's a common error I see people making. Comparing to a vacuum (assuming everything would be ok if the choice had not been made) instead of properly accounting for opportunity costs.
Not gonna happen. The potential liability for automakers when someone crashes due to watching YouTube while driving is just too huge. Whatever in-dash system they install in the factory has to be locked down so you can't install entertainment apps on a display visible from the driver's seat. If you want to rip it out and install your own tablet in its place, you can. But then the liability for distracted driving is squarely on your shoulders.
The sad thing is, 1920x1080 laptop screens are only about $40-$100 wholesale in quantity.
I ran the numbers a few years ago. The waste generated from running a single nuclear reactor for a year is about enough to fill a bathtub. The solid waste from generating the same amount of power from coal would fill about 4-6 oil tankers.
And that's ignoring the waste vented to the atmosphere. You know how you can't eat too much tuna because of the high levels of mercury? Did you ever wonder where that mercury comes from? That's right - burning coal.
While I agree extraditing this guy is ridiculous, the handgun analogy doesn't really work. This guy was operating in the UK, but the links on his site was available to Americans. A closer handgun analogy would be extraditing someone in the U.S. providing links to UK citzens of stores which would sell and ship them handguns.
It's not ironic at all. It only seems ironic if you misunderstand what's actually going on. During the 1700-1800s, it was to the financial advantage of the U.S. to violate copyright, so we did. During the present era, it's to the financial advantage of the U.S. to defend copyright, so we do.
When I was growing up in Michigan in the 1970s, $1 CAD was worth about $1 USD. The exchange rate was stable enough that most places near the border accepted both Canadian and US bills for the same price. Canadian coins (back then they were just pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters too) were not a problem anywhere in the U.S.
I dunno what caused the CAD to drop to about 65 cents US. But to me, the fact that they're near parity again just means things are back to normal.
Ah yes, the safety argument. Do you want to know what else would reduce T-bone accidents? Increasing the length of time after a light turns red, before the cross light turns green. That's a helluva lot cheaper than installing a red light camera and the enormous technological and bureaucratic overhead needed to operate them. But it's income first, safety second, so the dirt cheap and more effective but zero revenue solution is passed up in favor of the expensive and less effective but positive revenue solution.
I've posted this so many times on /. I feel like I'm pounding my head against a brick wall. I know it goes against people's political inclinations here, but it's the truth so here it is again.
Wouldn't it be great if there were a non-partisan government body which went over all the government accounting books and figured out what's causing the budget to blow up out of control? Guess what? There is. It's called the Congressional Budget Office. Every year or two they put out a long-term budget outlook where they outline where we're headed, and what's causing the problems, and how changes we can make to the budget can change that course. Please read it, or at least read the summary if you can't read the whole thing.
For the last 12 years, they've pointed out over and over that the primary cause of our budget woes is Medicare/Medicaid and to a lesser extent Social Security. The historical average for federal tax revenue is about 18% of GDP. Did you know that on our current course, Medicare/Medicaid will grow to consume 18% of GDP some time around 2050-2070? That's right, 100% of tax receipts will go to pay for Medicare/Medicaid and nothing else. We're not being driven to bankruptcy by banks or the military industrial complex. We're being driven to bankruptcy by voters wanting stuff in their old age without having to pay for (most of) it.
Please, for a moment put aside everything you hear your peers say and ask yourself with an open mind: "what if military spending isn't the problem?" Read the link. The vast majority of the $200 trillion is unfunded entitlements (net difference between estimated outlays vs receipts).
This matches with what the Congressional Budget Office reports have been saying for 12 years now. Social Security and especially Medicare/Medicaid are driving us to bankruptcy. That's not saying we have to get rid of them, but they need to be seriously overhauled to keep their costs within realistic levels (e.g. raise retirement/benefit ages to keep pace with life expectancy).
Military spending is a red herring. Yes it can be cut. But even if we completely eliminated it we'd still be on a path to bankruptcy due to the above entitlements. The only route to fiscal solvency is entitlement reform. The longer people refuse to listen to what the CBO has been telling us for over a decade because it's inconvenient to their political ideology, the worse it will get.
Didn't read TFA so dunno how valid it is. But that would actually makes sense.
Big movie advertised everywhere. Person wants to watch it but doesn't want to pay. Before the shutdown they'd download it from Megaupload and watch it. But after the shutdown they really want to watch it, so they fork over the money at the theater.
Small movie without much advertising. Person hears about it through the Internet, downloads it from Megaupload and watches it. They love it so they tell all their friends about it, some of whom go to watch it at the theater. After the shutdown, the person never watches it, their friends never hear about him raving about how good it is, so they never go to the theater to watch it. Since Megaupload's effect on box office sales is a secondary effect in this case (it affects the person's friends' behavior), the magnitude of the effect is smaller, small enough to be statistically insignificant in this sample.
Or it could just be a garbage study.
People rarely decide things based on a single factor. When you characterize their decisions in terms of that single factor, you usually arrive at an incorrect assessment of their motivations. Unfortunately, it's become popular to pick the one factor which makes people with opposing viewpoints look the worst, and then boldly claim that that's their sole motivation. Great for getting cheap acknowledgement from those with similar viewpoints to yours, very bad for creating rational debate about an issue.
For the death penalty, people who support it are generally strongly in favor of individual responsibility. You should reap the rewards of the good you do, bear the consequences of the bad. More succinctly, the priority they assign to punishment for bad deeds is higher than the priority they assign to preservation of life. Deliberately depriving another fellow human being of their life without justification is the ultimate bad, and so being deprived of yours seems an equitable punishment (this is simplified, as obviously degree of mitigating factors can play into it - e.g. abused wife kills husband).
That the government is acting as the agent for the penalty is inconsequential. Most of them would probably vote to acquit a posse who lynched a murderer if they were sitting on the jury. Now, if these people believed government should be so limited it doesn't have the right to punish a convicted criminal, then you'd be correct that they're being hypocrites. But they universally believe government does have that right, so the only variable is degree of punishment. Limitations of government powers simply isn't a factor on this issue for them.
And FWIW, I agree with the reasoning of those for the death penalty. But I oppose it because I don't think our legal systems are sophisticated enough to mete it out in a just manner. There are an uncomfortable number of people on death row whose cases have reasonable doubt in my mind. We have to keep in mind that people and our systems are not perfect, and will inevitably sometimes fail. If it fails and you jail someone, hopefully at some point the person can be released. But if it fails and you execute someone, you can't bring them back from the dead.
Thing is, increased consumption and population growth are inversely correlated . There's something about living in a modern industrialized society which makes people want to have fewer kids. Nearly all industrialized countries have close to zero population growth, with a few actually shrinking in population (Japan is the biggest one). The countries with the highest population growth are the undeveloped poor nations - agricultural with people living on subsistence diets.
So if you want to slow down the world's population growth, simply encourage industrialization of undeveloped countries. And the way to do that is more cheap energy, not less. The idyllic vision of everyone living on their own plot of land, working their own fields, and growing their own crops to eat results in the high population growth its proponents think the lifestyle will prevent.
That is grounds for losing the domain name and having it turned over to the complainant regardless of how Google came to acquire it. The only thing that's really questionable is whether "duck.com" is sufficiently similar to DuckDuckGo to cause confusion.
If you have some domain whose name is similar to a commercial trademark, you're in the clear as long as you steer clear of their business. But the moment you try to compete with them using that name, you're liable to lose the domain. e.g. If I owned apple.com and used it to sell apples (the red and green edible kind), there is nothing Apple Computer could do about it. But if I started using it to sell computers, they could complain and I could lose the domain.
Your thinking is 20th century. When only nation-states had the power to wage war on a scale which caused massive casualties, and missile defense systems like this actually increased the chance of war by increasing the odds of a first strike succeeding.
As technology progresses, so does the power which can be wielded by smaller groups and even individuals. In cave man times, one guy with a club could hack down a couple people before he was overwhelmed by everyone else. In medieval times, a swordsman could hack down maybe a dozen before being overwhelmed. With guns and especially the machine gun, that number began to approach a hundred. On 9/11, a single pilot at the controls of an airliner brought the number up to a thousand.
Eventually, some terrorist group or a lone nut-case is going to acquire a nuke. And they're going to try to lob it somewhere. We need point defense systems like this to deal with that new reality. Nation-states are no longer the only ones who can possess weapons of mass destruction. Once you factor in stability and propensity for self-preservation, the biggest threat is no longer nation-states starting a war with each other. The biggest threat is a small group of people deciding they want to take out another small group of people, with little to no regard for innocent bystanders. You can't just consider a USSR vs US type confrontation anymore. You also have to consider regional gangs and paramilitaries deciding to go at each other.
It gets worse than that. I was on vacation in Germany last month, and had a couple extra hours to kill at the hotel one night. So I fired up my Amazon Prime account to watch some movies on Amazon instant video. Not authorized in the area. Same with Netflix and Hulu.
I had to run an SSH proxy through one of my web hosting servers to trick these services into thinking I was still in the U.S., but very few people know how to and have the resources to do that. This whole anachronistic distribution and publishing rights by region has got to die. I try to be a legit customer, paying for my movies and music. But if this is what's going to happen, I'm ripping everything I buy and making my own copies regardless of what silly laws they get passed. If I can't bypass the DRM, I'm downloading the pirated version of my legitimately bought media.