Norway. And I think I can safely say that our police is different than the police in USA. They're normally not armed, and need a special permit to arm themselves. In some of the more violent areas they have guns in the car, but it's locked down, and they need a confirmation from HQ to be able to use them.
A cop being stabbed, or even hurt at all when on duty is fairly rare here, and tend to hit the top 5 news cases for the day. If someone dies on duty, it's several weeks of news about it, detailed investigation, and so forth.
I was curious, so... According to the wikipedia page (I know, I know), 23 Norwegian police officers have been killed in the line of duty since WWII (both killed by criminals and accidents). 23 in 65 years is a rate of 0.35 per year.
Norway has a population of 4.6 million in 2008. The U.S. has a population of approx 305 million. A 66:1 ratio. Norway has a police force of approx 11,000. The U.S. had a police force of approx 970,000 or 675,000 in 2004, depending on how you define "police officer". Scale this up for the change in population (278 -> 307 million) and you get 1.06 million or 741,000 in 2008. That's a ratio of 96:1 or 67:1 compared to Norway.
3.2 per 100,000 per year - Norway police total fatality rate (felonious + accident)
5 ~ 7.2 per 100,000 per year - U.S. police felonious fatality rate
7.1 ~ 10.1 per 100,000 per year - U.S. police accident fatality rate
12 ~ 17.3 per 100,000 per year - U.S. police fatality rate
Two things to note:
1) The overall police fatality rate in the U.S. is only about 5x higher than Norway's. The reason a police officer being killed in Norway is big news is simply because Norway has a small population.
2) The U.S. police fatality rate due to accidents alone is over 2-3x that of Norway's. The vast majority were killed in auto accidents. Clearly there is something else going on here than just police being armed with firearms or not.
I can think of a much simpler explanation why this wasn't caught in testing. Apple has an AT&T tower on site. So all iPhone 4s tested in Apple's labs would've had a strong signal to work with. Apple also gave phones to select personnel to field test, but were so paranoid about it being spotted in the field that they disguised it with (you guessed it) a rubber bumper to hide the distinctive metal antenna band. So it was impossible to hold the field test units in a way which shorted out the two antennas.
Fast-forward 50 years. Natural mosquitoes have been eradicated, replaced by this new genetically modified mosquito. Malaria is wiped off the face of the earth. Two million lives a year are saved. There are rainbows in the sky. Cute puppies and kittens sleep together in every home.
Until some lawyer files a class action lawsuit. Since all mosquitoes are now the genetically modified variety, the researchers and company which developed the buggers and the governments which permitted it are now liable for the pain and suffering associated with every mosquito bite on the planet.
Not only that, $1.5 billion over 2 million iPhones is $750 per iPhone. Apparently this "analyst" simply took the retail non-subsidized cost of the iPhone, multiplied it by the number of iPhone 4s out there, and passed that off as the cost of a recall. As if Apple were going to take the "broken" iPhones and toss them into an industrial grade wood chipper.
"Nine animal studies conducted between 1973 and 2008 show that dioxin is harmful at levels even lower than in the human studies on which EPA based its proposal.
I have to think there were a helluva lot more than 9 studies on the toxicity of dioxin done between 1973-2008, especially in the aftermath of the Times Beach fiasco. That makes me suspect those 9 studies were cherry-picked because they got the results the site wanted. Does someone know of a metastudy which collates the results of all dioxin studies over a give time period?
If they are using MY tax dollars then they damn well ARE accountable to the public.
So all of their private conversations are suddenly public record because they get paid with tax dollars? I'm sorry, but you have no right to take away our privacy just because you are the source of our paychecks.
I'm surprised this got modded up. Any employer is well within their rights to view the communications of their employees while on the job and pertaining to job-related tasks. Since the public is their employer, the public has the right to know. There's some tweaking of this rule when it comes to state secrets (instead of the public being told, select representatives of the public are told and it's their responsibility to uphold the public's interest and make sure the job is being done right), but even there the same principle applies - you do not have an expectation of privacy.
If you want to head down to the bar with your scientist buddies after work and shoot the breeze about the Rosetta probe's flyby of Lutetia, then you can expect it to remain private. But if you are conversing with them about tasks relevant to your job while at work using computers and networks bought with public money discussing data collected at public expense regarding issues you're being paid to investigate, then your employer - the public - has every right to know what you're doing and saying.
In fact, that's part of the premise behind government and educational research being of higher quality than private research. The openness of the former allows for greater scrutiny and confirmation of results. If you're going to argue that public research shouldn't be open, then you've just knocked the trustworthiness of said research down to the level of privately-funded research - i.e. your climate research is no more trustworthy than climate research funded by Exxon-Mobil. They refuse to give select details about their research, you refuse to give select details about your research. They did it to make money, you did it to make money.
The other part of the premise is that there's no conflict of interest - that the research doesn't desire a certain result. But it's been argued that there's a financial conflict of interest in pro-AGW research since it now represents a significant fraction of government research spending. So again, the only practical difference between industry-funded research and government-funded research is the openness of the latter.
I doubt it. When the law was written, it was written to cover commercial infringement,
Yes, that's a very important point to remember. The laws were written to discourage commercial pirates. If they made and sold 10,000 illegal copies of a CD, they made 10,000x as much money as if they only sold one. The more copies they could sell, the more they would benefit. So a fine like $250,000 per song made sense to discourage them.
But on the same token, it makes absolutely no sense to apply that fine to personal copyright infringement. By definition, the personal infringer is only interested in one copy. S/he cannot benefit from making nor providing more than one copy (indeed, as many filesharing networks have found out, the incentive to leave the network as soon as they've gotten their one copy gives rise to "leechers"). So just fining them for the one illegal copy is disincentive enough. Figure $25 for a CD, treble damages for willful infringement, and a little extra for the copyright holder's and government's time and effort, and you're in the $100-$200 range per CD.
This gets into another aspect of this whole thing which is just wrong. The *AA are essentially double-dipping. When they bring a file-sharer to trial, they bemoan how the lone person made the song available to thousands of other people, and so the fine should reflect all those copies. But if that's their reasoning, then the moment they get a judgment for $54,000 against one person, that should indemnify all the people who got files from her from further prosecution. After all, by the *AA's own argument, the fine she's paying is for all those copies, not just hers. So the defendant(s) has been punished and fined, and the *AA recompensed for those thousands of copies and made whole. But no, they go right on filing lawsuits against all those other people.
Either haul one person to court and make them pay these huge fines, and indemnify the rest of the people from prosecution for that infringement. Or try each person in court for their single infringement. You cannot have it both ways and fine every single person for his/her infringement plus the infringement of every other filesharer, and do the same for every other filesharer. Much like if you file suit against a commercial pirate, the people who bought CDs from that pirate are not liable for infringement.
This is a very old trick, and I can't understand why people still fall for it.
People fall for it because while it may be an old trick, it's a good trick that's not well-known . Usually in this country, we make such tricks illegal. But Hollywood has enough money and political clout to not only bribe our politicians to look the other way, but to get them to pass probably-unconstitutional laws hunting the white whale of piracy.
Read the paper. Haggerty had two cages, one of which was RF-transparent fiberglass which was close to the same air and light blockage as the aluminum faraday cage.
That assumes the only influence of the cages is in blocking EM radiation. I can already tell you that's not the case. Metal in moist soil can create a voltage gradient and current, which has long been known to affect plant growth.
A better control would be a metal cage, and an identical fiberglass cage with an equivalent amount/type of metal in contact with the ground.
Trademarks can be lost if they become common generic terms in the language. It happened with Aspirin, Escalator, Zipper, Thermos, and Yo-yo. It almost happened to Kleenex and Xerox, and could happen to Google ("why don't you google it?").
Perhaps copyright needs a similar exception. If your song/phrase/work becomes an iconic symbol of something else (in this case, Australia), then clearly the benefit to society of not having it protected by copyright outweighs the author's right to profit off it. So it should lose its copyright.
All this means is that scientists are in fact humans and make small errors just like everyone else.
Hey, I believe in AGW, but this is much more than just a "small error". It indicates that papers supportive of the conclusion had a much lower threshold for inclusion than papers contradictory to it. As in, there was no threshold for pro-GW papers. You could make up stuff and if it sounded good it could be included, without any fact-checking.
The issue isn't whether there were a few factual errors. It's whether the report is credible. Your credibility is golden, and once you lose it in the eyes of the public, it's really, really hard to get back. Ideally, in science, the proponent of a theory should also be its harshest critic.
You've got to be kidding me. To quote Jon Stewart, "Democrats... have an 18 vote majority in the Senate. Which is more than George W Bush ever had in the Senate when he did whatever the f*ck he wanted to do. In fact the Democrats have a greater majority than Republicans have had since 1923. But for Democrats apparently a majority of 100 is 60?"
The problems the Democrats are having passing anything is because when they effectively got 60 Senate seats, their leadership went into the throes of a collective orgasm and dreamt up every far-left bill they could think of and tried to pass them. Not only did Republicans vote against them, they had to beg and bribemoderate Democrats to support those bills. If a bill you propose is opposed by all Republicans and a significant number of moderate Democrats, most intelligent people would logically conclude that the bill is far too liberal and needs to come back to center to have a chance at passing. Not that there's some right-wing conspiracy to thwart you.
You can pretend that what your government actually does with the weaponry is not my department, but you're bright enough to see your link in the causal chain of events. So unless you're exercising wilful intellectual dishonesty your brain has at some point justified the ends. What I want to understand is: what is the moral framework which has enabled you to justify the ends? And what was the argument leading to your conclusion?
It's pretty simple. Countries which don't prepare for war eventually get conquered and cease to exist. As a result, all countries which exist have some history of warfare. If you believe your country is generally doing morally good things, asking for a cessation of investment in military technology is tantamount to insuring that your country (and thus those morally good things) cease to exist.
Morally, the choice is not, as you seem to feel, between building things which could be used for evil purposes or not building them. It's between building things which might possibly be used for evil purposes, or guaranteeing that your idea of morality will cease to exist because your country will be conquered and its morality replaced by the conqueror's. And it's a pretty good bet that the conqueror's morality will be worse than yours because, hey, they had no qualms about conquering you despite the generally good things you were doing morally.
The moral position you're staking - that one should never build weapons since they might be used for evil purposes - is an unstable boundary condition. One can only remain at that boundary state so long as the entire rest of the world is also in the same state. If you model it simply with a markov chain, you'll see that the moment even a tiny bit of the world takes a minuscule step away from that boundary state, the moment a child is born who decides he would rather take something from another child rather than play nice, with the passage of time the entire system diverges away from that boundary state until nothing is left. Practically, the best long-term stable position you can hope for is something close to that boundary state but not quite there. Hence some investment in the military is necessary if you want to insure that your ideas and sense of morality survive into the future.
People love to whine about all the Apple stories. I would defy any of them to submit their own stories about all the other computer companies that are breaking new ground with this type of research.
Apple has become like the Microsoft of old. Repackaging old things and presenting them to an enamored audience of fanbois who oooh and aaah at all the wonderful things Apple/Microsoft "invented". I still meet people who think Microsoft invented the Internet just because they're ignorant of the rest of the tech market and were only exposed to Microsoft products. I'm starting to see the same thing happen with people who shroud themselves entirely within Jobs' reality distortion field.
That's a really poor way to look at it, since you're basing the vertical scale based on the one wealthiest person, throwing off the scale of the rest of your graph making it impossible to estimate an integral. Play with the income tax stats yourself. In 2007:
The lower half(below $40k) representing 45.8% of taxpayers accounted for 9.1% of taxable income, and 5.6% of income tax revenue.
The top half ($40k-$1 mil), representing 53.2% of taxpayers accounted for 70.4% of taxable income, and 58.3% of income tax revenue.
The upper crust (over $1 mil) are 0.9% of taxpayers and accounted for 20.5% of taxable income, and 36% of income tax revenue.
So the bulk of income tax revenue comes from the moderately wealthy, those making $40k-$1 mil.* Arguing that the wealthiest individual doesn't pay enough, as your l-curve site does, and using that as a reason to raise income taxes on the moderately wealthy doesn't really make a lot of sense since the people you're proposing to raise taxes on aren't the wealthiest individual. Cranking up the tax rate on people with incomes over $10 mil (a "merely" 33-foot tall stack of $100 bills 0.72 inches from the goal line according to your site) may make you feel better, but it won't increase income tax revenue significantly since they only represent 8.2% of taxable income and 9.8% of current income tax revenue. It's very difficult to raise income tax revenue significantly without dipping into the lower-upper class (to $100k as Obama campaigned on) and upper-middle class ($40k-$99k). (And no, arguing that they're using tax dodges so their gross income is much higher than their taxable income doesn't work either. I ran those numbers as well and the people with the biggest ratio of gross to taxable income were in the $4k-$12k range. Those earning $1+ mil had the smallest ratio. Apparently the AMT is working.)
*(The cutoffs are somewhat arbitrary; I chose them because they broke up taxpayers into roughly 50% blocks. Feel free to pick $30k or $50k or whatever you like from the IRS figures and run the numbers yourself. The median seems to be around $45k.)
You told me, but you didn't convince me. People need to be convinced. If an engineer doesn't show faith in his calculations/estimations/conclusions, then you won't convince the leaders of the need to do something differently. Just because an engineer says something doesn't mean others will follow. You need engineering leaders that trust their teams that can communicate the level of risk associated with each path.
You're making the right point, but you're pinning the blame on the wrong people. Engineers are numbers people with (usually) a thorough understanding of probability-based risk assessment. Managers are often clueless about probability. The conversation goes something like this:
Engineer: You shouldn't do this. It's highly likely to blow up in our faces.
Manager: Oh? How sure are you? How likely?
Engineer: Very likely.
Manager: So you're sure this will fail?
Engineer: No, just that it's very likely to fail.
Manager: So you're not sure?
Engineer: Nothing is 100% certain.
Manager: Well if you're not sure this will blow up, what's the problem? Let's go ahead and do it.
Engineer:...
The problem is that hyperbole and exaggeration is the norm when arguing or making claims outside of engineering and science circles (sales is the epitome of this, and the reason most engineers and scientists hate marketing). And when an engineer reports the risk in probability-based engineer-speak, many manager types tend to interpret it as the engineer not having much faith in in his calculations/estimations/conclusions.
The correct solution is to train managers to understand probability-based risk assessment so they can properly make the go/no-go decision based on the information their engineers feed them. Asking the engineer to change his speak to something the manager understands (go/no-go) is essentially bumping down the decision-making power to the engineer. Not necessarily a bad idea, but probably beyond the scope of his duties.
This one has flaws too, but at least it's better than FPTP hopefully.
Just to be clear, there is no flawless voting system. The best you can do is pick which flaws you wish to live with, and pick a voting system which minimizes those flaws.
The problem with geothermal is that after you extract the heat from the rocks, it takes time for the surrounding rock to heat up the cool spot you've created. This places a natural limit on the rate you can extract heat energy from a geothermal well, thus making it unsuitable for high population density areas like cities. The geological formations in some areas provide their own natural flow of subterranean water, thus constantly carrying in heat from other distant rocks to your geothermal well. But those are exceedingly rare.
Regardless, I am very optimistic about geothermal for meeting the energy needs of low population density areas. On top of that, geothermal heat pumps for heating and air conditioning, while not an energy source, improve efficiency so much that in both hot and cold regions of the country, they will typically pay for themselves in 3-7 years.
The one thing you fail to mention is that Spamhaus, for one, is an opt-in service, meaning that the individuals and businesses who decide to accept the false positives of Spamhaus' "slander via algorithm" have decided to do so on their own - no one is forcing them to take Spamhaus' word for it. Secondly, being a "spammer" isn't like pregnancy, it's not a binary option. Certainly there are people out there who think they're "informing the public", where others think the same people are worthy of being boiled in oil.
Actually, the biggest problem I've had with RBLs is when our server gets rooted and gets used to send spam. We've always caught it within 24 hours, analyzed the logs to figure out what happened, wiped, restored, and patched to prevent it again. But by that time our IP has been blacklisted on numerous RBLs and it can take weeks or months to get it unlisted. So it's even possible to be caught spamming and be labeled a spammer even when you clearly aren't one.
I'm not saying RBLs are evil. I think on the whole they are a useful tool. But clearly there needs to be some balance between how quick they are to add you to the blacklist and how quick they are to remove you.
The people who are alleging fraud are claiming that this is a scheme to ensure that the Republican incumbent is re-elected.
That makes no sense. Even the left-leaning fivethirtyeight blog listed the South Carolina Senate seat as safely Republican back in late April, with a 95+% chance to be won by the Republican candidate.
Is it possible that thousands of Republicans decided to vote for Alvin Greene not because they want him to be their next Senator, but because he is such a hopeless candidate that he will be crushed by the Republican nominee?
Sorry to repost, but this seems a better place. If you look at the election results, you'll see that 424,893 people voted for the Republican primary while 197,380 voted for the Democrat primary. The electorate there is so strongly Republican that if 30k Republicans crossed over to give Greene his minimum 100k vs 70k margin of victory, the Democrats are looking at having to overcome a 2.7:1 margin of voter registrations against them to win, instead of "merely" 2.1:1. If you assume Greene is a nobody and should've gotten 10k votes max, then that means over half the people who voted in the Democrat primary were Republicans, and so the Democrats would need to overcome a 6.4:1 margin to win.
All in all, none of this makes any sense. There's no motive on either side. Why would Republicans poison a Democrat primary for a safely Republican seat? The stronger you advocate the "Republicans voting in Democrat primary" theory, the safer the Republican seat becomes. Why would Democrats not want to put forth the best candidate? Something does smell, but the most plausible explanation is simple voting machine tallying error with no nefarious purpose behind it.
Voters in S.C. are allowed to vote for the Democratic or Republican primary regardless of party affiliation. One of the theories was that Republicans crossed and voted in the Democrat primary to try to shaft them with a bad candidate. But if you look at the election results, you'll see that 424,893 people voted for the Republican primary while 197,380 voted for the Democrat primary. The electorate there is so strongly Republican that if 30k Republicans crossed over to give Greene his minimum 100k vs 70k margin of victory, the Democrats are looking at having to overcome a 2.7:1 margin of voter registrations against them to win, instead of "merely" 2.1:1. If you assume Greene is a nobody and should've gotten 10k votes max, then that means over half the people who voted in the Democrat primary were Republicans, and so the Democrats would need to overcome a 6.4:1 margin to win.
All in all, none of this makes any sense. There's no motive on either side. Why would Republicans poison a Democrat primary for a safely Republican seat? Why would Democrats not want to put forth the best candidate? Something does smell, but the most plausible explanation is simple voting machine tallying error with no nefarious purpose behind it.
I do not know where you grew up, but when I was in elementary school, we had maps that showed countries which had not existed in over a decade. We had math textbooks that were falling apart. The teachers had to spend money out of their own pockets on classroom supplies, despite the fact that their salaries were the lowest in the entire region. ...
The funding problems wind up magnifying the policy problems and the result is an embarrassingly bad education system.
There is no funding problem. In 2005/2006, the U.S. spent over $9100 per student per year on public primary and secondary school education. It's among the highest in the world. For a typical classroom of 30 students, that's over a quarter of a million dollars a year. With that amount of money, there is absolutely no excuse for a teacher having to pay out of their own pocket for basic classroom supplies.
The problem isn't that schools are underfunded. The problem is that the money is poorly spent.
From what I'm told (I didn't live during that time, so I don't have firsthand knowledge), we used to have a government that strongly encouraged scientific research and development and considered it part of the greatness of our nation.
The biggest increase in Federal science (non-defense) R&D in recent years happened during Bush's terms. You know, the President who most openly avowed his faith ever since I've been old enough to vote? If you ask the scientist in me, that data seems crippling to any theory that science and religion are contradictory and can't mix.
Bush had many faults, but he got painted as an anti-science President solely because he was religious and killed a couple high-profile science projects (supercollider and stem cell research). As scientists are fond of saying, the facts do not bear that out. He increased funding for the NIH, NSF, and DOE more than any recent President. If you've been assuming he was anti-science all this time, I'd say you need to step back and ask yourself if your anti-religious fervor has become your religion.
Yup, I saw the same thing happen when I used to work for a DoD contractor. The colonel who was spearheading the project we were working on got promoted and reassigned. His replacement came in, didn't like what the project's goals were, and pretty much rewrote the design specs for the then two-year old project to make it do something completely different than what it was originally supposed to do. We had to backtrack and re-do large segments of work, which all got billed of course as a cost overrun.
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I was curious, so... According to the wikipedia page (I know, I know), 23 Norwegian police officers have been killed in the line of duty since WWII (both killed by criminals and accidents). 23 in 65 years is a rate of 0.35 per year.
Norway has a population of 4.6 million in 2008. The U.S. has a population of approx 305 million. A 66:1 ratio. Norway has a police force of approx 11,000. The U.S. had a police force of approx 970,000 or 675,000 in 2004, depending on how you define "police officer". Scale this up for the change in population (278 -> 307 million) and you get 1.06 million or 741,000 in 2008. That's a ratio of 96:1 or 67:1 compared to Norway.
Police officer fatalities in the U.S. vary year by year, but the FBI posts the statistics online. In the 10 years spanning 1999-2008, an average of 53 officers per year were killed feloniously while an average of 75 officers per year were killed in accidents. Plugging these rates into the above population sizes yields:
3.2 per 100,000 per year - Norway police total fatality rate (felonious + accident)
5 ~ 7.2 per 100,000 per year - U.S. police felonious fatality rate
7.1 ~ 10.1 per 100,000 per year - U.S. police accident fatality rate
12 ~ 17.3 per 100,000 per year - U.S. police fatality rate
Two things to note:
1) The overall police fatality rate in the U.S. is only about 5x higher than Norway's. The reason a police officer being killed in Norway is big news is simply because Norway has a small population.
2) The U.S. police fatality rate due to accidents alone is over 2-3x that of Norway's. The vast majority were killed in auto accidents. Clearly there is something else going on here than just police being armed with firearms or not.
I can think of a much simpler explanation why this wasn't caught in testing. Apple has an AT&T tower on site. So all iPhone 4s tested in Apple's labs would've had a strong signal to work with. Apple also gave phones to select personnel to field test, but were so paranoid about it being spotted in the field that they disguised it with (you guessed it) a rubber bumper to hide the distinctive metal antenna band. So it was impossible to hold the field test units in a way which shorted out the two antennas.
Fast-forward 50 years. Natural mosquitoes have been eradicated, replaced by this new genetically modified mosquito. Malaria is wiped off the face of the earth. Two million lives a year are saved. There are rainbows in the sky. Cute puppies and kittens sleep together in every home.
Until some lawyer files a class action lawsuit. Since all mosquitoes are now the genetically modified variety, the researchers and company which developed the buggers and the governments which permitted it are now liable for the pain and suffering associated with every mosquito bite on the planet.
Not only that, $1.5 billion over 2 million iPhones is $750 per iPhone. Apparently this "analyst" simply took the retail non-subsidized cost of the iPhone, multiplied it by the number of iPhone 4s out there, and passed that off as the cost of a recall. As if Apple were going to take the "broken" iPhones and toss them into an industrial grade wood chipper.
I have to think there were a helluva lot more than 9 studies on the toxicity of dioxin done between 1973-2008, especially in the aftermath of the Times Beach fiasco. That makes me suspect those 9 studies were cherry-picked because they got the results the site wanted. Does someone know of a metastudy which collates the results of all dioxin studies over a give time period?
I'm surprised this got modded up. Any employer is well within their rights to view the communications of their employees while on the job and pertaining to job-related tasks. Since the public is their employer, the public has the right to know. There's some tweaking of this rule when it comes to state secrets (instead of the public being told, select representatives of the public are told and it's their responsibility to uphold the public's interest and make sure the job is being done right), but even there the same principle applies - you do not have an expectation of privacy.
If you want to head down to the bar with your scientist buddies after work and shoot the breeze about the Rosetta probe's flyby of Lutetia, then you can expect it to remain private. But if you are conversing with them about tasks relevant to your job while at work using computers and networks bought with public money discussing data collected at public expense regarding issues you're being paid to investigate, then your employer - the public - has every right to know what you're doing and saying.
In fact, that's part of the premise behind government and educational research being of higher quality than private research. The openness of the former allows for greater scrutiny and confirmation of results. If you're going to argue that public research shouldn't be open, then you've just knocked the trustworthiness of said research down to the level of privately-funded research - i.e. your climate research is no more trustworthy than climate research funded by Exxon-Mobil. They refuse to give select details about their research, you refuse to give select details about your research. They did it to make money, you did it to make money.
The other part of the premise is that there's no conflict of interest - that the research doesn't desire a certain result. But it's been argued that there's a financial conflict of interest in pro-AGW research since it now represents a significant fraction of government research spending. So again, the only practical difference between industry-funded research and government-funded research is the openness of the latter.
Yes, that's a very important point to remember. The laws were written to discourage commercial pirates. If they made and sold 10,000 illegal copies of a CD, they made 10,000x as much money as if they only sold one. The more copies they could sell, the more they would benefit. So a fine like $250,000 per song made sense to discourage them.
But on the same token, it makes absolutely no sense to apply that fine to personal copyright infringement. By definition, the personal infringer is only interested in one copy. S/he cannot benefit from making nor providing more than one copy (indeed, as many filesharing networks have found out, the incentive to leave the network as soon as they've gotten their one copy gives rise to "leechers"). So just fining them for the one illegal copy is disincentive enough. Figure $25 for a CD, treble damages for willful infringement, and a little extra for the copyright holder's and government's time and effort, and you're in the $100-$200 range per CD.
This gets into another aspect of this whole thing which is just wrong. The *AA are essentially double-dipping. When they bring a file-sharer to trial, they bemoan how the lone person made the song available to thousands of other people, and so the fine should reflect all those copies. But if that's their reasoning, then the moment they get a judgment for $54,000 against one person, that should indemnify all the people who got files from her from further prosecution. After all, by the *AA's own argument, the fine she's paying is for all those copies, not just hers. So the defendant(s) has been punished and fined, and the *AA recompensed for those thousands of copies and made whole. But no, they go right on filing lawsuits against all those other people.
Either haul one person to court and make them pay these huge fines, and indemnify the rest of the people from prosecution for that infringement. Or try each person in court for their single infringement. You cannot have it both ways and fine every single person for his/her infringement plus the infringement of every other filesharer, and do the same for every other filesharer. Much like if you file suit against a commercial pirate, the people who bought CDs from that pirate are not liable for infringement.
People fall for it because while it may be an old trick, it's a good trick that's not well-known . Usually in this country, we make such tricks illegal. But Hollywood has enough money and political clout to not only bribe our politicians to look the other way, but to get them to pass probably-unconstitutional laws hunting the white whale of piracy.
That assumes the only influence of the cages is in blocking EM radiation. I can already tell you that's not the case. Metal in moist soil can create a voltage gradient and current, which has long been known to affect plant growth.
A better control would be a metal cage, and an identical fiberglass cage with an equivalent amount/type of metal in contact with the ground.
Trademarks can be lost if they become common generic terms in the language. It happened with Aspirin, Escalator, Zipper, Thermos, and Yo-yo. It almost happened to Kleenex and Xerox, and could happen to Google ("why don't you google it?").
Perhaps copyright needs a similar exception. If your song/phrase/work becomes an iconic symbol of something else (in this case, Australia), then clearly the benefit to society of not having it protected by copyright outweighs the author's right to profit off it. So it should lose its copyright.
Hey, I believe in AGW, but this is much more than just a "small error". It indicates that papers supportive of the conclusion had a much lower threshold for inclusion than papers contradictory to it. As in, there was no threshold for pro-GW papers. You could make up stuff and if it sounded good it could be included, without any fact-checking.
The issue isn't whether there were a few factual errors. It's whether the report is credible. Your credibility is golden, and once you lose it in the eyes of the public, it's really, really hard to get back. Ideally, in science, the proponent of a theory should also be its harshest critic.
You've got to be kidding me. To quote Jon Stewart, "Democrats... have an 18 vote majority in the Senate. Which is more than George W Bush ever had in the Senate when he did whatever the f*ck he wanted to do. In fact the Democrats have a greater majority than Republicans have had since 1923. But for Democrats apparently a majority of 100 is 60?"
The Republican party does not vote in lock-step. They have moderate members who will vote against their party. In fact, of Senators in the current term who vote against their party more than 20% of the time, 5 are Republicans (out of 43) and 4 are Democrats (out of 62). In the 2007-2008 Senate when Republicans held a 51:49 majority, the 9 Senators who voted against their party more than 20% of the time were all Republicans.
The problems the Democrats are having passing anything is because when they effectively got 60 Senate seats, their leadership went into the throes of a collective orgasm and dreamt up every far-left bill they could think of and tried to pass them. Not only did Republicans vote against them, they had to beg and bribe moderate Democrats to support those bills. If a bill you propose is opposed by all Republicans and a significant number of moderate Democrats, most intelligent people would logically conclude that the bill is far too liberal and needs to come back to center to have a chance at passing. Not that there's some right-wing conspiracy to thwart you.
It's pretty simple. Countries which don't prepare for war eventually get conquered and cease to exist. As a result, all countries which exist have some history of warfare. If you believe your country is generally doing morally good things, asking for a cessation of investment in military technology is tantamount to insuring that your country (and thus those morally good things) cease to exist.
Morally, the choice is not, as you seem to feel, between building things which could be used for evil purposes or not building them. It's between building things which might possibly be used for evil purposes, or guaranteeing that your idea of morality will cease to exist because your country will be conquered and its morality replaced by the conqueror's. And it's a pretty good bet that the conqueror's morality will be worse than yours because, hey, they had no qualms about conquering you despite the generally good things you were doing morally.
The moral position you're staking - that one should never build weapons since they might be used for evil purposes - is an unstable boundary condition. One can only remain at that boundary state so long as the entire rest of the world is also in the same state. If you model it simply with a markov chain, you'll see that the moment even a tiny bit of the world takes a minuscule step away from that boundary state, the moment a child is born who decides he would rather take something from another child rather than play nice, with the passage of time the entire system diverges away from that boundary state until nothing is left. Practically, the best long-term stable position you can hope for is something close to that boundary state but not quite there. Hence some investment in the military is necessary if you want to insure that your ideas and sense of morality survive into the future.
Eh? This is hardly breaking new ground. IBM achieved a "retina display" 10 years ago. Kudos to Apple for identifying a supplier who could provide something similar but smaller for a device held closer to your eyes. But unlike Apple, IBM actually did the R&D themselves, doubling the state of the art at the time before bringing it to market.
Apple has become like the Microsoft of old. Repackaging old things and presenting them to an enamored audience of fanbois who oooh and aaah at all the wonderful things Apple/Microsoft "invented". I still meet people who think Microsoft invented the Internet just because they're ignorant of the rest of the tech market and were only exposed to Microsoft products. I'm starting to see the same thing happen with people who shroud themselves entirely within Jobs' reality distortion field.
That's a really poor way to look at it, since you're basing the vertical scale based on the one wealthiest person, throwing off the scale of the rest of your graph making it impossible to estimate an integral. Play with the income tax stats yourself. In 2007:
The lower half(below $40k) representing 45.8% of taxpayers accounted for 9.1% of taxable income, and 5.6% of income tax revenue.
The top half ($40k-$1 mil), representing 53.2% of taxpayers accounted for 70.4% of taxable income, and 58.3% of income tax revenue.
The upper crust (over $1 mil) are 0.9% of taxpayers and accounted for 20.5% of taxable income, and 36% of income tax revenue.
So the bulk of income tax revenue comes from the moderately wealthy, those making $40k-$1 mil.* Arguing that the wealthiest individual doesn't pay enough, as your l-curve site does, and using that as a reason to raise income taxes on the moderately wealthy doesn't really make a lot of sense since the people you're proposing to raise taxes on aren't the wealthiest individual. Cranking up the tax rate on people with incomes over $10 mil (a "merely" 33-foot tall stack of $100 bills 0.72 inches from the goal line according to your site) may make you feel better, but it won't increase income tax revenue significantly since they only represent 8.2% of taxable income and 9.8% of current income tax revenue. It's very difficult to raise income tax revenue significantly without dipping into the lower-upper class (to $100k as Obama campaigned on) and upper-middle class ($40k-$99k). (And no, arguing that they're using tax dodges so their gross income is much higher than their taxable income doesn't work either. I ran those numbers as well and the people with the biggest ratio of gross to taxable income were in the $4k-$12k range. Those earning $1+ mil had the smallest ratio. Apparently the AMT is working.)
*(The cutoffs are somewhat arbitrary; I chose them because they broke up taxpayers into roughly 50% blocks. Feel free to pick $30k or $50k or whatever you like from the IRS figures and run the numbers yourself. The median seems to be around $45k.)
You're making the right point, but you're pinning the blame on the wrong people. Engineers are numbers people with (usually) a thorough understanding of probability-based risk assessment. Managers are often clueless about probability. The conversation goes something like this:
...
Engineer: You shouldn't do this. It's highly likely to blow up in our faces.
Manager: Oh? How sure are you? How likely?
Engineer: Very likely.
Manager: So you're sure this will fail?
Engineer: No, just that it's very likely to fail.
Manager: So you're not sure?
Engineer: Nothing is 100% certain.
Manager: Well if you're not sure this will blow up, what's the problem? Let's go ahead and do it.
Engineer:
The problem is that hyperbole and exaggeration is the norm when arguing or making claims outside of engineering and science circles (sales is the epitome of this, and the reason most engineers and scientists hate marketing). And when an engineer reports the risk in probability-based engineer-speak, many manager types tend to interpret it as the engineer not having much faith in in his calculations/estimations/conclusions.
The correct solution is to train managers to understand probability-based risk assessment so they can properly make the go/no-go decision based on the information their engineers feed them. Asking the engineer to change his speak to something the manager understands (go/no-go) is essentially bumping down the decision-making power to the engineer. Not necessarily a bad idea, but probably beyond the scope of his duties.
Just to be clear, there is no flawless voting system. The best you can do is pick which flaws you wish to live with, and pick a voting system which minimizes those flaws.
The problem with geothermal is that after you extract the heat from the rocks, it takes time for the surrounding rock to heat up the cool spot you've created. This places a natural limit on the rate you can extract heat energy from a geothermal well, thus making it unsuitable for high population density areas like cities. The geological formations in some areas provide their own natural flow of subterranean water, thus constantly carrying in heat from other distant rocks to your geothermal well. But those are exceedingly rare.
Regardless, I am very optimistic about geothermal for meeting the energy needs of low population density areas. On top of that, geothermal heat pumps for heating and air conditioning, while not an energy source, improve efficiency so much that in both hot and cold regions of the country, they will typically pay for themselves in 3-7 years.
Actually, the biggest problem I've had with RBLs is when our server gets rooted and gets used to send spam. We've always caught it within 24 hours, analyzed the logs to figure out what happened, wiped, restored, and patched to prevent it again. But by that time our IP has been blacklisted on numerous RBLs and it can take weeks or months to get it unlisted. So it's even possible to be caught spamming and be labeled a spammer even when you clearly aren't one.
I'm not saying RBLs are evil. I think on the whole they are a useful tool. But clearly there needs to be some balance between how quick they are to add you to the blacklist and how quick they are to remove you.
That makes no sense. Even the left-leaning fivethirtyeight blog listed the South Carolina Senate seat as safely Republican back in late April, with a 95+% chance to be won by the Republican candidate.
Sorry to repost, but this seems a better place. If you look at the election results, you'll see that 424,893 people voted for the Republican primary while 197,380 voted for the Democrat primary. The electorate there is so strongly Republican that if 30k Republicans crossed over to give Greene his minimum 100k vs 70k margin of victory, the Democrats are looking at having to overcome a 2.7:1 margin of voter registrations against them to win, instead of "merely" 2.1:1. If you assume Greene is a nobody and should've gotten 10k votes max, then that means over half the people who voted in the Democrat primary were Republicans, and so the Democrats would need to overcome a 6.4:1 margin to win.
All in all, none of this makes any sense. There's no motive on either side. Why would Republicans poison a Democrat primary for a safely Republican seat? The stronger you advocate the "Republicans voting in Democrat primary" theory, the safer the Republican seat becomes. Why would Democrats not want to put forth the best candidate? Something does smell, but the most plausible explanation is simple voting machine tallying error with no nefarious purpose behind it.
Voters in S.C. are allowed to vote for the Democratic or Republican primary regardless of party affiliation. One of the theories was that Republicans crossed and voted in the Democrat primary to try to shaft them with a bad candidate. But if you look at the election results, you'll see that 424,893 people voted for the Republican primary while 197,380 voted for the Democrat primary. The electorate there is so strongly Republican that if 30k Republicans crossed over to give Greene his minimum 100k vs 70k margin of victory, the Democrats are looking at having to overcome a 2.7:1 margin of voter registrations against them to win, instead of "merely" 2.1:1. If you assume Greene is a nobody and should've gotten 10k votes max, then that means over half the people who voted in the Democrat primary were Republicans, and so the Democrats would need to overcome a 6.4:1 margin to win.
All in all, none of this makes any sense. There's no motive on either side. Why would Republicans poison a Democrat primary for a safely Republican seat? Why would Democrats not want to put forth the best candidate? Something does smell, but the most plausible explanation is simple voting machine tallying error with no nefarious purpose behind it.
There is no funding problem. In 2005/2006, the U.S. spent over $9100 per student per year on public primary and secondary school education. It's among the highest in the world. For a typical classroom of 30 students, that's over a quarter of a million dollars a year. With that amount of money, there is absolutely no excuse for a teacher having to pay out of their own pocket for basic classroom supplies.
The problem isn't that schools are underfunded. The problem is that the money is poorly spent.
The biggest increase in Federal science (non-defense) R&D in recent years happened during Bush's terms. You know, the President who most openly avowed his faith ever since I've been old enough to vote? If you ask the scientist in me, that data seems crippling to any theory that science and religion are contradictory and can't mix.
Bush had many faults, but he got painted as an anti-science President solely because he was religious and killed a couple high-profile science projects (supercollider and stem cell research). As scientists are fond of saying, the facts do not bear that out. He increased funding for the NIH, NSF, and DOE more than any recent President. If you've been assuming he was anti-science all this time, I'd say you need to step back and ask yourself if your anti-religious fervor has become your religion.
Yup, I saw the same thing happen when I used to work for a DoD contractor. The colonel who was spearheading the project we were working on got promoted and reassigned. His replacement came in, didn't like what the project's goals were, and pretty much rewrote the design specs for the then two-year old project to make it do something completely different than what it was originally supposed to do. We had to backtrack and re-do large segments of work, which all got billed of course as a cost overrun.