the RIAA get $84,000 per song or whatever it works out too, and Air France is giving families of the victims of the Airbus crash $24,000.
That's more a reflection of the (in)sanity of monetary awards in the U.S. legal system. Airlines and aircraft manufacturers in the U.S. typically settle for around $1 million per death. When I was younger, at this point I would go on a rant about how lawyers have mutated our legal system into a monstrosity whose primary purpose is to enrich themselves. But I'm past mid-life now and have given up trying to change it. Maybe I'll encourage my kids to become lawyers...
I tossed the numbers into a spreadsheet and figured out the median stats. Kinda sucks that each carrier wins one category:
Carrier: download / upload / reliabiliy
Verizon: 909 / 415 / 87%
Sprint: 794 / 391 / 90%
AT&T: 745 / 660 / 82%
I started weighting it by population of the metro area, but they're missing several major population areas and their samples probably represent a few towers, not the entire metro area. So I realized it would be of dubious value. But it does give a boost to Verizon (due to their great NYC result), while AT&T plummets (again, due to their poor NYC result).
Still, that's [a 5-12 hour drive] not too typical for most people's day-to-day routine.
The thing is, unless they're rich, people don't buy a car based on their day-to-day routine. They buy a car based on how well it can handle all their driving needs. If a car that suits their day-to-day driving needs can't handle an annual 12 hour drive to grandma's for Thanksgiving, they're not going to buy a second car just for that one trip. They're going to eliminate the electric from consideration and buy one car that can handle both needs.
I've proposed that people rent a car for their once-a-year trips, and the common reply is that it'd be a "waste of money" when you "already own a car." Not to mention rental cars would be in short supply with jacked up prices around holidays like Thanksgiving. The fiscal benefit of an electric car for day-to-day travel would have to outweigh the cost of renting for that once-a-year trip. A decent rail system would also fill this need for intermediate trip lengths, but alas the U.S. has sacrificed its rail system for freeways. Plug-in hybrids are also a good solution, since they can fill up at a gas station if need be. But then you're carrying around all that weight of an ICU which is only used a few times a year.
If the defendant were not clearly guilty, the ruling might simply be overturned. In this case, with it pretty darned likely that she did do what did, the real case here is what kinds of limits should be set for recovering legal damages.
Agreed. If law said the sentence for drunk driving were 20 years, and you wanted to challenge the constitutionality of the long sentence, by definition the defendant would have to have driven drunk. That said, it would be possible to get a more sympathetic defendant in this case - maybe someone who unwittingly fileshared songs. e.g. They installed Kazaa, tried it briefly, and stopped using it not realizing it stayed active in the background sharing their legit MP3 collection (ripped from CDs they owned).
If they can't prove the actual losses, they should get 3x the value (or 5x or 10x, not 100000x).
Yeah, I can understand being awarded multiple times the value of the song. If she were penalized just 1x the cost of buying the songs (as some here have proposed), then you'd have nothing to lose by downloading. If you're caught, you only pay as much as if you'd bought it. If you're not caught, you get it for free. So clearly the penalty has to be more than the cost of just buying the songs.
But the award in this case works out to $1.9 mil / 24 songs = $79k per song. If you look at the RIAA's 2001 marketing stats, they made about $500,000 per new CD release. If you figure a CD averages 8 songs, that's only $60,000 in annual worldwide revenue per song in the first year as a new release. i.e. The award has her paying more per song than the average revenue the RIAA gets per new song in its first year. You don't even need to check if the award is "cruel or unusual punishment." You can tell it's way too high because it makes it a better business model to sue filesharers than to actually sell the songs on the market. The initial $220k award was possibly unconstitutional. The current $1.9 million award is insanity and would destroy capitalism if it stands.
Just fill a zip-lock bag with water and put it on top of the GPS antenna. When we were trying to use GPS for position fixes on our autonomous submarines, we found to our consternation that just a few millimeters of seawater on top of the antenna would prevent a signal lock.
Way to double, triple, or more the gas tax without looking like it.
This, I think, is the Achilles' heel of democracy. So much effort is put into disguising and sugar-coating things so the public will accept them, that you end up with a convoluted mess where it's nearly impossible to quickly and easily tell exactly what the cost of doing one thing vs. another thing are.
If it were just a gas tax, I could figure out how much gas my vehicle would use in a moth, and multiply that by the tax. But instead, I have to do that, multiply the miles driven by another tax, estimate what proportion of my driving will be on toll roads, add in some other tax based on the type of vehicle I have, etc., then add it all together to figure out how much it's gonna cost me.
I call BS. If I stole a cow from one of those giant farms, the damn rancher'd be able to identify it in a second, but the instant you want to track something for public safety reasons, "there is no way they could ever collect that information."
I call BS on your BS. If we were talking about corporate feed lots it would be one thing, but a very significant percentage of the US beef herd is raised by independent cattle producers on open range in very sparsely populated country. It can take months to find all of your cattle to tag them in the first place, so it is very easy to "lose" cattle without noticing.
I can vouch for this. My previous workplace was adjacent to a free-range cattle ranch. Occasionally someone would leave a gate open or the cattle would manage to knock part of a fence down, and the cattle would roam onto our property. The only way the rancher found out about it is because we called him to collect his cattle off our property. Which he did with some farm hands on horseback, complete with lassos and the whole cowboy shebang. We joked with him about keeping one of the cows for a barbecue next time, and I got the impression they lost cattle to theft, death, or predation all the time with no clue as to exactly what happened to the individual cow/steer. It was just a cost of doing business, like "shrinkage" (shoplifting) is in retail.
This really smells like an attempt by agribusiness to kill the free-range cattle industry, which is mostly mom and pop operations.
I've always felt the contract sites make with advertisers should stipulate that if the ad doesn't load within a reasonable time (say, 5 seconds), the script should time out displaying the ad, finish up, and allow the rest of the page to finish loading. That way the advertisers would have some incentive to upgrade their servers and connection. Personally I don't mind non-annoying ads (no flashing or cheesy animations). But I had to install an ad-blocker because too many of them were slowing down my browsing.
Now if you were packing C4 and detonators you should probably be checked out. But plain old information? Without acting on it, information is basically harmless.
Law enforcement generally breaks down into two types - reactive and preventative enforcement. Reactive is pretty simple. Someone gets killed, law enforcement shows up, collects evidence, figures out whodunit, and (tries to) capture the killer. Preventative enforcement is harder and more intrusive on civil liberties because you have to apply it to everyone, not just suspects. Sobriety checks to catch drunk drivers before they kill anyone, laws to prevent convicted criminals or mentally unstable individuals from buying guns, getting your luggage x-rayed and searched at airports, etc.
The monkey wrench in the works is the suicide bomber mentality. Prior to 9/11, the assumption was that a terrorist had a sense of self-preservation. So we made sure to match up luggage with passengers on the plane, asked people if they'd received any last-minute gifts from acquaintances before boarding, etc. all based on the theory that the terrorist didn't himself want to die. But if the terrorist is willing to die in the act, then most of the detectable intermediate steps between planning a terrorist act and carrying it out disappear. So your preventative options are limited to catching the terrorist in the process of carrying it out (like the passengers and crew tackled Richard Reid, aka the shoe bomber, whom we now have to thank for having our shoes x-rayed at security). Or catching him while he's planning it with only information on his person.
Personally, the number of people killed by terrorism compared to, say, traffic accidents is so minuscule that I think the magnitude of our reaction to the problem is a waste of time and money. I suspect a lot of people in law enforcement feel the same way - they'd rather be on the street combating everyday crime, rather than the 1 in a million terrorist. But the general public seems to want that level of preventative enforcement against terrorism (or at least the majority haven't complained about it vocally). And I've yet to see an alternative method of preventative enforcement which avoids the possibility of infringing on the civil liberties of innocents.
Really? You think the proper behavior for the High School principal is browsing former students MySpace pages and if he decides he doesn't like the content conspiring to "Out Them". Really? Is this the kind of person you want in charge of your child's education?
I know the idea of an authority figure persecuting a former subordinate really riles up your sense of indignation, but you're making a "think of the children" argument. At a fundamental level, this is a case of an employee doing stuff on the web in (I presume) his free time which does not pertain in any way to his work. I haven't seen anyone claiming that he pretended to be the girl when submitting the rant to the newspaper, and the fact that the newspaper's editor was fired over this would seem to indicate the mis-attribution was the editor's fault. So it would appear the principal did nothing legally wrong.
In these cases, I would argue that one's legal online activities outside of your work hours should have no bearing on your employment. To argue otherwise would be accepting several employment practices I find dubious. e.g. employment contracts where the employer claims to own everything you create while employed even though they're only paying you for 8 hours/day, 5 days/week. Do I think what he did was despicable? Of course! But she was no longer a student, and thus not a subordinate, so there was no conflict with his position as a school employee.
Now that the story has become public, he is subject to the same whims of the public that the girl fell victim to. PTA members may question his mental fitness as head of the school, which could lead him to being fired. But that would be a firing due to pressure by the public. Not because what he did was a violation of his duties as a school employee.
66,000 Tweets were made within a 60-minute period.
That's it? That's all it takes to bring Twitter to its knees? A measily 18 tweets per second?
For the record, when the MJ news was at its peak, the volume was more like 1000+ tweets per second on Michael Jackson alone, so I have no idea how the article got those numbers
66,000 tweets per minute would give you 1100 tweets per second. So likely someone misheard or misspoke 66,000 tweets per minute as 66,000 tweets per hour.
It's even simpler than that. The Internet is an information distribution medium. It's not a money-making medium, or a marketing data gathering medium, or a international press service medium. People use it because it's a quick and convenient way to get and spread information - quicker and more convenient than older media. If you try to make parts of it slower and less convenient, people will simply stop using those parts. When friends ask me a technical how-to question, and I find that a nice youtube video that I was using to answer it was pulled because of a C&D letter from the copyright holder, I don't write a letter to the copyright holder asking them for permission to use the video. I just find a different but available video that explains it, and give them a link to that.
The rate at which information flows from an Internet site is not determined by the site's owners; it's determined by the site's visitors. Even if you were to pass and somehow enforce a law prohibiting linking w/o the copyright holder's consent, all that would happen is that copyright holders who gave linking consent up-front would flourish, while copyright holders who insisted on reviewing any link requests would wither and die. Simply because I seriously doubt they could review all such requests before the story becomes yesterday's news. The newspapers would still die (at least the ones insisting on controlling who links to them), and we in the U.S. would just be saddled with an unwieldy and likely unenforceable law that would impede our ability to take advantage of the Internet to the extent that the rest of the free world does.
Nothing will rally conservative forces in Iran more than the belief that the US is supporting a coup against them yet again.
On the other hand, support from *individual Americans*, that's completely different.
And what exactly makes you think the conservative forces in Iran distinguish between the support from "individual Americans", and U.S. government-sponsored activities? When the U.S. government detected intrusions into its military computer networks from IP addresses originating in China, the immediate suspicion was that it was promoted by the Chinese government. There's little to no attempt to distinguish between individual and government-sponsored activities. Whichever culprit is more politically convenient ends up bearing the blame.
Did they confiscate his earnings too? He supposedly made $3 million by spamming. If he's just being fined $1 million and gets to keep the other $2 million, I'd hardly call this effective even with the prison sentence.
I don't even understand why there are subsidized phones. If the cellular companies are worried about people being unable to pay for the cost of a phone up front, then give them a loan. They already run a credit check when you sign up for service. If the customer is credit-worthy, then offer them a 1-, 2-, or 3-year loan for the cost of the phone, complete with amortization tables. Then tack it onto their monthly bill. They already tack on a gazillion other fees and taxes so it's not like this would be difficult.
The way things are now is like having to sign an exclusive purchase contract with an oil company, agreeing to buy only their gasoline at an inflated price. In exchange, they give you a car at a steep discount. Want to switch gas stations? Sorry, can't do that. Already own your own car? Sorry, you still have to sign up with one oil company and buy their high-priced gas.
They consistantly brewed their coffee at 180F. Industry standard is 140F or so. There were multiple complains their coffee was too hot, dating back years. They were warned repeatedly about this. There was a paper trail. There were prior cases of 3rd degree burns.
No, that's propaganda spread by the lady's law firm to convince the jury (and it worked, not only on them but on a lot of people on the Internet).
Bunn is the largest manufacturer of commercial coffee makers in the U.S. They supplied the coffee makers when I helped manage a restaurant. They probably supply the coffee makers for McDonalds. They are the industry standard. If you go to their web store and scroll down, you will clearly see:
Ideal coffee holding temperature: 175F to 185F (80C to 85C)
Most all the volatile aromatics in coffee have boiling points well below that of water and continue to evaporate from the surface until pressure in the serving container reaches equilibrium. A closed container can slow the process of evaporation.
Ideal coffee serving temperature: 155F to 175F (70C to 80C)
Many of the volatile aromatics in coffee have boiling points above 150F (65C). They simply are not perceived when coffee is served at lower temperatures.
Well, it's $80,000, not $18,000. However, I cannot possibly see even $100 per song as justified.
To put $80,000 per song in perspective, look at the RIAA's 2001 marketing stats (last year I could find figures for new releases). On average each new CD title brought in about $500,000 in revenue. If you figure conservatively 8 songs per CD, that works out to $62,500 per song.
In other words, the jury awarded more averages damages per song than if she'd prevented all copies of the song from ever being sold.
They don't know. My warranty expired 2 years ago and I get the cards and calls too. They seem to be mailing/calling people based on year model of the car and normal manufacturer's warranty, then continuing the mailings for several more years in case you got an extended warranty. People figure, "wow, they know when my warranty is up, so they must have gotten some "inside" info from the manufacturer, so they must be legit." It's just a variant of the perfect prediction scam.
Because they were on manual backup control they could not exert enough force on the controls to recover before Vne or the flutter speed of something was attained.
IIRC, the A330 is fly-by-wire and the joystick controllers have no force feedback. i.e. The pilots point their joystick in the direction they want, the computer takes a reading of the joystick deflection and tries its best to make it happen. It's not like the traditional stick and rudder where forces acting on the control surfaces get transmitted back to the stick/yoke in the pilot's hand.
In other words, getting paid is more important than human lives.
That's a very static way to view the world. If getting paid means they can stay in business to save lives for tens or hundreds of years in the future, then heck yeah it's more important to safeguard that future by losing a day's worth of saved lives.
And the article says other hospitals nearby took the overflow patients, so no lives were compromised. If there had been some sort of natural disaster and each hospital had been flooded with patients, then I'm sure they would've chucked the paperwork to treat patients.
BUT, the standard party line of reducing taxes is that "cut taxes to increase revenue".
It is frankly, based on nothing but hot air and/or lies and most serious economic studies have found little to no room for quibbles in that.
The Laffer curve is just the mean value theorem from calculus with the two endpoints set at zero. Anybody claiming it is "nothing but hot air and/or lies" is an idiot, in denial of 300+ years of mathematics which are the foundation of our modern technology-based civilization.
The only quibble about it is whether we are above or below the point at which cutting taxes would increase revenue. I think most people would agree that most of our tax rates are well below this point (and thus lowering those rates would in fact decrease revenue). However, bear in mind that when the Laffer curve was first proposed, the top income tax bracket in the U.S. was ~70%, arguably well above that point.
Perhaps a better way to explain it is that sometimes cutting taxes lowers revenue, sometimes it increases revenue. Anyone who claims that cutting taxes always raises revenue is full of nothing but hot air and lies. But so is anyone who claims that cutting taxes always decreases revenue.
Wrong. 80% of the population experienced a decrease in income from 1977 to 1988 (Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor, p. 17).
The income figures put out by the U.S. Census would seem to contradict this. While the gains were concentrated in the upper 50%, the median did increase over that period.
We're talking about companies with hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year.
The media industry (at least the ones most concerned about TPB) are not that big. The companies overall are huge, but they do lots of other things that aren't related to media. Using their own statistics, global movie box office sales were less than $30 billion. DVD sales (which they apparently no longer release) were about twice that when I crunched the numbers a few years ago. So overall the global U.S.-based movie industry is less than $100 billion. The music industry is even smaller. About 1/3rd the size of the movie industry. Interestingly, their annual report with global sales figures is no longer available on the RIAA web site.
The industries taken as a whole don't even make it into the top-10 of Fortune 500 companies. They are small industries which wield an enormously disproportionate amount of power with our lawmakers. Their biggest claim to fame is not the content they produce, but that their products are "enablers" - driving demand for other industries like DVD players, MP3 players, TVs, etc. Those industries are many times larger, which kinda makes you think that the emphasis should be on allowing everyone to make as much content as they can, not on allowing a few companies to continue to control the content market.
The USN recovered the cargo door which blew off of United flight 811 over the Pacific Ocean about 20 minutes into a flight out of Honolulu. If they have a radar track of it, they most likely can find and recover it. Course we probably won't hear anything about it for 50+ years.
Anyone worth their salt knows nothing is stored in the cable modem.
Hate to post this under a joke, but wouldn't the police have to seize your cable modem in any case involving Internet activity? The only evidence they'll have prior to getting a warrant to search your property is a bunch of logs from the cable company. Those logs won't point to an address, they'll point to a MAC address (or whatever cable modems use). The cable company's records will say that MAC address belongs to a modem at such and such address, but to prove it they'll need the cable modem physically used at that address. Otherwise the resident could destroy the modem or switch his with a neighbor's and claim it wasn't his modem that was the source of that activity.
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That's more a reflection of the (in)sanity of monetary awards in the U.S. legal system. Airlines and aircraft manufacturers in the U.S. typically settle for around $1 million per death. When I was younger, at this point I would go on a rant about how lawyers have mutated our legal system into a monstrosity whose primary purpose is to enrich themselves. But I'm past mid-life now and have given up trying to change it. Maybe I'll encourage my kids to become lawyers...
I tossed the numbers into a spreadsheet and figured out the median stats. Kinda sucks that each carrier wins one category: Carrier: download / upload / reliabiliy Verizon: 909 / 415 / 87% Sprint: 794 / 391 / 90% AT&T: 745 / 660 / 82% I started weighting it by population of the metro area, but they're missing several major population areas and their samples probably represent a few towers, not the entire metro area. So I realized it would be of dubious value. But it does give a boost to Verizon (due to their great NYC result), while AT&T plummets (again, due to their poor NYC result).
The thing is, unless they're rich, people don't buy a car based on their day-to-day routine. They buy a car based on how well it can handle all their driving needs. If a car that suits their day-to-day driving needs can't handle an annual 12 hour drive to grandma's for Thanksgiving, they're not going to buy a second car just for that one trip. They're going to eliminate the electric from consideration and buy one car that can handle both needs.
I've proposed that people rent a car for their once-a-year trips, and the common reply is that it'd be a "waste of money" when you "already own a car." Not to mention rental cars would be in short supply with jacked up prices around holidays like Thanksgiving. The fiscal benefit of an electric car for day-to-day travel would have to outweigh the cost of renting for that once-a-year trip. A decent rail system would also fill this need for intermediate trip lengths, but alas the U.S. has sacrificed its rail system for freeways. Plug-in hybrids are also a good solution, since they can fill up at a gas station if need be. But then you're carrying around all that weight of an ICU which is only used a few times a year.
Agreed. If law said the sentence for drunk driving were 20 years, and you wanted to challenge the constitutionality of the long sentence, by definition the defendant would have to have driven drunk. That said, it would be possible to get a more sympathetic defendant in this case - maybe someone who unwittingly fileshared songs. e.g. They installed Kazaa, tried it briefly, and stopped using it not realizing it stayed active in the background sharing their legit MP3 collection (ripped from CDs they owned).
Yeah, I can understand being awarded multiple times the value of the song. If she were penalized just 1x the cost of buying the songs (as some here have proposed), then you'd have nothing to lose by downloading. If you're caught, you only pay as much as if you'd bought it. If you're not caught, you get it for free. So clearly the penalty has to be more than the cost of just buying the songs.
But the award in this case works out to $1.9 mil / 24 songs = $79k per song. If you look at the RIAA's 2001 marketing stats, they made about $500,000 per new CD release. If you figure a CD averages 8 songs, that's only $60,000 in annual worldwide revenue per song in the first year as a new release. i.e. The award has her paying more per song than the average revenue the RIAA gets per new song in its first year. You don't even need to check if the award is "cruel or unusual punishment." You can tell it's way too high because it makes it a better business model to sue filesharers than to actually sell the songs on the market. The initial $220k award was possibly unconstitutional. The current $1.9 million award is insanity and would destroy capitalism if it stands.
Just fill a zip-lock bag with water and put it on top of the GPS antenna. When we were trying to use GPS for position fixes on our autonomous submarines, we found to our consternation that just a few millimeters of seawater on top of the antenna would prevent a signal lock.
This, I think, is the Achilles' heel of democracy. So much effort is put into disguising and sugar-coating things so the public will accept them, that you end up with a convoluted mess where it's nearly impossible to quickly and easily tell exactly what the cost of doing one thing vs. another thing are.
If it were just a gas tax, I could figure out how much gas my vehicle would use in a moth, and multiply that by the tax. But instead, I have to do that, multiply the miles driven by another tax, estimate what proportion of my driving will be on toll roads, add in some other tax based on the type of vehicle I have, etc., then add it all together to figure out how much it's gonna cost me.
I can vouch for this. My previous workplace was adjacent to a free-range cattle ranch. Occasionally someone would leave a gate open or the cattle would manage to knock part of a fence down, and the cattle would roam onto our property. The only way the rancher found out about it is because we called him to collect his cattle off our property. Which he did with some farm hands on horseback, complete with lassos and the whole cowboy shebang. We joked with him about keeping one of the cows for a barbecue next time, and I got the impression they lost cattle to theft, death, or predation all the time with no clue as to exactly what happened to the individual cow/steer. It was just a cost of doing business, like "shrinkage" (shoplifting) is in retail.
This really smells like an attempt by agribusiness to kill the free-range cattle industry, which is mostly mom and pop operations.
I've always felt the contract sites make with advertisers should stipulate that if the ad doesn't load within a reasonable time (say, 5 seconds), the script should time out displaying the ad, finish up, and allow the rest of the page to finish loading. That way the advertisers would have some incentive to upgrade their servers and connection. Personally I don't mind non-annoying ads (no flashing or cheesy animations). But I had to install an ad-blocker because too many of them were slowing down my browsing.
Law enforcement generally breaks down into two types - reactive and preventative enforcement. Reactive is pretty simple. Someone gets killed, law enforcement shows up, collects evidence, figures out whodunit, and (tries to) capture the killer. Preventative enforcement is harder and more intrusive on civil liberties because you have to apply it to everyone, not just suspects. Sobriety checks to catch drunk drivers before they kill anyone, laws to prevent convicted criminals or mentally unstable individuals from buying guns, getting your luggage x-rayed and searched at airports, etc.
The monkey wrench in the works is the suicide bomber mentality. Prior to 9/11, the assumption was that a terrorist had a sense of self-preservation. So we made sure to match up luggage with passengers on the plane, asked people if they'd received any last-minute gifts from acquaintances before boarding, etc. all based on the theory that the terrorist didn't himself want to die. But if the terrorist is willing to die in the act, then most of the detectable intermediate steps between planning a terrorist act and carrying it out disappear. So your preventative options are limited to catching the terrorist in the process of carrying it out (like the passengers and crew tackled Richard Reid, aka the shoe bomber, whom we now have to thank for having our shoes x-rayed at security). Or catching him while he's planning it with only information on his person.
Personally, the number of people killed by terrorism compared to, say, traffic accidents is so minuscule that I think the magnitude of our reaction to the problem is a waste of time and money. I suspect a lot of people in law enforcement feel the same way - they'd rather be on the street combating everyday crime, rather than the 1 in a million terrorist. But the general public seems to want that level of preventative enforcement against terrorism (or at least the majority haven't complained about it vocally). And I've yet to see an alternative method of preventative enforcement which avoids the possibility of infringing on the civil liberties of innocents.
I know the idea of an authority figure persecuting a former subordinate really riles up your sense of indignation, but you're making a "think of the children" argument. At a fundamental level, this is a case of an employee doing stuff on the web in (I presume) his free time which does not pertain in any way to his work. I haven't seen anyone claiming that he pretended to be the girl when submitting the rant to the newspaper, and the fact that the newspaper's editor was fired over this would seem to indicate the mis-attribution was the editor's fault. So it would appear the principal did nothing legally wrong.
In these cases, I would argue that one's legal online activities outside of your work hours should have no bearing on your employment. To argue otherwise would be accepting several employment practices I find dubious. e.g. employment contracts where the employer claims to own everything you create while employed even though they're only paying you for 8 hours/day, 5 days/week. Do I think what he did was despicable? Of course! But she was no longer a student, and thus not a subordinate, so there was no conflict with his position as a school employee.
Now that the story has become public, he is subject to the same whims of the public that the girl fell victim to. PTA members may question his mental fitness as head of the school, which could lead him to being fired. But that would be a firing due to pressure by the public. Not because what he did was a violation of his duties as a school employee.
66,000 tweets per minute would give you 1100 tweets per second. So likely someone misheard or misspoke 66,000 tweets per minute as 66,000 tweets per hour.
It's even simpler than that. The Internet is an information distribution medium. It's not a money-making medium, or a marketing data gathering medium, or a international press service medium. People use it because it's a quick and convenient way to get and spread information - quicker and more convenient than older media. If you try to make parts of it slower and less convenient, people will simply stop using those parts. When friends ask me a technical how-to question, and I find that a nice youtube video that I was using to answer it was pulled because of a C&D letter from the copyright holder, I don't write a letter to the copyright holder asking them for permission to use the video. I just find a different but available video that explains it, and give them a link to that.
The rate at which information flows from an Internet site is not determined by the site's owners; it's determined by the site's visitors. Even if you were to pass and somehow enforce a law prohibiting linking w/o the copyright holder's consent, all that would happen is that copyright holders who gave linking consent up-front would flourish, while copyright holders who insisted on reviewing any link requests would wither and die. Simply because I seriously doubt they could review all such requests before the story becomes yesterday's news. The newspapers would still die (at least the ones insisting on controlling who links to them), and we in the U.S. would just be saddled with an unwieldy and likely unenforceable law that would impede our ability to take advantage of the Internet to the extent that the rest of the free world does.
And what exactly makes you think the conservative forces in Iran distinguish between the support from "individual Americans", and U.S. government-sponsored activities? When the U.S. government detected intrusions into its military computer networks from IP addresses originating in China, the immediate suspicion was that it was promoted by the Chinese government. There's little to no attempt to distinguish between individual and government-sponsored activities. Whichever culprit is more politically convenient ends up bearing the blame.
Did they confiscate his earnings too? He supposedly made $3 million by spamming. If he's just being fined $1 million and gets to keep the other $2 million, I'd hardly call this effective even with the prison sentence.
I don't even understand why there are subsidized phones. If the cellular companies are worried about people being unable to pay for the cost of a phone up front, then give them a loan. They already run a credit check when you sign up for service. If the customer is credit-worthy, then offer them a 1-, 2-, or 3-year loan for the cost of the phone, complete with amortization tables. Then tack it onto their monthly bill. They already tack on a gazillion other fees and taxes so it's not like this would be difficult.
The way things are now is like having to sign an exclusive purchase contract with an oil company, agreeing to buy only their gasoline at an inflated price. In exchange, they give you a car at a steep discount. Want to switch gas stations? Sorry, can't do that. Already own your own car? Sorry, you still have to sign up with one oil company and buy their high-priced gas.
No, that's propaganda spread by the lady's law firm to convince the jury (and it worked, not only on them but on a lot of people on the Internet).
Bunn is the largest manufacturer of commercial coffee makers in the U.S. They supplied the coffee makers when I helped manage a restaurant. They probably supply the coffee makers for McDonalds. They are the industry standard. If you go to their web store and scroll down, you will clearly see:
Ideal coffee holding temperature: 175F to 185F (80C to 85C)
Most all the volatile aromatics in coffee have boiling points well below that of water and continue to evaporate from the surface until pressure in the serving container reaches equilibrium. A closed container can slow the process of evaporation.
Ideal coffee serving temperature: 155F to 175F (70C to 80C)
Many of the volatile aromatics in coffee have boiling points above 150F (65C). They simply are not perceived when coffee is served at lower temperatures.
To put $80,000 per song in perspective, look at the RIAA's 2001 marketing stats (last year I could find figures for new releases). On average each new CD title brought in about $500,000 in revenue. If you figure conservatively 8 songs per CD, that works out to $62,500 per song.
In other words, the jury awarded more averages damages per song than if she'd prevented all copies of the song from ever being sold.
They don't know. My warranty expired 2 years ago and I get the cards and calls too. They seem to be mailing/calling people based on year model of the car and normal manufacturer's warranty, then continuing the mailings for several more years in case you got an extended warranty. People figure, "wow, they know when my warranty is up, so they must have gotten some "inside" info from the manufacturer, so they must be legit." It's just a variant of the perfect prediction scam.
IIRC, the A330 is fly-by-wire and the joystick controllers have no force feedback. i.e. The pilots point their joystick in the direction they want, the computer takes a reading of the joystick deflection and tries its best to make it happen. It's not like the traditional stick and rudder where forces acting on the control surfaces get transmitted back to the stick/yoke in the pilot's hand.
That's a very static way to view the world. If getting paid means they can stay in business to save lives for tens or hundreds of years in the future, then heck yeah it's more important to safeguard that future by losing a day's worth of saved lives.
And the article says other hospitals nearby took the overflow patients, so no lives were compromised. If there had been some sort of natural disaster and each hospital had been flooded with patients, then I'm sure they would've chucked the paperwork to treat patients.
The Laffer curve is just the mean value theorem from calculus with the two endpoints set at zero. Anybody claiming it is "nothing but hot air and/or lies" is an idiot, in denial of 300+ years of mathematics which are the foundation of our modern technology-based civilization.
The only quibble about it is whether we are above or below the point at which cutting taxes would increase revenue. I think most people would agree that most of our tax rates are well below this point (and thus lowering those rates would in fact decrease revenue). However, bear in mind that when the Laffer curve was first proposed, the top income tax bracket in the U.S. was ~70%, arguably well above that point.
Perhaps a better way to explain it is that sometimes cutting taxes lowers revenue, sometimes it increases revenue. Anyone who claims that cutting taxes always raises revenue is full of nothing but hot air and lies. But so is anyone who claims that cutting taxes always decreases revenue.
The income figures put out by the U.S. Census would seem to contradict this. While the gains were concentrated in the upper 50%, the median did increase over that period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1967-2003.svg
The media industry (at least the ones most concerned about TPB) are not that big. The companies overall are huge, but they do lots of other things that aren't related to media. Using their own statistics, global movie box office sales were less than $30 billion. DVD sales (which they apparently no longer release) were about twice that when I crunched the numbers a few years ago. So overall the global U.S.-based movie industry is less than $100 billion. The music industry is even smaller. About 1/3rd the size of the movie industry. Interestingly, their annual report with global sales figures is no longer available on the RIAA web site.
The industries taken as a whole don't even make it into the top-10 of Fortune 500 companies. They are small industries which wield an enormously disproportionate amount of power with our lawmakers. Their biggest claim to fame is not the content they produce, but that their products are "enablers" - driving demand for other industries like DVD players, MP3 players, TVs, etc. Those industries are many times larger, which kinda makes you think that the emphasis should be on allowing everyone to make as much content as they can, not on allowing a few companies to continue to control the content market.
The USN recovered the cargo door which blew off of United flight 811 over the Pacific Ocean about 20 minutes into a flight out of Honolulu. If they have a radar track of it, they most likely can find and recover it. Course we probably won't hear anything about it for 50+ years.
Hate to post this under a joke, but wouldn't the police have to seize your cable modem in any case involving Internet activity? The only evidence they'll have prior to getting a warrant to search your property is a bunch of logs from the cable company. Those logs won't point to an address, they'll point to a MAC address (or whatever cable modems use). The cable company's records will say that MAC address belongs to a modem at such and such address, but to prove it they'll need the cable modem physically used at that address. Otherwise the resident could destroy the modem or switch his with a neighbor's and claim it wasn't his modem that was the source of that activity.