My ISP has a cap, but their web site says they're working on a web page to let you monitor your monthly usage. The web site has said that for a year. I tried deliberately going slightly over the cap (my router monitors my usage), and they didn't say anything. I suspect it's just a ruse to get people to police themselves without any additional effort on their part than a web page slapped together in 5 minutes.
But he never said it was justified. Someone posting a followup mistakenly mischaracterized his response as justification (and somehow got modded 5 insightful for it). OP never said the crackdown was justified.
The OP and GP were debating a matter of degree of wrongness. The OP citing the fact that the country experienced greater wrongs in the past is sufficient to refute the GP's claim that we had in the present "almost hit rock bottom". I'm not sure how your "two wrongs don't make a right" got modded insightful, since the OP and GP had a disagreement over magnitude, not sign.
Katrina was category 3 when it made landfall. The reason it was so destructive was because it was a huge storm. Hurricane force winds 240 miles across, tropical storm force winds 440 miles across. Some of my European friends were criticizing the U.S. response as deplorable for a developed nation. Until I pointed out that if it had hit the UK, the hurricane force winds would've easily covered all of Wales. If it had hit Germany, the tropical storm force winds would've covered the entire country plus some of its neighbors.
Just saying, most Game Company EULAs actually state that you don't even get a service in return for your payments
Then the agreement is automatically invalid. All contracts have to have something called consideration. Basically, both sides have to get something of value out of the agreement. A contract in which only one side is getting value lacks consideration and is legally invalid.
You can cancel without penalty when this happens. A lot of people took advantage of it to get out of cell phone contracts back when cellular 911 service became mandated. The wireless carriers lobbied for and got the right to charge a fee for the 911 service. This fee was a change in the contract, so spades of people who'd been itching to get out of their contracts without paying the early termination fee simply said they didn't agree to the new fees. Since the carriers were required to provide 911 service and they wanted to charge the fee, they canceled the contract, thus nullifying the early termination fee.
I'm a U.S. citizen working in Canada right now. Canada and the U.S. have a tax treaty to recognize taxes taken out of wages in the other country. The U.S. tries to tax all of its citizens' income regardless of source, so if the country you work in does not have such a treaty you will end up being taxed by both countries. Even for Canada, it turns out the treaty doesn't cover certain things like investment income, so that could be double-taxed. Be sure to speak with a qualified tax attorney so you can avoid any pitfalls like this.
The problem with Mad Cow disease is that it is extremely rare. If you slaughter 35 million cows annually, and only 1 in 10,000,000 cows have the disease, then a 1% testing regime is essentially guaranteed to never find the problem. With the numbers given, the 1% testing regime has only a 3.4% chance of detecting a 1 in 10,000,000 problem. [...]
From everything I have read, there almost certainly was trace quantities of mad cow disease in the North American meat supply, and these trace quantities will be undetectable with current sampling methods.
If 1 in 10 million cows had BSE, using the above numbers the chance of detecting it in 1 year is 3.5%, in 10 years it's 30%, in 20 years it's 50%, in 40 years it's 76%. This is hardly "undetectable with current sampling methods".
And if the incident rate is so rare that it's 1 in 10 million, why are you even worried about it? Salmonella causes over 500 deaths a year in this country, yet fewer than 1 in 300 cattle and poultry carcasses are tested for it. If you're going to raise a fuss over it, apply the money and tests where it will do the most good, not where people show the most fear and hysteria.
'Add in salaries of lab technicians, the cost of grinding up and delivering cattle brain samples for testing, and the tab would be $30 to $50 per animal, industry experts say. The average U.S. cow slaughtered for food yields meat with a retail value of $1,636.
Now multiply that by every disease the USDA tests for. Testing for disease has to be done in proportion to the prevalence of the disease and the threat of death that it imposes. This is risk management, not risk elimination. If you try to eliminate risk, life becomes too expensive to live. Sure nobody wants their brain to waste away, but there are much more serious and deadlier risks out there that we'd be much better off spending our money on.
But I can tell from the mods I'm on the losing side of this. Once again, fear and hysteria trumps math and science.
It was just this same sound mathematical policy that led to the deaths of 107 people in Britain from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
No, it was failure to recognize the disease as a threat that lead to those people dying. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy and scrapie have been known about for centuries. But until the first C-J cases were traced, it was thought that those diseases couldn't be transmitted to humans.
Since the disease is extremely rare to begin with, testing samples don't really help you prevent the rare outbreak. Now, you might argue that there are cost benefit issues here, that a couple of hundred people who go mad and die in an agonizing fashion over several years doesn't justify testing every product sold, but others might disagree. I wonder if the US would block import of beef labelled as "tested for mad cow disease" as a threat to the market?
If the only disease we had to worry about were BSE, then you'd be right. Unfortunately there are thousands of diseases we have to test and monitor for. You can't test 100% of all food for all of them - it would be prohibitively expensive. So you have to resort to partial testing in proportion to the prevalence of the disease and the magnitude of its deleterious effect on humans. 100% safety is an unattainable goal, and failure to achieve it should never be assumed to be evidence of negligence or malfeasance.
No, it is an attempt to prevent misleading marketing from unnecessarily driving up the price of meat. About 35 million cows are slaughtered in the U.S. If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
There's a point beyond which testing leaves the realm of statistical cost-effectiveness. The only value of such testing is to trick a public which doesn't understand statistics into thinking they're getting some worthwhile value for the extra cost of that testing. Just because Japan and Korea have decided to cave and let misguided public sentiment trump sound mathematical policy is no reason for the U.S. to follow suit. If anything, I would rather we spend that extra money to teach people basic statistics as part of the required educational curriculum.
There are some 35 million cows slaughtered in the U.S. each year. Testing 1% of them gives a statistical margin of error of 0.17% at a 95% confidence interval for. Far, far in excess of the level of sensitivity needed to detect the 50% you claim. They're opposing expanded testing because a public that is uneducated about statistics will wrongly attribute value to the additional testing, forcing everyone to waste money doing additional tests that statistically are nearly worthless.
It's really ironic that the story was submitted by someone named "Anti-Globalism". The long-term solution to this is globalism. As wages around the world normalize, the difference between highest paid and lowest paid people in the world decreases, making this sort of thing economically unfeasible.
I really think we should change our votes to a Yes/No system instead of pick-a-candidate. That way you can register an opinion on each and every one of the candidates, and the one with the most Yes votes wins. No "throwing away" your vote on a third party candidate, no silliness like Nader siphoning off votes from Gore because their political stances were most similar.
The Senators represent the majority in your State because that's the way the system was designed. It's counterbalanced by your Representative in the House representing your district in upstate NY.
The OP was talking about the electoral college, where the State's electoral votes go to whomever the majority in your State wants for President. It is counterbalanced by nothing.
But partisan nutjobs tend to fall at both ends of the political spectrum, and on average cancel each other out. A group of people voting based on who looks better on TV are much more likely to vote for the same candidate.
Just spam news outlets with anonymous encrypted documents, and never give them the key. When someone tries to "prove" they did something by giving the key to an encrypted document, it will be assumed that they did the following:
1. Send two copies of encrypted documents to each media outlet, one claiming to have rigged the election for candidate A, the other for candidate B. 2. Wait until election results are tallied and candidate A is announced the winner. 3. Send media outlets the key for document saying you rigged the election for candidate A. Delete the other key.
The fact that the anonymous source and format of the two documents are different won't matter. It will be assumed that anyone trying to pull off this scam would deliberately try to make them look different, to make you think they're only sending one document. If they looked the same, it would be obvious that it was a scam.
If white balance were as simple as normalizing the three color histograms, every picture ever taken by every digital camera would have perfect color. Truth is, if the histograms for all three primary colors in a picture span the full 0-255 range, it's a pretty much a surefire sign that the color is incorrect. Cameras have a "neutral" objective view of colors. The only reason we need white balancing is because our brains don't work like that, and insist on fiddling with how we perceive colors depending on the ambient light, predominance of colors in the scene, and the color of known objects in the scene. Colors "as we see them" are very much an illusion.
You can't put a nuclear plant next to each village, but you can put a combination of windmills, geo-thermal, solar panels, and waste incinerators (with their heat used for both electricity generation and heating industrial or other buildings, rather than just for heating rivers) in or in the neighbourhood of places where the electricity is actually needed.
No you can't. All the renewables so far - wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal - are very sensitive to geographic location. Some places don't have sufficient wind, sun, rivers, and/or volcanic activity for the respective renewable to be economically viable at that location. For example, if you put windmills in places where it makes economic sense as the U.S. has been doing (PDF, page 55), then it ends up costing about the same as coal and nuclear. But if you start putting them everywhere you can because you want to be green like Europe does, they can end up costing 2x-4x as much per kWh as coal and nuclear.
The only renewable that doesn't suffer from this problem is hot dry rock geothermal, where you drill 3-10 km underground and tap the heat energy that's omnipresent at those depths. It's promising, but still in the early R&D phase.
Also, wind and solar are variable and unpredictable, and thus unsuitable for providing base load power. You'd need either hydro or geothermal to provide base load power, or massive, massive batteries/pumped reservoirs to even out the power generation from wind and solar.
But honestly, is there any point in signing a contract when one party retains all rights to completely change the contract without allowing you the ability to opt-out of the contract?
In the U.S., you always have the right to opt out of a contract revision. Usually the company will then terminate the contract, but sometimes they will let you continue under the old terms.
That's one of the tricks you can use to get out of early termination fees. Just because they change the terms of the contract doesn't mean you're obligated to abide by the new terms. If you're in a cell phone contract and the wireless company changes the terms of the contract in a manner in which you disagree with, you can tell them you don't agree to the changes. They then have to let you stay with the old contract terms, or they terminate the contract (thus releasing you from the obligation to pay the early termination fee since you didn't quit). Of course the phone company won't tell you this and I suspect they've managed to extract millions of dollars in early termination fees from former customers who didn't know better.
Why is the comparison invalid? You are free to install OS X on your own machine as long as you do not distribute the code! This is not because the license allows it, but because you are not commiting copyright infringement.
In this case PsyStar is both installing OS X AND distributing the copy they installed.
The doctrine of first sale comes into play here. Right now the courts have issued contradictory rulings on it. But if it's eventually decided that software is sold, not licensed, then PsyStar would be in the clear. They are simply reselling a copy of OS X which they legally bought and paid for.
Your interpretation falls under the alternative opinion that software is licensed, not sold. Under your interpretation, Microsoft can prohibit you from selling your unused copy of Windows, you can't sell your copy of Oblivion or Halo 3. Heck, even book, music, and movie publishers could claim they're simply licensing their product to you, so you can't resell it if you don't want it anymore.
Personally I wouldn't want to live in a world which works the way you want it to. IMHO if it sat in a box on a store shelf and I made a one-time payment for perpetual rights to use it, I've bought it. If I enter into a contractual agreement for recurring fees and my right to use it ends when I stop paying (e.g. World of Warcraft), then I've licensed it.
The man is paralyzed, not an amputee. His legs and muscles are perfectly functional, they just lack control. Instead of powering motors with batteries, the computer should be using his leg muscles as actuators.
And its converse: No profit without responsibility.
The latter also covers cases like Monsanto, which wants to profit from the wind blowing their GM seeds to other fields (sue the farmer for using the seeds without paying), but denies responsibility when those same seeds cause problems (contaminating the crops of organic farmers). If you want to be the beneficiary of a product or mechanism, they you must also be liable for any negative consequences of that product or mechanism.
I think that this is more or less the point. California has lost sight of 'risk management' in favor of 'risk avoidance'.
Just to be clear, the law requiring the signs was not passed by the California legislature. It was passed by popular referendum.
What california should do is set a standard - only the more dangerous cancer causing substances such as cigarettes and asbestos get the warning.
That's the way it used to be. But people kept saying the standards were too lax, or that a danger existed which wasn't yet covered by the standards and regulations. I like to think Prop 65 was a response to all those OMG! DMHO can kill you! scares. If everything had a label, then nobody could complain that something wasn't labeled, and we could just ignore those twits and get on with our lives.
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My ISP has a cap, but their web site says they're working on a web page to let you monitor your monthly usage. The web site has said that for a year. I tried deliberately going slightly over the cap (my router monitors my usage), and they didn't say anything. I suspect it's just a ruse to get people to police themselves without any additional effort on their part than a web page slapped together in 5 minutes.
But he never said it was justified. Someone posting a followup mistakenly mischaracterized his response as justification (and somehow got modded 5 insightful for it). OP never said the crackdown was justified.
The OP and GP were debating a matter of degree of wrongness. The OP citing the fact that the country experienced greater wrongs in the past is sufficient to refute the GP's claim that we had in the present "almost hit rock bottom". I'm not sure how your "two wrongs don't make a right" got modded insightful, since the OP and GP had a disagreement over magnitude, not sign.
Katrina was category 3 when it made landfall. The reason it was so destructive was because it was a huge storm. Hurricane force winds 240 miles across, tropical storm force winds 440 miles across. Some of my European friends were criticizing the U.S. response as deplorable for a developed nation. Until I pointed out that if it had hit the UK, the hurricane force winds would've easily covered all of Wales. If it had hit Germany, the tropical storm force winds would've covered the entire country plus some of its neighbors.
Then the agreement is automatically invalid. All contracts have to have something called consideration. Basically, both sides have to get something of value out of the agreement. A contract in which only one side is getting value lacks consideration and is legally invalid.
You can cancel without penalty when this happens. A lot of people took advantage of it to get out of cell phone contracts back when cellular 911 service became mandated. The wireless carriers lobbied for and got the right to charge a fee for the 911 service. This fee was a change in the contract, so spades of people who'd been itching to get out of their contracts without paying the early termination fee simply said they didn't agree to the new fees. Since the carriers were required to provide 911 service and they wanted to charge the fee, they canceled the contract, thus nullifying the early termination fee.
I'm a U.S. citizen working in Canada right now. Canada and the U.S. have a tax treaty to recognize taxes taken out of wages in the other country. The U.S. tries to tax all of its citizens' income regardless of source, so if the country you work in does not have such a treaty you will end up being taxed by both countries. Even for Canada, it turns out the treaty doesn't cover certain things like investment income, so that could be double-taxed. Be sure to speak with a qualified tax attorney so you can avoid any pitfalls like this.
If 1 in 10 million cows had BSE, using the above numbers the chance of detecting it in 1 year is 3.5%, in 10 years it's 30%, in 20 years it's 50%, in 40 years it's 76%. This is hardly "undetectable with current sampling methods".
And if the incident rate is so rare that it's 1 in 10 million, why are you even worried about it? Salmonella causes over 500 deaths a year in this country, yet fewer than 1 in 300 cattle and poultry carcasses are tested for it. If you're going to raise a fuss over it, apply the money and tests where it will do the most good, not where people show the most fear and hysteria.
Now multiply that by every disease the USDA tests for. Testing for disease has to be done in proportion to the prevalence of the disease and the threat of death that it imposes. This is risk management, not risk elimination. If you try to eliminate risk, life becomes too expensive to live. Sure nobody wants their brain to waste away, but there are much more serious and deadlier risks out there that we'd be much better off spending our money on.
But I can tell from the mods I'm on the losing side of this. Once again, fear and hysteria trumps math and science.
No, it was failure to recognize the disease as a threat that lead to those people dying. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy and scrapie have been known about for centuries. But until the first C-J cases were traced, it was thought that those diseases couldn't be transmitted to humans.
If the only disease we had to worry about were BSE, then you'd be right. Unfortunately there are thousands of diseases we have to test and monitor for. You can't test 100% of all food for all of them - it would be prohibitively expensive. So you have to resort to partial testing in proportion to the prevalence of the disease and the magnitude of its deleterious effect on humans. 100% safety is an unattainable goal, and failure to achieve it should never be assumed to be evidence of negligence or malfeasance.
No, it is an attempt to prevent misleading marketing from unnecessarily driving up the price of meat. About 35 million cows are slaughtered in the U.S. If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
There's a point beyond which testing leaves the realm of statistical cost-effectiveness. The only value of such testing is to trick a public which doesn't understand statistics into thinking they're getting some worthwhile value for the extra cost of that testing. Just because Japan and Korea have decided to cave and let misguided public sentiment trump sound mathematical policy is no reason for the U.S. to follow suit. If anything, I would rather we spend that extra money to teach people basic statistics as part of the required educational curriculum.
There are some 35 million cows slaughtered in the U.S. each year. Testing 1% of them gives a statistical margin of error of 0.17% at a 95% confidence interval for. Far, far in excess of the level of sensitivity needed to detect the 50% you claim. They're opposing expanded testing because a public that is uneducated about statistics will wrongly attribute value to the additional testing, forcing everyone to waste money doing additional tests that statistically are nearly worthless.
It's really ironic that the story was submitted by someone named "Anti-Globalism". The long-term solution to this is globalism. As wages around the world normalize, the difference between highest paid and lowest paid people in the world decreases, making this sort of thing economically unfeasible.
I really think we should change our votes to a Yes/No system instead of pick-a-candidate. That way you can register an opinion on each and every one of the candidates, and the one with the most Yes votes wins. No "throwing away" your vote on a third party candidate, no silliness like Nader siphoning off votes from Gore because their political stances were most similar.
The Senators represent the majority in your State because that's the way the system was designed. It's counterbalanced by your Representative in the House representing your district in upstate NY.
The OP was talking about the electoral college, where the State's electoral votes go to whomever the majority in your State wants for President. It is counterbalanced by nothing.
But partisan nutjobs tend to fall at both ends of the political spectrum, and on average cancel each other out. A group of people voting based on who looks better on TV are much more likely to vote for the same candidate.
Just spam news outlets with anonymous encrypted documents, and never give them the key. When someone tries to "prove" they did something by giving the key to an encrypted document, it will be assumed that they did the following:
1. Send two copies of encrypted documents to each media outlet, one claiming to have rigged the election for candidate A, the other for candidate B.
2. Wait until election results are tallied and candidate A is announced the winner.
3. Send media outlets the key for document saying you rigged the election for candidate A. Delete the other key.
The fact that the anonymous source and format of the two documents are different won't matter. It will be assumed that anyone trying to pull off this scam would deliberately try to make them look different, to make you think they're only sending one document. If they looked the same, it would be obvious that it was a scam.
If white balance were as simple as normalizing the three color histograms, every picture ever taken by every digital camera would have perfect color. Truth is, if the histograms for all three primary colors in a picture span the full 0-255 range, it's a pretty much a surefire sign that the color is incorrect. Cameras have a "neutral" objective view of colors. The only reason we need white balancing is because our brains don't work like that, and insist on fiddling with how we perceive colors depending on the ambient light, predominance of colors in the scene, and the color of known objects in the scene. Colors "as we see them" are very much an illusion.
No you can't. All the renewables so far - wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal - are very sensitive to geographic location. Some places don't have sufficient wind, sun, rivers, and/or volcanic activity for the respective renewable to be economically viable at that location. For example, if you put windmills in places where it makes economic sense as the U.S. has been doing (PDF, page 55), then it ends up costing about the same as coal and nuclear. But if you start putting them everywhere you can because you want to be green like Europe does, they can end up costing 2x-4x as much per kWh as coal and nuclear.
The only renewable that doesn't suffer from this problem is hot dry rock geothermal, where you drill 3-10 km underground and tap the heat energy that's omnipresent at those depths. It's promising, but still in the early R&D phase.
Also, wind and solar are variable and unpredictable, and thus unsuitable for providing base load power. You'd need either hydro or geothermal to provide base load power, or massive, massive batteries/pumped reservoirs to even out the power generation from wind and solar.
In the U.S., you always have the right to opt out of a contract revision. Usually the company will then terminate the contract, but sometimes they will let you continue under the old terms.
That's one of the tricks you can use to get out of early termination fees. Just because they change the terms of the contract doesn't mean you're obligated to abide by the new terms. If you're in a cell phone contract and the wireless company changes the terms of the contract in a manner in which you disagree with, you can tell them you don't agree to the changes. They then have to let you stay with the old contract terms, or they terminate the contract (thus releasing you from the obligation to pay the early termination fee since you didn't quit). Of course the phone company won't tell you this and I suspect they've managed to extract millions of dollars in early termination fees from former customers who didn't know better.
The doctrine of first sale comes into play here. Right now the courts have issued contradictory rulings on it. But if it's eventually decided that software is sold, not licensed, then PsyStar would be in the clear. They are simply reselling a copy of OS X which they legally bought and paid for.
Your interpretation falls under the alternative opinion that software is licensed, not sold. Under your interpretation, Microsoft can prohibit you from selling your unused copy of Windows, you can't sell your copy of Oblivion or Halo 3. Heck, even book, music, and movie publishers could claim they're simply licensing their product to you, so you can't resell it if you don't want it anymore.
Personally I wouldn't want to live in a world which works the way you want it to. IMHO if it sat in a box on a store shelf and I made a one-time payment for perpetual rights to use it, I've bought it. If I enter into a contractual agreement for recurring fees and my right to use it ends when I stop paying (e.g. World of Warcraft), then I've licensed it.
The man is paralyzed, not an amputee. His legs and muscles are perfectly functional, they just lack control. Instead of powering motors with batteries, the computer should be using his leg muscles as actuators.
No taxation without representation.
And its converse: No profit without responsibility.
The latter also covers cases like Monsanto, which wants to profit from the wind blowing their GM seeds to other fields (sue the farmer for using the seeds without paying), but denies responsibility when those same seeds cause problems (contaminating the crops of organic farmers). If you want to be the beneficiary of a product or mechanism, they you must also be liable for any negative consequences of that product or mechanism.
Just to be clear, the law requiring the signs was not passed by the California legislature. It was passed by popular referendum.
That's the way it used to be. But people kept saying the standards were too lax, or that a danger existed which wasn't yet covered by the standards and regulations. I like to think Prop 65 was a response to all those OMG! DMHO can kill you! scares. If everything had a label, then nobody could complain that something wasn't labeled, and we could just ignore those twits and get on with our lives.
I've always wondered why the signs aren't everywhere outside too, since sunlight is known to cause cancer.