I don't think you understand what tabs are - most tabs include the chord progressions and the exact notes being played by the guitarist (or guitarists) in the background, the cool little riffs and sometimes entire solo's.
Then, strictly speaking, it is not a tab, it is a tab plus some more stuff. I don't know what guitartabs.com put in their tabs since I never visited the site, but if it includes the individual notes and/or lyrics then clearly it's a copyright violation.
If a given portion of the spectrum is not present in the "white light" (using that term very loosely here) backlight, no amount of filtering by the LCD screen overlay can put it back.
While this is true for LED lighting*, it does not hold for LCD backlights. LCDs work by filtering the backlight through red, green, and blue filters attached to each sub-pixel. These are then varied in transmissivity to generate the illusion of other colors. So the only requirement is that the LED produce white light which has sufficient amounts of red, green, and blue matching the frequency of the color filters. The rest of the spectrum does not matter, only what can get through the color filters.
*Spectrum for general lighting has to do with the reflectivity of objects. White light composed of pure red, blue, and green components can simulate the entire spectrum of colors in projection (within the gamut of the individual colors). Reflectivity however is dependent on the entire spectrum. A material may not just reflect light that our eyes are sensitive to, it may reflect an in-between color as well (sometimes even changing its frequency to a different color). This means that lights which appear the same color to our eyes can cause the same item to appear different colors.
But this is purely a reflectivity phenomenon. Projected images operate entirely by fooling our eyes into thinking they are seeing a certain colors. So the spectrum of the light does not matter so long as our red, green, and blue sensors receive sufficient input.
They're just chords. Not the song, not the individual notes, not the lyrics, not the melody, not the rhythm, just the chord sequences. It's up to the person playing the instrument to fill in the missing pieces to make it sound like the song they want. To carry the movie analogy, it's not even like excerpting parts of the movie and publishing it. It's like summarizing the movie and publishing that: Killer hunts girl, girl thinks boy is killer, boy saves girl from killer, boy and girl flee killer, boy dies trying to save girl from killer, girl kills killer. According to the reasoning that shut down tab sites, I have now just violated the copyright on Terminator by publishing the above summary.
Here's an example of how generic chord sequences are and how the same chords show up repeatedly in different music. If tabs (chord sequences) are protected under copyright, then story plots are copyrightable, the function of software code (not the exact implementation itself) is copyrightable, the compositional style of a photograph (e.g. upper torso portrait with 3/4 lighting) is copyrightable. You're talking about a massive unprecedented expansion of the definition of what is copyrightable. An expansion that pretty obviously would shut down the cultural exchange of ideas as we know it.
For the 5 years I was living alone with the dog, I lowered the lid after each toilet use to prevent the dog from drinking out of the bowl. I made sure to explain this rule and the rationale to everyone who visited.
All the women who used the toilet in those 5 years, every single one of them, left the lid up.
In comparison, about half the guys lowered the lid. Make of this what you will.
Just make it so you can make political donations only if you're able to vote for the guy. After all, the elected representatives are supposed to represent the voters, not campaign contributors who may be foreigners, non-voting corporations, felons (they aren't allowed to vote), etc. For local elections, it would also eliminate problems of getting support from outside your constituency.
I assume these timestamps have been used to prosecute people. "Your honor, analysis of the defendant's hard drive shows that he received the files on April 1, 2005 at 1:23:45 am. This is precisely 67 seconds after the notorious Hacker X sent an email containing equivalent files to his sidekick ScriptKiddie Y. Thus establishing that the defendant is indeed the ScriptKiddie Y referenced in all these IRC chat logs."
Which begs the question, do courts give as much credibility to this sort of thing when it's used to defend people. "Your honor, analysis of my hard drive will show that on June 15, 2004 at 10:30 pm, I, the sole resident of my apartment, was at my computer downloading and watching porn. Therefore I could not have been at the scene of the crime to commit the murders I am charged with."
I say that Fair Use lets me both time and place-shift.
You don't have to declare it, it's already been decided. The courts have already determined that Fair Use includes the right to timeshift. However, Special Relativity tells us that time and space are actually the same thing, and your perception of how the two relate to each other depends on your velocity. So timeshifting in one reference frame is placeshifting in another. Ergo if fair use grants us the right to timeshift, it also grants us the right to placeshift.;)
apply a very simple test: "What does the average murderer/rapist/pedophile get when convicted?" If the answer is less then the person in question I ask "What's worse, what this person did or what they did?"
You have to be careful because murder/rape/pedophilia is directed at one or a few victims. Spamming is a distributed crime. Each individual victim may have suffered less, but the aggregate damage may be much more.
Is there a difference between stealing $50,000 from a bank, and stealing 1 cent from each of 5 million of the bank's customers? It's the same amount of money, and the same people are going to absorb the cost. But for some reason people think "1 cent per person isn't that much" and decide to let the spammer off easy. Just because the crime is distributed across many victims doesn't make it any less of a crime.
Holly: Well, only if you're not busy. Would you mind erasing some of my memory banks? Lister: What for? Holly: Well, if you erase all the Agatha Christie novels from my memory bank, I can read 'em again tonight. Lister: How do I do it? Holly: Just type, "Holmem. Password override. The novels Christie, Agatha." Then press erase. Lister: I've done it. Holly: Done what? Lister: Erased Agatha Christie. Holly: Who's she, then? Lister: Holly, you just asked me to erase all Agatha Christie novels from your memory. Holly: Why should I do that? I've never heard of her. Lister: You've never heard of her because I've just erased her from your smegging memory. Holly: What'd you do that for? Lister: You asked me to! Holly: When? Lister: Just now! Holly: I don't remember this.
I do the different email addresses on signup thing too. I don't have an Ameritrade account, but the two email addresses that get the most spam are addresses that I gave to Godaddy and Microsoft. Together I'd say spam to those email addresses account for about 60% of my spam. If I delete addresses I use on mailing lists (where the recipients can give your email address to spammers if their computer gets infected by a virus that harvests their address book), Godaddy and Microsoft account for about 80% of my spam.
eBooks won't catch on until they lose the DRM, or come up with a DRM that's standard and compatible across most platforms and transparent to most users. Right now the publishing industry is absolutely mortified that what happend to the RIAA is going to happen to them, and they're keeping a tight stranglehold on nearly all books published in electronic format. As long as the DRM makes you lose your books if you upgrade or the eBook breaks down, people aren't going to want it. The publishers also need to come back down to reality and start pricing them for less than regular books, not more.
Long-term they will take over primarily because you can store an entire library in a unit the size of a single paperback. But the publishers need to accept progress, otherwise the market is going to be dominated by pirated books that have simply been scanned, OCR'ed, and shared via P2P.
I tried to present a broad picture of the facts behind the status of CO2 production, economic productivity, and population. I did not claim the U.S. was innocent of all evil, and pointed out that the U.S. could well stand to improve to European levels. I did this to substantiate my point that reforming the U.S. alone would not solve the world's CO2 problems. The fact that it appeared to defend the U.S. was entirely due to the post I was replying to being so one-sided.
You've gone right back to cherry picking just a few snippets of the broad range of facts I presented in order to argue that the U.S. is the worst. Policy decisions need to be made based on broad general facts and statistics. It cannot be based on a narrow hatred for a nation or nations.
e.g. Say the U.S. were to adopt nuclear power to the extent France has (78% of its electricity from nuclear). About 90% of the U.S. coal use is for electricity generation, as is about 25% of its natural gas use (source). (Petroleum is also burned for electricity, but accounts for less than 3% of electricity production in the U.S.).
Nuclear currently accounts for 21% of U.S. electricity generation. If that were increased to 78% with hydro and renewable electricity generation held steady, coal and gas consumption for electricity production would drop to just 17.6% of current levels. This would correspond to a 74% reduction in total coal use, and a 21% reduction in total gas use.
Factoring these reductions into U.S. CO2 production (same source as above), total emissions for the U.S. would drop from 5802 million metric tons to 3996 million metric tons. That's a 31% reduction in CO2 emissions without making a single change to how energy in the U.S. is consumed.
Trees are almost irrelevant to climate change. They're part of closed carbon cycle.
Trees are vital to climate change. The are the primary means by which CO2 is removed from the atmosphere (aside from oceanic sinks, which are believed to be full). They are only part of a closed carbon cycle if you burn them down and release their carbon into the atmosphere. Otherwise their carbon ends up in houses and furniture, and buried under the ground (where it can turn into oil and coal after a few million years). If you choose to define the carbon cycle as closed despite this, then all the fossil fuels we're burning right now are also a part of the closed cycle and hence irrelevant to climate change, because they originally came from trees millions of years ago which took that carbon out of the atmosphere.
Trees are the ultimate renewable resource because the more you harvest, the more area you have to replant them. It's not like, say, fish, where the more you harvest, the less there are to reproduce and replenish their stocks. The reason the world is losing forested area is because sustenance farmers are able to grow food and cash crops on cleared land, while harvesting trees is not as economically attractive. So they burn the trees down to clear land.
The real problem is the amount of fossil carbin the US has released (more than anyone else).
The U.S. only accounts for 24% of the world's carbon emissions. The U.S. also accounts for 28% of the world's economic production. In other words, the rest of the world is less efficient than the U.S. at producing value per ton of CO2 released. Europe is by far more efficient and the U.S. should try to learn from them, but these attempts to paint the U.S. as the sole bogeyman are horribly misguided. If the U.S. were to disappear overnight, by the time the world economy grew back to the level it's at today, there would be more CO2 emissions than before the U.S. disappeared!
Also, trying to pin blame on a country by country basis makes no sense (aside from a policy perspective) because each nation has a different size and different population. On a per capita basis (CO2 emissions per person), the U.S. is not at the top, and there are several developed nations who are right up there with the U.S.
Finally, in terms of forest and protected forest, the U.S. has far more than all of Europe combined, nearly 1.7x as much in terms of area, and more than 3x as much per capita. In the above hypothetical scenario where the U.S. disappeared overnight, 7.6% of the world's forests and 9.6% of the world's protected forests would disappear as well.
What's needed to get us out of this mess is a systemic plan which address all aspects of the problem, not trying to single out sole nations for blame. If you do that, as we found out with Kyoto, the nation singled out will simply choose not to play ball. The developed nations need to set and meet energy efficiency goals (the U.S., Canada, and Australia especially). They also need to invest R&D money in non-carbon based energy sources. Environmentalists in these countries need to accept that nuclear is a much, much better option than spewing out millions of tons of carbon and other pollutants by burning fossil fuels. Developing nations need to restrict behaviors which are cheap in labor but expensive in carbon emissions (e.g. slash and burn). They will need economic and organizational aid from the developed world to help them establish economies which are not based on these behaviors.
University students are adults. Why should Ohio University - or any other nearby entity with deep pockets - step in to help them?
The issue isn't whether or not the RIAA's allegations of wrongdoing are true. That is, we're not expecting the school to defend the students in the RIAA's lawsuits. The issue is the tactic of filing mass lawsuits against people predominantly unable to pay to defend themselves in court, thus forcing them to settle regardless of their guilt or innocence. People wish the schools would use their legal resources to fight that tactic. Demand more than just a notice of infringement; demand some sort of proof, confront the student about it, and turn the student's information over only s/he can't refute the charges somehow. Initially everyone had hoped that ISPs would do this, but they rolled over and decided to play along with the RIAA to avoid any additional expense on their part. One would hope for a more moral stance from schools.
Now, it could be the school researched the allegations, and decided 98% of the students were guilty as charged. In that case they'd probably be justified in going along with the RIAA's tactic. In most of these cases however, it seems like the ISP or school is just rolling over and choosing the option that costs them the least amount of money, their customers or students be damned.
6-bit is values 0 to 63. If you map these into 8-bit by adding two more zero bits at the end, you get values 0 to 252 in increments of 4 (0, 4, 8, 12,... , 248, 252). Dithering can only result in intermediate values, so 252 is the brightest a 6-bit panel can display. Values 253-255 have to be mapped to it. 253^3 = 16,194,277.
The non-flip Sanyo phones had a keyguard (as all non-flip phones do). However, someone at Sanyo decided that it would be bad if there was an emergency and the person who picked up the phone did not know how to disable the keyguard (maybe they're a kid or non-English speaker). They wouldn't be able to dial 911 on the phone because the keyguard would prevent them from dialing. So they thoughtfully allowed you to dial 911 through the keyguard.
Of course this meant that as the phone bounced around in your pocket or purse, it would hit random buttons. All of these would be blocked until a 9 was pressed. It would bounce around some more until a 1 was pressed. And so on for the final 1 and 'talk'. So basically the keyguard assured that pressing random keys would always result in a 911 call.
Real-estate is generally bought, developed, and sold at a profit. Net good happens there. Some real estate developers buy land they think will be profitable, and sell it months later once it is in demand. No net good, but the land usually flips within a reasonable amount of time and, hey, other landowners nearby are usually willing to sell.
Most really successful commercial real estate moguls I know don't sell their properties. They lease (rent) it out and make income off of it perpetually. It sucks, but isn't very different from what's going on here. In fact I've seen worse in real estate. I've seen contracts where the lessee develops the land, but ownership of the building(s) gets transferred to the land owner after a certain number of years.
I'm guessing all they typed in was "palmsprings" and their browser did the rest. This sounds like the perfect excuse for a BIND patch that will drop all queries that return the IP of a known typo-squatter, including Network Solutions.
I noticed this behavior in Firefox with v2.0, and that's what I thought was going on at first. A bit more investigation revealed that it is not appending.com to what you type. If you type in a word into the URL field in Firefox, it will go to the default search engine you've selected (usually Google), find the first hit on that search engine, and send you to that web site.
So essentially, Firefox is using the URL field as a search entry box for Google, and sending you to the first site that Google returns. You can try it yourself by typing in multiple words in the URL box and comparing to the same words on your preferred search engine. I've since started using this as a shortcut for some Google searches (it skips the search result page).
Why do I suspect that his business colleagues are using botnets to artificially inflate those pageviews? If one follows the money paid in the advertising--whose pockets are he picking?
The most lucrative sites are general names, not typosquats. You're probably correct that most people who make a typo just ignore the ads and type in the URL again. But a surprising number of people who are, say, visiting Palm Springs will just type www.palmsprings.com into their browser, bypassing search engines like Google (dunno if that's a real site, but my guess would be it almost certainly is). These people will click on the ads on that site because it's exactly what they're searching for. I suspect most of the revenue comes from these types of domains. The article does focus on typos (mainly typos in.com), but that's probably because that's where all the new domain acquisition business is. Nearly all the "good" domain names under.com were sold long ago.
And this isn't being pedantic - surely it's long established that "number of colours" refers to the number of possible colours an individual pixel can display, and not using tricks like dithering? Otherwise, back in the 80s/90s when computers only had 256 colours or less, why didn't we see manufacturers claiming they could actually display thousands of colours?
The dithering done on 6-bit LCD panels is in the time domain. A pixel will flicker between two different shades at a frequency high enough to be almost invisible, creating the illusion of a shade in between. (I say "almost" because some people can see the flickering, including me. It's easier to see if your eye is moving around the screen instead of staring at a point.) The 256-color displays of days gone by dithered in the spatial domain, so their dithering was always visible. The only way it created the illusion of continuity was if you sat far enough back that you couldn't see the individual pixels.
It's an interesting distinction that I'm not sure how it would hold up in court. I should point out however that many light sources we think of as continuous do the exact same thing to produce the illusion of continuous light output. Fluorescent lights, lights on some new cars, the backlights on many cell phones and PDAs, all of them flicker.
I'm curious, as I thought 24 bit displays had been standard on computers for well over a decade now - is it common for laptops to have an 18 bit display, or is it only Apple that have decided to take us back to the 1990s?
The vast majority of LCD panels are 6-bit, and use dithering to generate 16.2 million colors. True 8-bit panels are usually fairly expensive, and only used on high end LCDs designed for graphics work. The fact that you hadn't noticed this is a pretty good argument that this type of dithering isn't really false advertising.
It's not all one-sided. There are valid reason for subsidizing food. Most importantly, unlike other markets where you want the supply and demand curves to intersect, you don't want that with agriculture. You want to insure that your supply curve is higher than what's needed to meet demand. The reason is pretty simple - there's a lot of uncertainty in agriculture. One year you'll have a bumper crop. Next year, a cold spell may wipe out half the crop. If you lose half the crop, you don't want people starving because everyone is bidding up the price of the remaining crop up to the point where only the wealthy can afford it. The demand curve is not elastic like, say, game consoles. If game consoles cost too much, people stop buying them. If food costs too much, people still have to buy it to stay alive.
So you want to insure there's overproduction to take up the slack if there's a temporary shortfall in supply. But now that you've told all these farmers to overproduce, come harvest time there's a glut in the market. Too much supply means the price drops, often to the point where the farmers (or agribusiness) can't stay in business.
This leads to the second reason for subsidizing food production - to maintain long-term production capability. Farming is a relatively slow process compared to other businesses. It has a very long time constant, often exceeding billing cycles by an order of magnitude. This makes farmers (or agribusiness) very sensitive to fluctuations in price. Farmer Joe puts in a half year's work raising a crop. If the price drops for a few weeks when he has to sell, that doesn't affect him for just a few weeks. It affects him until next year's crop. The money he gets from that sale has to carry him through until next season (assuming a single crop). Otherwise he goes out of business. Since most crops are harvested around the same time, a short-term price drop can cause a large portion of the nation's food-producing capability to go belly up. Not a good thing.
So you need to insure overproduction, but at the same time maintain higher prices than free market economics would dictate. And finally you need to insure prices remain relatively stable. The solution? Subsidies. The government spends a little money to guarantee there's enough food for everyone to eat each year, and that production can remain steady year-to-year. If you can make back some of those subsidies by using the excess crop for other purposes (humanitarian aid to other countries, corn syrup, ethanol, etc), then all the better.
The question of how much to subsidize I leave as an exercise for the reader.
So on a strictly weight-for-weight basis, nuclear is over 22,300 times cleaner than coal per megawatt. The nuclear waste is also highly regulated with stringent disposal requirements (if our politicians will get off their duffs and decide on a place to put it). A large portion of the ash and sludge from a coal plant is simply disposed into the atmosphere or sent to landfills where it ends up in our lungs and our water.
Yes, yes, everyone wants near-zero emission renewable energy. But given that that is currently not cost-effective enough to compete with coal, nuclear is a tremendously cleaner stepping stone that's available here and now, while we do the R&D to get the renewable costs down to where they're competitive.
You're essentially saying that no matter how useful and successful your business model is, if it can in any way be used illegally, then the business model doesn't have a right to exist. That's what I've been trying to get at with the screwdriver analogy. The crime isn't that I sell screwdrivers to people, the crime is that some people use them to break into things. The crime isn't that roommates.com collects information from and resells it to other people, the crime is that some people use that information to discriminate.
Your reasoning would make illegal anything which could be used in an illegal manner.
f you forced everyone who entered your store to give their name, address, and a list of the valuables they kept in their car, and you passed that info out to anyone who bought a screwdriver from you, then no you shouldn't be insulated from the lawsuits.
But you see, the "product" that roommates.com was selling is that information itself. If they didn't collect some identifying information (age, gender, etc) from their customers, they would have nothing to sell, no customers, and no reason for existing. That information can be used both legally and illegally. Hence the screwdriver analogy.
Slashdot Mirror
*Spectrum for general lighting has to do with the reflectivity of objects. White light composed of pure red, blue, and green components can simulate the entire spectrum of colors in projection (within the gamut of the individual colors). Reflectivity however is dependent on the entire spectrum. A material may not just reflect light that our eyes are sensitive to, it may reflect an in-between color as well (sometimes even changing its frequency to a different color). This means that lights which appear the same color to our eyes can cause the same item to appear different colors. But this is purely a reflectivity phenomenon. Projected images operate entirely by fooling our eyes into thinking they are seeing a certain colors. So the spectrum of the light does not matter so long as our red, green, and blue sensors receive sufficient input.
Here's an example of how generic chord sequences are and how the same chords show up repeatedly in different music. If tabs (chord sequences) are protected under copyright, then story plots are copyrightable, the function of software code (not the exact implementation itself) is copyrightable, the compositional style of a photograph (e.g. upper torso portrait with 3/4 lighting) is copyrightable. You're talking about a massive unprecedented expansion of the definition of what is copyrightable. An expansion that pretty obviously would shut down the cultural exchange of ideas as we know it.
All the women who used the toilet in those 5 years, every single one of them, left the lid up.
In comparison, about half the guys lowered the lid. Make of this what you will.
Just make it so you can make political donations only if you're able to vote for the guy. After all, the elected representatives are supposed to represent the voters, not campaign contributors who may be foreigners, non-voting corporations, felons (they aren't allowed to vote), etc. For local elections, it would also eliminate problems of getting support from outside your constituency.
Which begs the question, do courts give as much credibility to this sort of thing when it's used to defend people. "Your honor, analysis of my hard drive will show that on June 15, 2004 at 10:30 pm, I, the sole resident of my apartment, was at my computer downloading and watching porn. Therefore I could not have been at the scene of the crime to commit the murders I am charged with."
Is there a difference between stealing $50,000 from a bank, and stealing 1 cent from each of 5 million of the bank's customers? It's the same amount of money, and the same people are going to absorb the cost. But for some reason people think "1 cent per person isn't that much" and decide to let the spammer off easy. Just because the crime is distributed across many victims doesn't make it any less of a crime.
Holly: Well, only if you're not busy. Would you mind erasing some of my memory banks?
Lister: What for?
Holly: Well, if you erase all the Agatha Christie novels from my memory bank, I can read 'em again tonight.
Lister: How do I do it?
Holly: Just type, "Holmem. Password override. The novels Christie, Agatha." Then press erase.
Lister: I've done it.
Holly: Done what?
Lister: Erased Agatha Christie.
Holly: Who's she, then?
Lister: Holly, you just asked me to erase all Agatha Christie novels from your memory.
Holly: Why should I do that? I've never heard of her.
Lister: You've never heard of her because I've just erased her from your smegging memory.
Holly: What'd you do that for?
Lister: You asked me to!
Holly: When?
Lister: Just now!
Holly: I don't remember this.
I do the different email addresses on signup thing too. I don't have an Ameritrade account, but the two email addresses that get the most spam are addresses that I gave to Godaddy and Microsoft. Together I'd say spam to those email addresses account for about 60% of my spam. If I delete addresses I use on mailing lists (where the recipients can give your email address to spammers if their computer gets infected by a virus that harvests their address book), Godaddy and Microsoft account for about 80% of my spam.
Long-term they will take over primarily because you can store an entire library in a unit the size of a single paperback. But the publishers need to accept progress, otherwise the market is going to be dominated by pirated books that have simply been scanned, OCR'ed, and shared via P2P.
You've gone right back to cherry picking just a few snippets of the broad range of facts I presented in order to argue that the U.S. is the worst. Policy decisions need to be made based on broad general facts and statistics. It cannot be based on a narrow hatred for a nation or nations.
e.g. Say the U.S. were to adopt nuclear power to the extent France has (78% of its electricity from nuclear). About 90% of the U.S. coal use is for electricity generation, as is about 25% of its natural gas use (source). (Petroleum is also burned for electricity, but accounts for less than 3% of electricity production in the U.S.).
Nuclear currently accounts for 21% of U.S. electricity generation. If that were increased to 78% with hydro and renewable electricity generation held steady, coal and gas consumption for electricity production would drop to just 17.6% of current levels. This would correspond to a 74% reduction in total coal use, and a 21% reduction in total gas use.
Factoring these reductions into U.S. CO2 production (same source as above), total emissions for the U.S. would drop from 5802 million metric tons to 3996 million metric tons. That's a 31% reduction in CO2 emissions without making a single change to how energy in the U.S. is consumed.
Trees are the ultimate renewable resource because the more you harvest, the more area you have to replant them. It's not like, say, fish, where the more you harvest, the less there are to reproduce and replenish their stocks. The reason the world is losing forested area is because sustenance farmers are able to grow food and cash crops on cleared land, while harvesting trees is not as economically attractive. So they burn the trees down to clear land.
The U.S. only accounts for 24% of the world's carbon emissions. The U.S. also accounts for 28% of the world's economic production. In other words, the rest of the world is less efficient than the U.S. at producing value per ton of CO2 released. Europe is by far more efficient and the U.S. should try to learn from them, but these attempts to paint the U.S. as the sole bogeyman are horribly misguided. If the U.S. were to disappear overnight, by the time the world economy grew back to the level it's at today, there would be more CO2 emissions than before the U.S. disappeared!Also, trying to pin blame on a country by country basis makes no sense (aside from a policy perspective) because each nation has a different size and different population. On a per capita basis (CO2 emissions per person), the U.S. is not at the top, and there are several developed nations who are right up there with the U.S.
Finally, in terms of forest and protected forest, the U.S. has far more than all of Europe combined, nearly 1.7x as much in terms of area, and more than 3x as much per capita. In the above hypothetical scenario where the U.S. disappeared overnight, 7.6% of the world's forests and 9.6% of the world's protected forests would disappear as well.
What's needed to get us out of this mess is a systemic plan which address all aspects of the problem, not trying to single out sole nations for blame. If you do that, as we found out with Kyoto, the nation singled out will simply choose not to play ball. The developed nations need to set and meet energy efficiency goals (the U.S., Canada, and Australia especially). They also need to invest R&D money in non-carbon based energy sources. Environmentalists in these countries need to accept that nuclear is a much, much better option than spewing out millions of tons of carbon and other pollutants by burning fossil fuels. Developing nations need to restrict behaviors which are cheap in labor but expensive in carbon emissions (e.g. slash and burn). They will need economic and organizational aid from the developed world to help them establish economies which are not based on these behaviors.
The issue isn't whether or not the RIAA's allegations of wrongdoing are true. That is, we're not expecting the school to defend the students in the RIAA's lawsuits. The issue is the tactic of filing mass lawsuits against people predominantly unable to pay to defend themselves in court, thus forcing them to settle regardless of their guilt or innocence. People wish the schools would use their legal resources to fight that tactic. Demand more than just a notice of infringement; demand some sort of proof, confront the student about it, and turn the student's information over only s/he can't refute the charges somehow. Initially everyone had hoped that ISPs would do this, but they rolled over and decided to play along with the RIAA to avoid any additional expense on their part. One would hope for a more moral stance from schools.
Now, it could be the school researched the allegations, and decided 98% of the students were guilty as charged. In that case they'd probably be justified in going along with the RIAA's tactic. In most of these cases however, it seems like the ISP or school is just rolling over and choosing the option that costs them the least amount of money, their customers or students be damned.
6-bit is values 0 to 63. If you map these into 8-bit by adding two more zero bits at the end, you get values 0 to 252 in increments of 4 (0, 4, 8, 12, ... , 248, 252). Dithering can only result in intermediate values, so 252 is the brightest a 6-bit panel can display. Values 253-255 have to be mapped to it. 253^3 = 16,194,277.
Of course this meant that as the phone bounced around in your pocket or purse, it would hit random buttons. All of these would be blocked until a 9 was pressed. It would bounce around some more until a 1 was pressed. And so on for the final 1 and 'talk'. So basically the keyguard assured that pressing random keys would always result in a 911 call.
So essentially, Firefox is using the URL field as a search entry box for Google, and sending you to the first site that Google returns. You can try it yourself by typing in multiple words in the URL box and comparing to the same words on your preferred search engine. I've since started using this as a shortcut for some Google searches (it skips the search result page).
The dithering done on 6-bit LCD panels is in the time domain. A pixel will flicker between two different shades at a frequency high enough to be almost invisible, creating the illusion of a shade in between. (I say "almost" because some people can see the flickering, including me. It's easier to see if your eye is moving around the screen instead of staring at a point.) The 256-color displays of days gone by dithered in the spatial domain, so their dithering was always visible. The only way it created the illusion of continuity was if you sat far enough back that you couldn't see the individual pixels.
It's an interesting distinction that I'm not sure how it would hold up in court. I should point out however that many light sources we think of as continuous do the exact same thing to produce the illusion of continuous light output. Fluorescent lights, lights on some new cars, the backlights on many cell phones and PDAs, all of them flicker.
The vast majority of LCD panels are 6-bit, and use dithering to generate 16.2 million colors. True 8-bit panels are usually fairly expensive, and only used on high end LCDs designed for graphics work. The fact that you hadn't noticed this is a pretty good argument that this type of dithering isn't really false advertising.
So you want to insure there's overproduction to take up the slack if there's a temporary shortfall in supply. But now that you've told all these farmers to overproduce, come harvest time there's a glut in the market. Too much supply means the price drops, often to the point where the farmers (or agribusiness) can't stay in business.
This leads to the second reason for subsidizing food production - to maintain long-term production capability. Farming is a relatively slow process compared to other businesses. It has a very long time constant, often exceeding billing cycles by an order of magnitude. This makes farmers (or agribusiness) very sensitive to fluctuations in price. Farmer Joe puts in a half year's work raising a crop. If the price drops for a few weeks when he has to sell, that doesn't affect him for just a few weeks. It affects him until next year's crop. The money he gets from that sale has to carry him through until next season (assuming a single crop). Otherwise he goes out of business. Since most crops are harvested around the same time, a short-term price drop can cause a large portion of the nation's food-producing capability to go belly up. Not a good thing.
So you need to insure overproduction, but at the same time maintain higher prices than free market economics would dictate. And finally you need to insure prices remain relatively stable. The solution? Subsidies. The government spends a little money to guarantee there's enough food for everyone to eat each year, and that production can remain steady year-to-year. If you can make back some of those subsidies by using the excess crop for other purposes (humanitarian aid to other countries, corn syrup, ethanol, etc), then all the better.
The question of how much to subsidize I leave as an exercise for the reader.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 1000 Megawatt coal plant produces 250,000 tons of ash and 486,000 tons of sludge in a year.
So on a strictly weight-for-weight basis, nuclear is over 22,300 times cleaner than coal per megawatt. The nuclear waste is also highly regulated with stringent disposal requirements (if our politicians will get off their duffs and decide on a place to put it). A large portion of the ash and sludge from a coal plant is simply disposed into the atmosphere or sent to landfills where it ends up in our lungs and our water.
Yes, yes, everyone wants near-zero emission renewable energy. But given that that is currently not cost-effective enough to compete with coal, nuclear is a tremendously cleaner stepping stone that's available here and now, while we do the R&D to get the renewable costs down to where they're competitive.
How do they determine that this is actually a translation? Presumably by having someone make an (illegal) translation and comparing the two?
Your reasoning would make illegal anything which could be used in an illegal manner.