So, when the new version comes out, your old version suddenly becomes unwatchable? Seems to be that whatever content you had is still there.
And that right there is the problem. When you buy an improved DVD, you're double-paying. The original DVD purchase gets you a license to view the original movie any time you want. The new DVD purchase gets you a license to view the original movie + extended bits any time you want. So now you have two licenses to watch the original movie. You've double-paid.
Software companies get around this problem by offering discounted upgrade prices for current owners. You pay retail to buy the product, then you pay the upgrade fee to buy just the improved bits. The Entertainment Industry on the other hand seems to believe the standard model should be for you to double-pay.
Imagine the research and the discoveries we could do if there were no wars. If only a third or fourth of the DoD budget was given to scientists
If a nation progresses ahead of its neighbors scientifically or economically but invests nothing in its military, that nation will promptly be attacked, invaded, and conquered by a neighboring country. The key to surviving is to spending enough on the military so that it is more expensive for another country to successfully attack you than to conduct the scientific research and economic development on their own.
The PDF shows the discretionary budget - the part which has to be allocated each year by Congress. Social security, medicare, and medicaid are funded through their own taxes, so the PDF leaves them off. If it had included them, they would be the largest components of Federal spending ($798 billion in 2001, 48% of all federal revenue); and the Department of Health and Human Services would be the most funded department.
Which view you choose to take is semantics. Personally, I define "Federal spending" as "how do they spend the money they take from me and my employer." So I would include SS and medical programs in my view of the Federal budget. Some people like to argue that SS and medical programs give money directly back to citizens. But then you open up all sorts of arguments about direct economic effects and indirect economic effects. It's really not worth arguing about since it's highly unlikely said argument will change anyone's minds. The numbers are all there once you add the SS, medicare, and medicaid figures. Just interpret them as you please.
I think the problem here is that the company is permenantly keeping it, and I'd be pretty smarted about that as well, but then on the flip side of the coin for the company and the school, the more copies they have, the more likely (in their view) it is that they will catch those who for example, are using their older brothers essays to go through or using work taken from old pupils.
I call it NotOriginalMusic.com. Listeners will send me copies of any music they purchase. My sophisticated software will compare samples of each submitted song to all other submitted songs. It will detect incidents of unauthorized sampling, mixing, or outright duplication and inform the submitter, who can then return the CD so their money will not be supporting artists who steal others' work. My collection^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^bThe database will reside on my media player PC and mp3 player.
Early planes probably used a normal radar where the antenna had to physically move to redirect the signal. That meant you could only point it in one direction at a time, and it took some time to point it somewhere else. One radar, one target.
Later planes probably use a phased array radar which has no moving parts. It varies the phase of the outgoing signals in each mini-antenna in the array to determine which direction the signal fires out from the overall array. No moving parts so it can track and be redirected instantly. I suspect the F-14 was one of the first planes with a phased array radar (which would've been a rather impressive feat in the 1970s with nowhere near the computing power we have today).
In a paper titled "The Melting of Floating Ice will Raise the Ocean Level" submitted to Geophysical Journal International, Noerdlinger demonstrates that melt water from sea ice and floating ice shelves could add 2.6% more water to the ocean than the water displaced by the ice, or the equivalent of approximately 4 centimeters (1.57 inches) of sea-level rise.
So if all floating sea ice melted sea level would increase just 4 cm. In contrast, if the glaciers in Greenland melted (which you would think would have to happen if all floating sea ice melted), sea level would increase by an estimated 6.5 meters. Losing the Antarctic ice masses (which again would have to happen for all floating sea ice to melt) would increase sea levels by nearly 75 meters. The 4 cm contribution you point out is completely negligible except from an academic standpoint.
Page 64 shows the average cost of premium unleaded in various countries. "Normal sales price" (including cost of oil, processing, industry margin, and distribution) comes to just 44 cents per liter. The rest is taxes. Just eyballing the distribution, you can see the U.S. falls towards the lower end of the middle third. On the other hand, countries like Austria, Belgium, Sweden, the UK, and Netherlands are clearly at the extreme high end.
Page 78 lists fuel taxes as % of state revenue. The U.S. gets 12% of its revenue from fuel taxes. This is on par with the revenue of European states with high taxes (probably because their overall taxation rate is higher). U.S. tax revenue in 2005 was $2.15 trillion. 12% of that is $258 billion. This is on the order of the few federal figures I was able to find ($140 billion) plus state taxes. Greenpeace estimates the oil industry receives only $15-$35 billion in subsidies per year. In other words, the taxes are much more than the subsidies. Note that even the motor vehicle fuel taxes imposed by the states, not the federal government, exceeds the high end of Greenpeace's estimate.
$6/gal is not the normal or even market price for gasoline. You could argue the U.S. is slightly subsidizing gasoline prices (since it falls at the lower end of the middle third). But to argue that $6/gal is the "actual cost" is to argue that every country in the world is subsidizing gasoline except those in the EU with high fuel taxes.
Our dependence on oil is bad enough as it is. There's plenty to argue against it without makign stuff up. If you bring bogus figures to the table, it just makes it easier for the nay-sayers to discredit everyone advocating conservation and minimizing environmental impact.
If an ISP wants to sell a 3 Mbps service but wants to oversubscribe it by 10x, that's fine. But then they should advertise it as 3 Mbps at 10% saturation. Instead they advertise and sell it as 3 Mbps, then use secret criteria to determine who they try to kick off their service for "overusing" it. Lately they've started adding (very, very) fine print stating you're not supposed to use all that bandwidth 24/7. But the whole thing would sit better with the public if they were just up-front about it.
Serious question - was telling my wife about these, and she mentioned how they still hum (which I'm sensitive to), they cause/worsen her migraines, and that some people (not us) are sensitive to flicker.
Fluorescents only light up when the voltage driving them exceeds a certain level. AC current means a large portion of the time the voltage is below that level. This is what causes fluorescent lights to flicker. To keep the voltage above this threshold for a longer period of time, they use ballasts to alter the AC sine wave. The old fluorescents used magnetic ballasts. These were what caused the hum and flicker at 60 or 120 Hz.
Compact fluorescents use an electronic ballast (the magnetic ballasts are too big to let you screw them into a single lightbulb socket anyway). These operate at around 30-40 kHz. So yes they still do flicker and still do hum, but at around 30-40 kHz. Since the threshold of human hearing is around 22 kHz for young people, and the threshold for human peripheral vision is about 60-100 Hz, neither hum nor flicker are a problem with CFLs if you're human.
1) People are stupid. They look at the immediate up-front costs when making purchasing decisions (cost of acquisition, or CoA), rather than the long-term costs of operating the item through its lifetime (total cost of ownership, or TCO).
2) Insurance (or lack of). A printer that costs $100-$300 is usually below most people's threshold to purchase insurance, but above their threshold to purchase a replacement should it break down (i.e. they'll try to get it fixed). A business operates with a larger budget and thus can afford to amortize the cost of failed printers over the purchase of new ones. A household often cannot, so the printer manufacturers are actually helping them out here by pricing the printers at $20-$50. That drops the price down to where a household can easily absorb the cost of a failed unit. (The cost of failed units is amortized over all the units and ink the manufacturer sells).
It's because it doesn't change the fact that religion has hitherto suppressed scientific research. The time and money that has been spent on bickering over its morality could have been spent on research, and we could have been far more advanced in medical technology by now.
The joke about prostitution is relevant here. A man asks a woman if she'd sleep with him for $1 million dollars. She agrees. He then asks if she'd sleep with him for $100. She says she's not that type of woman. He says they've already established that she is that type of woman, and he's just negotiating the price.
You seem to be arguing that the "bickering" over this issue was wasted effort because it was based on religion and morality; that science should be unimpeded by those two. If you hold to that principle, then scientific research should always be allowed regardless of the moral issues involved. Unfortunately, in doing so you've legitimized the Nazi medical experimentation on human subjects.
Once you agree that morality has to play some role in determining what science is and isn't allowed, all that's left is negotiating as to what degree morality should overule science. That was the argument that played out over the stem cell issue. Perhaps it was not decided as we would've liked, or was decided unfairly. But it needed to be negotiated and decided, and the time and money spent "bickering" over it most definitely was not wasted. To not have gone through the process would've meant giving up what sets us apart from animals.
Clients with money who say "just do it right and install what you think it needs" are treasured rare jewels we bend over backwards to please. They get quality work at reasonable rates. The cheapskates get half-assed work with substandard materials and complain endlessly about how good workmanship in this country has declined. To them I say "you get what you PAY for, you fucking tightwads!"
You're a seller, and apparently an honest one. You only see half the business interactions: cheap buyers with honest sellers, and generous buyers with honest sellers.
You don't see the interactions with dishonest sellers. Any company which says "just do it right and install what you think it needs" to every vendor will be out of business in a year. There are dishonest vendors out there who will rape you if you give them a blank check like that.
The key is to be thrifty with your money when seeking out vendors, then when you find one that you know is honest and does good work, be generous with it. Of course there are always tightwads who will never be anything but tightwads. But if you're seeing a disproportionate share of them, you should probably raise your prices and work harder to convince clients that you're honest and do good work for their money.
In the town I grew up in merely having a young males car parked outside a young females house while he goes and visits another young male across the street will spawn all kinds of rumors and anger.
Mildred, the church gossip, and self-appointed monitor of the church's morals, kept sticking her nose into other people's business. Several members did not approve of her extra-curricular activities, but feared her enough to maintain their silence.
She made a mistake, however, when she accused George, a new member, of being an alcoholic after she saw his old pickup parked in front of the town's only bar one afternoon.
She emphatically told George and several others that everyone seeing it there would know what he was doing. George, a man of few words, stared at her for a moment and just turned and walked away. He didn't explain, defend, or deny. He said nothing.
Later that evening, George quietly parked his pickup in front of Mildred's house... and left it there all night.
That would be a valid argument for not deleting a hard drive that had belonged to Stephen Hawking.
No, it would be like throwing away your copy of Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" because your copy is dog-eared and you can always order another from Amazon. Likely at the time there were mutliple copies of Archimedes' work around, and this one was considered unimportant for that reason (the parchment was literally more valuable than the information it contained).
What makes it important to us is that it happens to be the only copy which survived. The monk at the time had no way of knowing that his copy would be the only one which survived. Same reason there are only about a dozen Honus Wagner baseball cards in good condition. Nobody at the time knew that baseball cards would become a multi-million dollar collectibles industry, and that this particular card would be so valuable.
When you can't strike at a power, you strike at a perceived symbol of that power.
Presumably the choice of symbol had a way whole lot to do with whose website they could crack.
More likely a bunch of bored teens out of school figured out a way to hack a low-security or no-security web site, realized they could get in trouble for doing something illegal, and latched on to the foremost political event in the news to justify their actions to themselves and to give their dirty deed a thin veneer of legitimacy.
Or maybe it's actually a well-funded government agency, and they defaced the main page with something making it look like a two-bit hacker did it, in order to deflect attention from a more thorough root job giving access to higher-security NASA computers.
The rovers are designed to move, so with dust devils cleaning their solar panels I suspect they'll eventually die from mechanical breakdowns, not due to lack of power. The Viking landers weren't designed to move around so were much less prone to mechanical breakdown.
RTGs really make more sense for missions where you're reasonably sure the hardware will last 10+ years and solar panels are not an option.
All of those dollars the BSA is claiming as economic losses are actually being spent elsewhere. It's not a situation of money that should be out working loafing safely in a shoebox. Would we all reap more economic benefit from shifting money away from the other things into the software industry?
Indeed. The entire principle behind trade is that the amount of goods in the system remains the same after each trade, but the value of those goods increases due to their redistribution. e.g. Chicken farmer has more eggs than he knows what to do with, cow farmer has more milk than he knows what to do with. They both decide to trade some eggs for milk. Net result is that although the total amount of milk and eggs remains the same, their value to the two farmers has increased due to the trade. Those two dozen eggs were worth more to the cow farmer than two liters of milk. Those two liters of milk were worth more to the chicken farmer than those two dozen eggs.
In the same way, if the theory that (some) software is overpriced is correct, then if all this pirated software were actually bought, the value of the system would actually decrease. In other words, this is a pretty good argument that if the "lost" revenue the BSA is crowing about were recouped, it could actually harm the economy.
I've never actually gotten into anything that looked like an account site. Once you provide the username/password, they are done with you and the phish ends there.
No, the phish ends when they empty your bank account. If it doesn't look like the real account site or redirect to the real account, that tips off the user that there's fraud going on. Then you're likely to login to the real site and change your passwords. The better (worse?) phishing scams will redirect you so as not to arouse your suspicion.
For example, more than 60% of Fox News listeners thought the US found WMD's in Iraq, less than 20% of NPR's listeners thought the same. Since Washington has admitted that no WMDs were found, which news organization did a better job of informing its listeners?
That statement is flawed in that it jumps to the conclusion that correlation implies causation. (The actual study was pretty clear in stating it only found correlation, but of course all the left-wingers went nuts over it mistakenly jumping to the conclusion that it meant causation.)
If you were to ask the Fox and NPR audience if they believed it had been scientifically proven that man is causing global warming, you'd probably find that the Fox viewers are "better informed." It hasn't been scientifically proven that man is causing global warming, but a greater percentage of the NPR audience probably believes it because it's dear to them and their threshold for belief on it is lower. In other words, it's just a correlation due to the political leanings of the two audiences.
If you select a fact on a topic that's widely liked or disliked by the groups, you're going to come up with a bias independent of the quality of the news service. Therefore to test the quality of news services, you need to select facts that are neutral or equally liked to disliked by both audiences.
People starving in Africa don't need laptops, they need basic infrastructure like clean water.
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.
Imagine you were stranded on a desert island. No idea how to build a fire, no idea how to make potable water, no idea how to build a trap, no idea what plants were edible. How well could you survive? Now imagine you had a survival manual. How much better do you think you could survive?
The idea behind the laptop is to help educate the population so they can work on building their own infrastructure. Your idea of building their infrastructure for them is the flawed reasoning behind most current forms of welfare. If you simply give things to people, there is no incentive for them to improve their own condition. You are handing them freebies, and if they improve their own condition you will take the freebies away. What the hell kind of incentive is that? c.f. ST:TOS A Taste of Armageddon. If you take away all the bad things about being in poverty, there remains no incentive to rise out of poverty.
The key to eliminating poverty is to give people the information and tools to climb out of it on their own. With information, you've given them the tools to get out of poverty, but they themselves have to make the effort to utilize those tools. Doing it this way, they don't feel beholden to foreign powers or grow dependent on foreign aid, and you aren't stuck babysitting a perpetual 3rd world nation.
What a useless, bullshit comparison of military spending.
Useless is it? Then I take it you also think Bill Gates is the most generous man on earth because he's donated billions of dollars? And that you're evil if you spend thousands of dollars on a new computer when there are people starving in the world and just pennies a day could feed them?
Any comparison of expenditure between nations with different standards of living has to be normalized to that standard of living and population. Otherwise you get ridiculous conclusions such as: "The US has no poverty because the World Bank's definition of international poverty is US$1 to US$2/day, and even the lowest US panhandler makes at least 10x that."
Even looking at the nationmaster link you gave, the US with about 295 million people spends $277 billion on their military. France with 60 million people spends $46 billion on their military. Factor in that the US has a 20% higher per capita income and there just isn't much difference in the spending. In other words, if France had the population of the US and its standard of living were as high, it would be spending almost exactly as much as the US is on the military.
The GDP is a good ballpark measure for aggregate population and standard of living. Americans just spend more in raw dollars on everything, not just the military because (1) they have a lot more money, (2) things cost a lot more in the US, and (3) The US has a lot more people than most other countries. As a percentage of its wealth, the amount the US spends on the military is not that far out of line with other first-world nations.
not to mention when compared to the rest of the world.
The US is actually only slightly above average in military spending. The only reason its spending in $ is so high is because its GDP is so huge. Once you normalize it to GDP, you can see that many other countries actually spend more than the US. China and most of the middle eastern countries actually spend significantly more, and "peace-loving" France spends just slightly less than the US.
It's the same argument used against the US when funding the UN. Countries are supposed to fund the UN in proportion to the GDP. "You have more money so you can pay more." Yet for some reason the same reasoning seems to escape people when it comes to military spending. You can't have it both ways. (Note: The US has been successful in trying to reduce its share of UN funding; partially understandable since GDP doesn't take into account taxation rate, so while US GDP is much bigger, the US govt gets to use less of it in its discretionary budget than socialist nations.)
I'm not sure that qualifies as abuse of the act. An organized group of people (Operation Rescue) attempting to extort legal businesses (abortion clinics) into either changing or closing entirely through threats (see what is on some of their websites), intimidation (in-your-face confrontations directly in front of clinics), and violence (bombings and beatings tacitly accepted as part of the struggle)
A good way to determine if your argument is logically sound is to replace the subject with something you personally feel differently about. Let's try that, switching anti-abortion with, say, environmentalism:
"I'm not sure that qualifies as abuse of the act. An organized group of people (Greenpeace) attempting to extort legal businesses (oil companies) into either changing or closing entirely through threats (see what is on some of their websites), intimidation (in-your-face confrontations directly in front of oil refineries), and violence (bombings and beatings tacitly accepted as part of the struggle),"
Or entertainment:
"I'm not sure that qualifies as abuse of the act. An organized group of people (slashdot) attempting to extort legal businesses (record companies) into either changing or closing entirely through threats (see what is on some of their websites), intimidation (in-your-face confrontations directly in front of court houses), and violence (bombings and beatings tacitly accepted as part of the struggle),"
Aside from the violence bit in the latter, I'd say this fails the test pretty miserably.
simply because their view isn't your view (First Amendment issue of everyone, including clinics have rights to free speech and association and freedom from religion)...
Companies, including clinics, don't have First Amendment rights (aside from a limited subset given to "artificial persons"). One cannot on the one hand declare that corporations are evil and aren't entitled to any of the protections provided to people, then on the other hand claim a company's rights exceed individuals' rights when you happen to disagree with the individuals protesting. "I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it" means what it says. Once you start picking and choosing who qualifies for those rights, you're no longer operating on priciple, you're operating on political opinion.
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In Ontario, Canada, he would be out of a house.
And that right there is the problem. When you buy an improved DVD, you're double-paying. The original DVD purchase gets you a license to view the original movie any time you want. The new DVD purchase gets you a license to view the original movie + extended bits any time you want. So now you have two licenses to watch the original movie. You've double-paid.
Software companies get around this problem by offering discounted upgrade prices for current owners. You pay retail to buy the product, then you pay the upgrade fee to buy just the improved bits. The Entertainment Industry on the other hand seems to believe the standard model should be for you to double-pay.
If a nation progresses ahead of its neighbors scientifically or economically but invests nothing in its military, that nation will promptly be attacked, invaded, and conquered by a neighboring country. The key to surviving is to spending enough on the military so that it is more expensive for another country to successfully attack you than to conduct the scientific research and economic development on their own.
Which view you choose to take is semantics. Personally, I define "Federal spending" as "how do they spend the money they take from me and my employer." So I would include SS and medical programs in my view of the Federal budget. Some people like to argue that SS and medical programs give money directly back to citizens. But then you open up all sorts of arguments about direct economic effects and indirect economic effects. It's really not worth arguing about since it's highly unlikely said argument will change anyone's minds. The numbers are all there once you add the SS, medicare, and medicaid figures. Just interpret them as you please.
I call it NotOriginalMusic.com. Listeners will send me copies of any music they purchase. My sophisticated software will compare samples of each submitted song to all other submitted songs. It will detect incidents of unauthorized sampling, mixing, or outright duplication and inform the submitter, who can then return the CD so their money will not be supporting artists who steal others' work. My collection^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^bThe database will reside on my media player PC and mp3 player.
Later planes probably use a phased array radar which has no moving parts. It varies the phase of the outgoing signals in each mini-antenna in the array to determine which direction the signal fires out from the overall array. No moving parts so it can track and be redirected instantly. I suspect the F-14 was one of the first planes with a phased array radar (which would've been a rather impressive feat in the 1970s with nowhere near the computing power we have today).
Looks like I was right. Search for AWG-9 in this link.
So if all floating sea ice melted sea level would increase just 4 cm. In contrast, if the glaciers in Greenland melted (which you would think would have to happen if all floating sea ice melted), sea level would increase by an estimated 6.5 meters. Losing the Antarctic ice masses (which again would have to happen for all floating sea ice to melt) would increase sea levels by nearly 75 meters. The 4 cm contribution you point out is completely negligible except from an academic standpoint.
Page 64 shows the average cost of premium unleaded in various countries. "Normal sales price" (including cost of oil, processing, industry margin, and distribution) comes to just 44 cents per liter. The rest is taxes. Just eyballing the distribution, you can see the U.S. falls towards the lower end of the middle third. On the other hand, countries like Austria, Belgium, Sweden, the UK, and Netherlands are clearly at the extreme high end.
Page 78 lists fuel taxes as % of state revenue. The U.S. gets 12% of its revenue from fuel taxes. This is on par with the revenue of European states with high taxes (probably because their overall taxation rate is higher). U.S. tax revenue in 2005 was $2.15 trillion. 12% of that is $258 billion. This is on the order of the few federal figures I was able to find ($140 billion) plus state taxes. Greenpeace estimates the oil industry receives only $15-$35 billion in subsidies per year. In other words, the taxes are much more than the subsidies. Note that even the motor vehicle fuel taxes imposed by the states , not the federal government, exceeds the high end of Greenpeace's estimate.
$6/gal is not the normal or even market price for gasoline. You could argue the U.S. is slightly subsidizing gasoline prices (since it falls at the lower end of the middle third). But to argue that $6/gal is the "actual cost" is to argue that every country in the world is subsidizing gasoline except those in the EU with high fuel taxes.
Our dependence on oil is bad enough as it is. There's plenty to argue against it without makign stuff up. If you bring bogus figures to the table, it just makes it easier for the nay-sayers to discredit everyone advocating conservation and minimizing environmental impact.
He made a Fedex Commercial pretty much along the same lines.
If an ISP wants to sell a 3 Mbps service but wants to oversubscribe it by 10x, that's fine. But then they should advertise it as 3 Mbps at 10% saturation. Instead they advertise and sell it as 3 Mbps, then use secret criteria to determine who they try to kick off their service for "overusing" it. Lately they've started adding (very, very) fine print stating you're not supposed to use all that bandwidth 24/7. But the whole thing would sit better with the public if they were just up-front about it.
Fluorescents only light up when the voltage driving them exceeds a certain level. AC current means a large portion of the time the voltage is below that level. This is what causes fluorescent lights to flicker. To keep the voltage above this threshold for a longer period of time, they use ballasts to alter the AC sine wave. The old fluorescents used magnetic ballasts. These were what caused the hum and flicker at 60 or 120 Hz.
Compact fluorescents use an electronic ballast (the magnetic ballasts are too big to let you screw them into a single lightbulb socket anyway). These operate at around 30-40 kHz. So yes they still do flicker and still do hum, but at around 30-40 kHz. Since the threshold of human hearing is around 22 kHz for young people, and the threshold for human peripheral vision is about 60-100 Hz, neither hum nor flicker are a problem with CFLs if you're human.
2) Insurance (or lack of). A printer that costs $100-$300 is usually below most people's threshold to purchase insurance, but above their threshold to purchase a replacement should it break down (i.e. they'll try to get it fixed). A business operates with a larger budget and thus can afford to amortize the cost of failed printers over the purchase of new ones. A household often cannot, so the printer manufacturers are actually helping them out here by pricing the printers at $20-$50. That drops the price down to where a household can easily absorb the cost of a failed unit. (The cost of failed units is amortized over all the units and ink the manufacturer sells).
The joke about prostitution is relevant here. A man asks a woman if she'd sleep with him for $1 million dollars. She agrees. He then asks if she'd sleep with him for $100. She says she's not that type of woman. He says they've already established that she is that type of woman, and he's just negotiating the price.
You seem to be arguing that the "bickering" over this issue was wasted effort because it was based on religion and morality; that science should be unimpeded by those two. If you hold to that principle, then scientific research should always be allowed regardless of the moral issues involved. Unfortunately, in doing so you've legitimized the Nazi medical experimentation on human subjects.
Once you agree that morality has to play some role in determining what science is and isn't allowed, all that's left is negotiating as to what degree morality should overule science. That was the argument that played out over the stem cell issue. Perhaps it was not decided as we would've liked, or was decided unfairly. But it needed to be negotiated and decided, and the time and money spent "bickering" over it most definitely was not wasted. To not have gone through the process would've meant giving up what sets us apart from animals.
You're a seller, and apparently an honest one. You only see half the business interactions: cheap buyers with honest sellers, and generous buyers with honest sellers. You don't see the interactions with dishonest sellers. Any company which says "just do it right and install what you think it needs" to every vendor will be out of business in a year. There are dishonest vendors out there who will rape you if you give them a blank check like that.
The key is to be thrifty with your money when seeking out vendors, then when you find one that you know is honest and does good work, be generous with it. Of course there are always tightwads who will never be anything but tightwads. But if you're seeing a disproportionate share of them, you should probably raise your prices and work harder to convince clients that you're honest and do good work for their money.
Mildred, the church gossip, and self-appointed monitor of the church's morals, kept sticking her nose into other people's business. Several members did not approve of her extra-curricular activities, but feared her enough to maintain their silence.
She made a mistake, however, when she accused George, a new member, of being an alcoholic after she saw his old pickup parked in front of the town's only bar one afternoon.
She emphatically told George and several others that everyone seeing it there would know what he was doing. George, a man of few words, stared at her for a moment and just turned and walked away. He didn't explain, defend, or deny. He said nothing.
Later that evening, George quietly parked his pickup in front of Mildred's house ... and left it there all night.
No, it would be like throwing away your copy of Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" because your copy is dog-eared and you can always order another from Amazon. Likely at the time there were mutliple copies of Archimedes' work around, and this one was considered unimportant for that reason (the parchment was literally more valuable than the information it contained).
What makes it important to us is that it happens to be the only copy which survived. The monk at the time had no way of knowing that his copy would be the only one which survived. Same reason there are only about a dozen Honus Wagner baseball cards in good condition. Nobody at the time knew that baseball cards would become a multi-million dollar collectibles industry, and that this particular card would be so valuable.
Presumably the choice of symbol had a way whole lot to do with whose website they could crack.
More likely a bunch of bored teens out of school figured out a way to hack a low-security or no-security web site, realized they could get in trouble for doing something illegal, and latched on to the foremost political event in the news to justify their actions to themselves and to give their dirty deed a thin veneer of legitimacy.
Or maybe it's actually a well-funded government agency, and they defaced the main page with something making it look like a two-bit hacker did it, in order to deflect attention from a more thorough root job giving access to higher-security NASA computers.
RTGs really make more sense for missions where you're reasonably sure the hardware will last 10+ years and solar panels are not an option.
Indeed. The entire principle behind trade is that the amount of goods in the system remains the same after each trade, but the value of those goods increases due to their redistribution. e.g. Chicken farmer has more eggs than he knows what to do with, cow farmer has more milk than he knows what to do with. They both decide to trade some eggs for milk. Net result is that although the total amount of milk and eggs remains the same, their value to the two farmers has increased due to the trade. Those two dozen eggs were worth more to the cow farmer than two liters of milk. Those two liters of milk were worth more to the chicken farmer than those two dozen eggs.
In the same way, if the theory that (some) software is overpriced is correct, then if all this pirated software were actually bought, the value of the system would actually decrease. In other words, this is a pretty good argument that if the "lost" revenue the BSA is crowing about were recouped, it could actually harm the economy.
No, the phish ends when they empty your bank account. If it doesn't look like the real account site or redirect to the real account, that tips off the user that there's fraud going on. Then you're likely to login to the real site and change your passwords. The better (worse?) phishing scams will redirect you so as not to arouse your suspicion.
That statement is flawed in that it jumps to the conclusion that correlation implies causation. (The actual study was pretty clear in stating it only found correlation, but of course all the left-wingers went nuts over it mistakenly jumping to the conclusion that it meant causation.)
If you were to ask the Fox and NPR audience if they believed it had been scientifically proven that man is causing global warming, you'd probably find that the Fox viewers are "better informed." It hasn't been scientifically proven that man is causing global warming, but a greater percentage of the NPR audience probably believes it because it's dear to them and their threshold for belief on it is lower. In other words, it's just a correlation due to the political leanings of the two audiences.
If you select a fact on a topic that's widely liked or disliked by the groups, you're going to come up with a bias independent of the quality of the news service. Therefore to test the quality of news services, you need to select facts that are neutral or equally liked to disliked by both audiences.
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.
Imagine you were stranded on a desert island. No idea how to build a fire, no idea how to make potable water, no idea how to build a trap, no idea what plants were edible. How well could you survive? Now imagine you had a survival manual. How much better do you think you could survive?
The idea behind the laptop is to help educate the population so they can work on building their own infrastructure. Your idea of building their infrastructure for them is the flawed reasoning behind most current forms of welfare. If you simply give things to people, there is no incentive for them to improve their own condition. You are handing them freebies, and if they improve their own condition you will take the freebies away. What the hell kind of incentive is that? c.f. ST:TOS A Taste of Armageddon. If you take away all the bad things about being in poverty, there remains no incentive to rise out of poverty.
The key to eliminating poverty is to give people the information and tools to climb out of it on their own. With information, you've given them the tools to get out of poverty, but they themselves have to make the effort to utilize those tools. Doing it this way, they don't feel beholden to foreign powers or grow dependent on foreign aid, and you aren't stuck babysitting a perpetual 3rd world nation.
Useless is it? Then I take it you also think Bill Gates is the most generous man on earth because he's donated billions of dollars? And that you're evil if you spend thousands of dollars on a new computer when there are people starving in the world and just pennies a day could feed them?
Any comparison of expenditure between nations with different standards of living has to be normalized to that standard of living and population. Otherwise you get ridiculous conclusions such as: "The US has no poverty because the World Bank's definition of international poverty is US$1 to US$2/day, and even the lowest US panhandler makes at least 10x that."
Even looking at the nationmaster link you gave, the US with about 295 million people spends $277 billion on their military. France with 60 million people spends $46 billion on their military. Factor in that the US has a 20% higher per capita income and there just isn't much difference in the spending. In other words, if France had the population of the US and its standard of living were as high, it would be spending almost exactly as much as the US is on the military.
The GDP is a good ballpark measure for aggregate population and standard of living. Americans just spend more in raw dollars on everything, not just the military because (1) they have a lot more money, (2) things cost a lot more in the US, and (3) The US has a lot more people than most other countries. As a percentage of its wealth, the amount the US spends on the military is not that far out of line with other first-world nations.
The US is actually only slightly above average in military spending. The only reason its spending in $ is so high is because its GDP is so huge. Once you normalize it to GDP, you can see that many other countries actually spend more than the US. China and most of the middle eastern countries actually spend significantly more, and "peace-loving" France spends just slightly less than the US.
It's the same argument used against the US when funding the UN. Countries are supposed to fund the UN in proportion to the GDP. "You have more money so you can pay more." Yet for some reason the same reasoning seems to escape people when it comes to military spending. You can't have it both ways. (Note: The US has been successful in trying to reduce its share of UN funding; partially understandable since GDP doesn't take into account taxation rate, so while US GDP is much bigger, the US govt gets to use less of it in its discretionary budget than socialist nations.)
A good way to determine if your argument is logically sound is to replace the subject with something you personally feel differently about. Let's try that, switching anti-abortion with, say, environmentalism:
"I'm not sure that qualifies as abuse of the act. An organized group of people (Greenpeace) attempting to extort legal businesses (oil companies) into either changing or closing entirely through threats (see what is on some of their websites), intimidation (in-your-face confrontations directly in front of oil refineries), and violence (bombings and beatings tacitly accepted as part of the struggle),"
Or entertainment:
"I'm not sure that qualifies as abuse of the act. An organized group of people (slashdot) attempting to extort legal businesses (record companies) into either changing or closing entirely through threats (see what is on some of their websites), intimidation (in-your-face confrontations directly in front of court houses), and violence (bombings and beatings tacitly accepted as part of the struggle),"
Aside from the violence bit in the latter, I'd say this fails the test pretty miserably.
simply because their view isn't your view (First Amendment issue of everyone, including clinics have rights to free speech and association and freedom from religion)...
Companies, including clinics, don't have First Amendment rights (aside from a limited subset given to "artificial persons"). One cannot on the one hand declare that corporations are evil and aren't entitled to any of the protections provided to people, then on the other hand claim a company's rights exceed individuals' rights when you happen to disagree with the individuals protesting. "I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it" means what it says. Once you start picking and choosing who qualifies for those rights, you're no longer operating on priciple, you're operating on political opinion.