Lawyers are not the cause of this problem. Lawyers are paid money to argue for their clients interests (or perceived interests). If the MPAA pays money to a good lawyer and gives them instructions, that lawyer goes and researches the law, determines what tactics will be effective, and ASKS THE CLIENT FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS. ...
2. Politicians for being so pathetically weak that they can be bought and sold like prostitutes
Let me let you in a little secret. People here don't hate corporations per se. What they hate is how most corporations put money ahead of little things like, oh, the greater good of society. Ask yourself if the ones you're defending are doing the same thing.
Well, I guess that should've been obvious, but... Since it's modifying the registry, any security app that warns you of registry changes (like SpyBot's TeaTimer) should pop up a warning and give you the option to prevent this from installing itself in the first place.
For a while, several environmental groups were raising quite a ruckus citing the high dB numbers (whether out of ignorance or deliberate deception), and the media was regurgitating it without asking questions. It's good to see both the media and environmental groups not making those kinds of mistakes or resorting to those tactics.
235dB???
Holy crap.
What would happen if I was scuba-diving near one of those suckers? Ear drum explosion?
dB in water is not the same as dB in air, primarily due to water being a denser medium (takes more energy to get those water molecules moving, while hearing is based mostly on the magnitude of the movement). For a rough conversion to dB in air, you need to subtract 62. And even then, the sound levels are within the range of other natural events.
Keep in mind this is just a record for "storms we know about," not actual number of storms there were. In 1933, they didn't have spiffy satellite images and radar to detect hurricanes far from the coast. Back then, storms like Lee and Maria probably would've gone completely unnoticed. Irene might've even skipped notice since it looped around the Bahamas.
NTP owns six patents that RIM is violating. These patents were submitted at the dawn of PDAs -- before the Newton, in fact -- and proposed the general notion of a wireless handheld which receives email, including protocols, long before this was an obvious notion.
Accessing your email on the road via your handheld is no different from accessing your email via dialup on a laptop (or luggable suitcase-sized computer). There is nothing innovative nor original about losing the wires or shrinking the the computer down to the size of a handheld as it pertains to email. It is an obvious application of a pre-existing invention to advancing technology. Next you're going to tell me putting wheels on cars should've been patentable since previously they'd only been used on horse-drawn carriages.
I think the majority of people who are hopping on the "I Hate The RIAA!" bandwagon are forgetting some crucial information. The RIAA is a trade organization. They represent MEMBERS of that organization. They are suing on behalf of their members, not on behalf of themselves. They're not the top of the chain, they are in the middle of the chain. The artists who join, support, and ask the RIAA to represent them are the ones at the top.
Yes the RIAA is a trade organization, but for the most part they represent the music studios, not the artists. See, the studios got an exception put into Copyright law which says that musical works performed by an artist belong to them, not the artist. Normally copyright is assigned to the creator/author/artist, unless it's a work for hire - I commission you (pay you) to create a piece of text, software, music, and it belongs to me even though you created it. Except the music studios didn't want to pay the artists so they bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobbied some Congressmen for a change in copyright law which says that audio recordings are a work for hire even if you don't pay the artist. That way they get the copyright, the artist gets "paid" a percentage of the album sales, and the costs of producing the album get taken out of the artist's cut. In other words, the artist pays for making his own album, but the studio gets the copyright.
So yes the RIAA is composed of members, but the members aren't the ones creating the music. They're simply the ones distributing music, and they're scared out of their wits because the Internet drops the cost of distributing music so close to zero that they children they're suing can do it.
So if a child steals from a store that they go to without a parent, it should be OK because the minor can't afford to purchase the item?
If a child steals merchandise from the store that she can't afford, the store has suffered material losses. The child/parent should be liable for those losses.
If a child copies music from the RIAA that she can't afford, the RIAA has lost nothing. If an adult copies, the RIAA has lost a potential sale. But since you've already stipulated that the child can't afford the music, there is no potential sale lost, and hence the RIAA has lost nothing. You can say the child/parent is liable for those losses, but since those losses are zero...
The bittorrent sites seem to mostly carry the full install CD + keygen.
I did look for a keygen-only torrent first, but couldn't find one. It was the first time I'd searched for a warez app torrent, so I probably wasn't very good at it. It was either wait for a keygen-only to show up, or grab a full CD + keygen. I was tired of searching and it didn't cost anything to leave bittorrent running for a few days so I just grabbed the full CD + keygen. I used the pirate CD image for a while (because it saved me the trouble of making my own), but then I got paranoid, converted my original CD to an image, and used that instead.
I bought Photoshop CS. Photography is a hobby, but one I take seriously enough to be semi-pro at it with the occasional paid job. The product activation in PS CS turned out to be a real problem. Nearly every time I did a system restore, PS CS would deactivate, requiring I call Adobe to reactivate it. Windows being the way it is and me liking to tweak with my laptop, I had to restore a lot. It was getting beyond annoying and I was starting to worry about Adobe blacklisting my copy of PS CS. So I downloaded a pirated copy of it along with a key generator. I kept that on my hard drive and started reinstalling instead of having Adobe reactivate.
At the end of a trip to Europe, I was working at editing and printing a bunch of pictures I'd taken of an event. I needed to use a photo printer someone else provided. The printer driver install went awry and I had to do a system restore to fix it. Sure enough Photoshop deactivated itself. I was at a hostel in the mountains, about 12 hours before my departing flight, without any Internet access, at 4 am, with no idea what phone number I was supposed to call to reach Adobe tech support if they were even open at that time on a Sunday. So I uninstalled Photoshop, dug up the pirated copy, and installed that. Worked like a charm. I got the pictures edited and printed, the people at the event were happy, and I made my flight home.
When Photoshop CS2 came out, I bought that as well. And I downloaded a pirated copy of it off bittorrent. Of course the real irony is that if Adobe handn't put in product activation as an anti-piracy measure, I never would've needed to get the pirated version.
I'd like to see a DRM technology that allowed music buyers to resell the music on eBay... By allowing the owner to set the price, you allow reselling and variable pricing... the studio (original owner) could get a piece of every transaction...
That would only make sense if the studio then reimbursed the seller what they got from the transaction when he originally bought the music. Since the owner is simply transferring a license for which the studios (original owner) has already been compensated, the studios are not entitled to any more money from future transactions. That is the legal doctrine of First Sale.
imprisoning anyone (much less a kid) for a year or more for cracking someone's cellphone while violent criminals get away with little or no penalty is hard to justify.
Yeah, I'm sure that there are no crackers out there who get away with little or no penalty.
I imagine that the Canadians would've been very quick to step in and help the Cubans rebuild after hurricane Dennis, the most powerful hurricane to hit Cuba since hurricane Flora in 1963. Of course, that's not really relevant, as Cuba evacuated their people (650,000) from the affected area. 16 people died in Cuba. It was a cat 5 when it hit, and its winds reached 239kph (149mph). Haiti also had about 44 deaths.
I think NO has had a great deal more death than that from what was a smaller storm,
You have that backwards. Katrina had a pressure reading of 908 mb just before landfall, 902 mb while at sea. That makes it the fourth most powerful hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic, and the second most powerful hurricane to hit the US. Only Gilbert (888 mb), the 1935 labor day hurricane (892 mb), and Allen (899 mb) were stronger. Dennis only managed 930 mb and never reached category 5.
Dennis was also a small storm. Katrina was a huge storm. It had hurricane-force winds covering an area almost the size of the UK, tropical storm-force winds covered an area about the size of France. It was bigger than the entire island of Cuba.
Yes the urban areas of the US are similar to urban areas in Europe. But cities are not self-contained economic islands; they trade with other cities. US cities are further apart than European cities, thus necessitating additional driving.
You just build you country wrong.
And I suppose you're some god of planning who knows the right and wrong way to build a country? The "right" way to build a country is a moving target. The US practices a fairly free form of capitalism. If the country is built wrong, someone who builds their house and business right will be at an economic advantage and drive out those who built it wrong (unless of course those people also adapt). If energy prices remain high for long, you'll see shifts in home and store locations and trade patterns to compensate. Just as I expect if global warming turns out to be true, Canadians will sprawl to the North as it becomes more habitable.
There are probably trillions of dollars worth of safety improvements that could be done throughout the country - enough to bankrupt the country. The question is, which ones should we fund? Politicians and even voters have been putting off upgrades for centuries. It's a roll of the dice - a calculated risk. Sometimes they get lucky and nothing happens, and everyone pats each other on their back for money saved. Sometimes, as with Katrina, they get spectacularly unlucky and people go on a witch hunt trying to place the blame.
Trying to pin the blame entirely on Bush is a gross misrepresentation of the decision-making process that leads to these sorts of funds being cut. You are essentially saying Bush in his omniscience should've foreseen that a major hurricane would happen this year in that area, and preserved funding for levee renovations there. Why the levees in New Orleans? What about earthquake retrofitting in California? Or tornado warning systems in the midwest? Or money to help uncover terrorist cells? You cannot judge these decisions in hindsight on the basis of what did happen. You have to judge them on the basis of what we thought could've happened at the time.
What if Katrina had grown no bigger than a tropical storm. What if Bush had then funded those levees in NOLA, cut funding for the war in Iraq, and Iraq degenerated into civil war because the US had inadequate troop presence? I suppose you'd think that would've squarely been Bush's fault too?
Blame people for the bad decisions they make after they've been given adequate data (e.g. the total lack of any connection between Iraq and terrorism). Do not try to pin all the blame on them for decisions which later turn out to be bad due to totally random phenomena like the weather.
> We drive about 10x more than you guys.
As if it were a God-given-right.
European Union population: 456,953,258 (2005 est.)
European Union area: 3,976,372 sq. km
European Union population density: 114.9 persons per sq. km
United States population: 295,734,134 (2005 est.)
United States area: 9,631,418
United States population density: 30.7 persons per sq. km
Ratio of the two population densities: 3.7:1
Stuff here is just further apart. The entire economic relationship between fuel costs, transport costs, and retail costs is different here than from Europe. Fuel taxes similar to what Europe charges would have a much larger impact on the retail prices for other goods than in Europe, simply because people here are nearly 4x further apart.
7 billion spams. Say 99% of them were caught by spam filters or went to bogus addresses. That leaves 70 million spams people had to deal with by hand. If it took one second to delete each of those spams, that means he cost everyone an aggregate 2.2 years of life. If someone imprisoned you in front of a computer hitting delete over and over for 2.2 years, wouldn't you consider him to be a physical threat to you and others?
Why is it that people think a distributed crime is any less of a crime? Do you think it'd be OK if he stole $130,000 from a bank? Then why do you think it's OK that he stole $0.0019 each (1 second's wages at $6.75/hr) from 70 million people? They work out to the same amount of money.
In my reading on this topic, it seems there was only one survivor (a physicist) who actually understood what he had witnessed (an atomic bomb), and he could not manage to deliver any report for a while,
The entire world understood what had happened - Truman announced it in a public address 16 hours afterwards. The Japanese got a first-hand report when they sent an official by plane to see why the telegraph signals from Hiroshima had stopped. Combine that with the radar reports which showed just 1-3 planes (the air raid sirens were turned on, but were shut down when the small number of planes seemed to indicate a reconaissance mission). It doesn't take a genius to figure out the U.S. really did a new weapon where a single plane could wipe out a city.
I'm basically convinced that we wanted to study the effects on real targets, and also implicitly threaten Stalin, and those factors were used to justify the targeting. We hated the Japanese enough to consider their use as human Guinnea pigs to be a trivial aspect.
Decisions are rarely, if ever, made based on a single factor. A good sign of a revisionist is that he'll take a complex decision with multiple difficult factors - some sincere and some not so sincere, choose the ones which best support his position, and emphasize those factors above all else.
Yes I'm sure the opportunity for experimentation on "live" subjects was part of the decision. But there was a war going on. It's silly to claim that experimentation was the prevailing reason for bombing Hiroshima when the U.S. was already bombing Japanese cities almost daily. Was the U.S. bombing the other cities for experimentation purposes too? No, they were bombing the other cities to try to win the war. And they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to try to win the war.
WWII killed over 50 million people. That's an average of over 20,000 a day. While the deaths of the quarter million who died from the atomic bombings were sad, they were just par for the course at the time.
However, looking at the state of the world today, it doesn't seem like we learned much by it. At least nothing important.
How do you figure that? Nuclear weapons have never been used again, and are universally considered the greatest threat to our survival as a species. I'd say we learned pretty well the lesson from it. The only reason we keep building 'em is a lack of trust. And lack of trust has been a human failing since the first caveman stole another caveman's dinner.
You (along with Rand, Nietsche, and others) are advocating the theory that people do everything solely for their own self-benefit. You base this on the implicit assumption that selfish actions always result in the greatest self-benefit.
It's been proven mathematically that that assumption is wrong. There are a class of problems where the unselfish choice results in a better or best possible outcome, and the selfish choice often the worst possible outcome. One example is the prisoner's dilemma. Another is the tragedy of the commons. It's this class of problems that forces government regulation of certain aspects of capitalism, or environmental protection: Most people can understand it and act altruistically on their own, but all it takes is one ignorant or overly selfish bastard to ruin it for everyone else.
Altruism doesn't exist because people derive pleasure from kindness (that is, perhaps, an evolutionary consequence rather than a cause - a selective factor for encouraging altruism among organisms). Altruism exists because in many social situations, the group as a whole derives greater benefit when some or all of the individuals sacrifice and act selflessly. Intellectually, most "do-gooders" realize this and choose to act for (what they perceive to be) the greater good, rather than for their own self-benefit. It's why the environmentalist pays more to drive a cramped and noisy hybrid or electric vehicle. It's why parents save to send their kids to college instead of blowing it on a vacation. It's why I bothered to type all this up instead of doing the work I need to get done done so I can go home early - my hope being that maybe you'll read this, understand, and become a better person who contributes more to society for it.
The Register story also points out that although they spend more on song downloads, that's still less than they used to spend on CDs - so the RIAA still loses out.
So just compare the past and present spending on CDs by people who don't download songs. If they're also spending less than they used to on CDs, the problem isn't downloading. I suspect the *AA never bothered looking up that particular stat. If they had and it supported them, their claim would've been the much stronger, "People who download spend less than they used to spend on CDs, unlike people who don't download."
You've correctly identified one - desirability (availability and cleanliness) of the energy source. Fuel cells still have to get their hydrogen from somewhere, be it oil, gas, solar, or nuclear. Cracking water via electrolysis isn't exactly efficient (water is at a very low energy state, meaning you have to put a lot of energy into it to liberate the hydrogen), so I have my doubts that solar (I include wind and hydro with solar) will be able to compete at this in the near future. Liberating hydrogen from natural gas or oil, or electrolysis using energy from nuclear power will probably turn out to be much more effective.
This dovetails neatly into the second problem - energy storage. Oil/gasoline is not a popular fuel just because it's a (relatively) cheap source. It's also a popular fuel because it's very compact (has high energy density) and easy to store and carry. The storage problem is the reason battery-powered cars are flopping while hybrids are taking off - modern battery technology simply cannot match gasoline in terms of energy per kg, even taking into account the horrendous efficiencies of gasoline engines. A major obstacle to hydrogen fuel cells has been figuring out ways to store hydrogen densely and safely (i.e. not under ridiculously high pressures or ridiculously cold temperatures).
Any alternate energy source is going to have to match or surpass oil at solving both these problems if it wants to supplant oil as the world's primary portable fuel source.
It may have something to do with Bluetooth's refresh rate being limited to something like 85 Hz. I know Logitech prefers a 125 Hz refresh rate on their mouses.
Slashdot Mirror
...
2. Politicians for being so pathetically weak that they can be bought and sold like prostitutes
Let me let you in a little secret. People here don't hate corporations per se. What they hate is how most corporations put money ahead of little things like, oh, the greater good of society. Ask yourself if the ones you're defending are doing the same thing.
Well, I guess that should've been obvious, but... Since it's modifying the registry, any security app that warns you of registry changes (like SpyBot's TeaTimer) should pop up a warning and give you the option to prevent this from installing itself in the first place.
For a while, several environmental groups were raising quite a ruckus citing the high dB numbers (whether out of ignorance or deliberate deception), and the media was regurgitating it without asking questions. It's good to see both the media and environmental groups not making those kinds of mistakes or resorting to those tactics.
Holy crap.
What would happen if I was scuba-diving near one of those suckers? Ear drum explosion?
dB in water is not the same as dB in air, primarily due to water being a denser medium (takes more energy to get those water molecules moving, while hearing is based mostly on the magnitude of the movement). For a rough conversion to dB in air, you need to subtract 62. And even then, the sound levels are within the range of other natural events.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/acoustics. htm#conversion
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200513.asp
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200514.asp
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200509.asp
Accessing your email on the road via your handheld is no different from accessing your email via dialup on a laptop (or luggable suitcase-sized computer). There is nothing innovative nor original about losing the wires or shrinking the the computer down to the size of a handheld as it pertains to email. It is an obvious application of a pre-existing invention to advancing technology. Next you're going to tell me putting wheels on cars should've been patentable since previously they'd only been used on horse-drawn carriages.
Yes the RIAA is a trade organization, but for the most part they represent the music studios, not the artists. See, the studios got an exception put into Copyright law which says that musical works performed by an artist belong to them, not the artist. Normally copyright is assigned to the creator/author/artist, unless it's a work for hire - I commission you (pay you) to create a piece of text, software, music, and it belongs to me even though you created it. Except the music studios didn't want to pay the artists so they bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobbied some Congressmen for a change in copyright law which says that audio recordings are a work for hire even if you don't pay the artist. That way they get the copyright, the artist gets "paid" a percentage of the album sales, and the costs of producing the album get taken out of the artist's cut. In other words, the artist pays for making his own album, but the studio gets the copyright.
So yes the RIAA is composed of members, but the members aren't the ones creating the music. They're simply the ones distributing music, and they're scared out of their wits because the Internet drops the cost of distributing music so close to zero that they children they're suing can do it.
If a child steals merchandise from the store that she can't afford, the store has suffered material losses. The child/parent should be liable for those losses.
If a child copies music from the RIAA that she can't afford, the RIAA has lost nothing. If an adult copies, the RIAA has lost a potential sale. But since you've already stipulated that the child can't afford the music, there is no potential sale lost, and hence the RIAA has lost nothing. You can say the child/parent is liable for those losses, but since those losses are zero...
The bittorrent sites seem to mostly carry the full install CD + keygen. I did look for a keygen-only torrent first, but couldn't find one. It was the first time I'd searched for a warez app torrent, so I probably wasn't very good at it. It was either wait for a keygen-only to show up, or grab a full CD + keygen. I was tired of searching and it didn't cost anything to leave bittorrent running for a few days so I just grabbed the full CD + keygen. I used the pirate CD image for a while (because it saved me the trouble of making my own), but then I got paranoid, converted my original CD to an image, and used that instead.
I bought Photoshop CS. Photography is a hobby, but one I take seriously enough to be semi-pro at it with the occasional paid job. The product activation in PS CS turned out to be a real problem. Nearly every time I did a system restore, PS CS would deactivate, requiring I call Adobe to reactivate it. Windows being the way it is and me liking to tweak with my laptop, I had to restore a lot. It was getting beyond annoying and I was starting to worry about Adobe blacklisting my copy of PS CS. So I downloaded a pirated copy of it along with a key generator. I kept that on my hard drive and started reinstalling instead of having Adobe reactivate.
At the end of a trip to Europe, I was working at editing and printing a bunch of pictures I'd taken of an event. I needed to use a photo printer someone else provided. The printer driver install went awry and I had to do a system restore to fix it. Sure enough Photoshop deactivated itself. I was at a hostel in the mountains, about 12 hours before my departing flight, without any Internet access, at 4 am, with no idea what phone number I was supposed to call to reach Adobe tech support if they were even open at that time on a Sunday. So I uninstalled Photoshop, dug up the pirated copy, and installed that. Worked like a charm. I got the pictures edited and printed, the people at the event were happy, and I made my flight home.
When Photoshop CS2 came out, I bought that as well. And I downloaded a pirated copy of it off bittorrent. Of course the real irony is that if Adobe handn't put in product activation as an anti-piracy measure, I never would've needed to get the pirated version.
That would only make sense if the studio then reimbursed the seller what they got from the transaction when he originally bought the music. Since the owner is simply transferring a license for which the studios (original owner) has already been compensated, the studios are not entitled to any more money from future transactions. That is the legal doctrine of First Sale.
Yeah, I'm sure that there are no crackers out there who get away with little or no penalty.
I think NO has had a great deal more death than that from what was a smaller storm,
You have that backwards. Katrina had a pressure reading of 908 mb just before landfall, 902 mb while at sea. That makes it the fourth most powerful hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic, and the second most powerful hurricane to hit the US. Only Gilbert (888 mb), the 1935 labor day hurricane (892 mb), and Allen (899 mb) were stronger. Dennis only managed 930 mb and never reached category 5.
Dennis was also a small storm. Katrina was a huge storm. It had hurricane-force winds covering an area almost the size of the UK, tropical storm-force winds covered an area about the size of France. It was bigger than the entire island of Cuba.
You just build you country wrong.
And I suppose you're some god of planning who knows the right and wrong way to build a country? The "right" way to build a country is a moving target. The US practices a fairly free form of capitalism. If the country is built wrong, someone who builds their house and business right will be at an economic advantage and drive out those who built it wrong (unless of course those people also adapt). If energy prices remain high for long, you'll see shifts in home and store locations and trade patterns to compensate. Just as I expect if global warming turns out to be true, Canadians will sprawl to the North as it becomes more habitable.
There are probably trillions of dollars worth of safety improvements that could be done throughout the country - enough to bankrupt the country. The question is, which ones should we fund? Politicians and even voters have been putting off upgrades for centuries. It's a roll of the dice - a calculated risk. Sometimes they get lucky and nothing happens, and everyone pats each other on their back for money saved. Sometimes, as with Katrina, they get spectacularly unlucky and people go on a witch hunt trying to place the blame.
Trying to pin the blame entirely on Bush is a gross misrepresentation of the decision-making process that leads to these sorts of funds being cut. You are essentially saying Bush in his omniscience should've foreseen that a major hurricane would happen this year in that area, and preserved funding for levee renovations there. Why the levees in New Orleans? What about earthquake retrofitting in California? Or tornado warning systems in the midwest? Or money to help uncover terrorist cells? You cannot judge these decisions in hindsight on the basis of what did happen. You have to judge them on the basis of what we thought could've happened at the time.
What if Katrina had grown no bigger than a tropical storm. What if Bush had then funded those levees in NOLA, cut funding for the war in Iraq, and Iraq degenerated into civil war because the US had inadequate troop presence? I suppose you'd think that would've squarely been Bush's fault too?
Blame people for the bad decisions they make after they've been given adequate data (e.g. the total lack of any connection between Iraq and terrorism). Do not try to pin all the blame on them for decisions which later turn out to be bad due to totally random phenomena like the weather.
As if it were a God-given-right.
European Union population: 456,953,258 (2005 est.)
European Union area: 3,976,372 sq. km
European Union population density: 114.9 persons per sq. km
United States population: 295,734,134 (2005 est.)
United States area: 9,631,418
United States population density: 30.7 persons per sq. km
Ratio of the two population densities: 3.7:1
Stuff here is just further apart. The entire economic relationship between fuel costs, transport costs, and retail costs is different here than from Europe. Fuel taxes similar to what Europe charges would have a much larger impact on the retail prices for other goods than in Europe, simply because people here are nearly 4x further apart.
As if it were a God-given-right.
European Union population: 456,953,258 European Union area: 3,976,372 sq. km European Union population density: 114.9 persons per sq. km
United States population: 295,734,134 United States area: 9,631,418 United States population density:
Why is it that people think a distributed crime is any less of a crime? Do you think it'd be OK if he stole $130,000 from a bank? Then why do you think it's OK that he stole $0.0019 each (1 second's wages at $6.75/hr) from 70 million people? They work out to the same amount of money.
We collaborated with UF a great deal when I was at the MIT AUV Lab from '94 to '96. They do very good work.
The entire world understood what had happened - Truman announced it in a public address 16 hours afterwards. The Japanese got a first-hand report when they sent an official by plane to see why the telegraph signals from Hiroshima had stopped. Combine that with the radar reports which showed just 1-3 planes (the air raid sirens were turned on, but were shut down when the small number of planes seemed to indicate a reconaissance mission). It doesn't take a genius to figure out the U.S. really did a new weapon where a single plane could wipe out a city.
I'm basically convinced that we wanted to study the effects on real targets, and also implicitly threaten Stalin, and those factors were used to justify the targeting. We hated the Japanese enough to consider their use as human Guinnea pigs to be a trivial aspect.
Decisions are rarely, if ever, made based on a single factor. A good sign of a revisionist is that he'll take a complex decision with multiple difficult factors - some sincere and some not so sincere, choose the ones which best support his position, and emphasize those factors above all else.
Yes I'm sure the opportunity for experimentation on "live" subjects was part of the decision. But there was a war going on. It's silly to claim that experimentation was the prevailing reason for bombing Hiroshima when the U.S. was already bombing Japanese cities almost daily. Was the U.S. bombing the other cities for experimentation purposes too? No, they were bombing the other cities to try to win the war. And they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to try to win the war.
WWII killed over 50 million people. That's an average of over 20,000 a day. While the deaths of the quarter million who died from the atomic bombings were sad, they were just par for the course at the time.
However, looking at the state of the world today, it doesn't seem like we learned much by it. At least nothing important.
How do you figure that? Nuclear weapons have never been used again, and are universally considered the greatest threat to our survival as a species. I'd say we learned pretty well the lesson from it. The only reason we keep building 'em is a lack of trust. And lack of trust has been a human failing since the first caveman stole another caveman's dinner.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts114/05072 7palrampimages/
looks an awful lot like the unidentified chunk of debris that missed the starboard wing (scroll to bottom of link).
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts114/05072 6images/
It's been proven mathematically that that assumption is wrong. There are a class of problems where the unselfish choice results in a better or best possible outcome, and the selfish choice often the worst possible outcome. One example is the prisoner's dilemma. Another is the tragedy of the commons. It's this class of problems that forces government regulation of certain aspects of capitalism, or environmental protection: Most people can understand it and act altruistically on their own, but all it takes is one ignorant or overly selfish bastard to ruin it for everyone else.
Altruism doesn't exist because people derive pleasure from kindness (that is, perhaps, an evolutionary consequence rather than a cause - a selective factor for encouraging altruism among organisms). Altruism exists because in many social situations, the group as a whole derives greater benefit when some or all of the individuals sacrifice and act selflessly. Intellectually, most "do-gooders" realize this and choose to act for (what they perceive to be) the greater good, rather than for their own self-benefit. It's why the environmentalist pays more to drive a cramped and noisy hybrid or electric vehicle. It's why parents save to send their kids to college instead of blowing it on a vacation. It's why I bothered to type all this up instead of doing the work I need to get done done so I can go home early - my hope being that maybe you'll read this, understand, and become a better person who contributes more to society for it.
So just compare the past and present spending on CDs by people who don't download songs. If they're also spending less than they used to on CDs, the problem isn't downloading. I suspect the *AA never bothered looking up that particular stat. If they had and it supported them, their claim would've been the much stronger, "People who download spend less than they used to spend on CDs, unlike people who don't download."
This dovetails neatly into the second problem - energy storage. Oil/gasoline is not a popular fuel just because it's a (relatively) cheap source. It's also a popular fuel because it's very compact (has high energy density) and easy to store and carry. The storage problem is the reason battery-powered cars are flopping while hybrids are taking off - modern battery technology simply cannot match gasoline in terms of energy per kg, even taking into account the horrendous efficiencies of gasoline engines. A major obstacle to hydrogen fuel cells has been figuring out ways to store hydrogen densely and safely (i.e. not under ridiculously high pressures or ridiculously cold temperatures).
Any alternate energy source is going to have to match or surpass oil at solving both these problems if it wants to supplant oil as the world's primary portable fuel source.
It may have something to do with Bluetooth's refresh rate being limited to something like 85 Hz. I know Logitech prefers a 125 Hz refresh rate on their mouses.