It does make sense to minimize the time zone difference involved.
For instance, if there has to be an urgent phone call between a CEO of an oil services company, and the head of a sovereign nation that retains both de facto and de jure control over resources that are increasingly difficult to find across the world, and somebody is going to be inconvenienced by the time -- I don't think it's going to be the emir who's getting woken up at 3AM to talk business unless it's really, really an emergency.
A tax filer who has debt might see his tax refund garnished -- for certain kinds of debt, at least. One of the examples most likely to be combined with bitterness would be non-payment of child support.
The nature of mathematics and the sciences also makes it far easier for students to figure out when they're being fed bullshit by a teacher who doesn't actually understand the material, or for somebody who really knows what he's doing to get a far more lucrative position outside of education.
Some wiseguy in the class asks you whether or not it's possible to conclusively prove or disprove every possible conjecture given a standard set of postulates and axioms -- the fact that there IS in answer lying in the incompleteness theorem that the wiseguy might well have heard of gives him an easy way to show you up. Mathematics also requires a good grounding in formal logic, not sophistry -- and consulting an answer book while going through even a simple proof like that of Pythagoras's Theorem or that there's an infinite number of prime numbers is pretty poor.
Likewise, a physics teacher is going to be expected to know experimental history and to fluently explain *why* things behave as they are, and again the nature of it makes it easy for students to test you. If you can't remember off the bat what Rutherford tested or how a random lab apparatus works or otherwise answer the inevitable torrent of "why" questions, you're going to flounder.
Conversely, it's going to be far easier to "teach" _Antigone_ or spend time having the class read through _Macbeth_, so long as you do little bit of a brush-up on archaic diction and a little bit of history. After all, there's a damn good chance your students will be just going by the Cliff's Notes, anyway, and the rest are going to have a harder time contradicting you. After all, you're going to be grading their essays through your subjective lens, and they know it.
That might depend on whether German law offers anything like the Safe Harbor provision of the United States' DMCA. Yes, in the US a formal complaint from the copyright holder can be required, and even then takedown need not be automatic (if the uploader positively affirms that it is not infringing, if memory serves)... but that has no bearing on what a German court might rule unless some treaty says otherwise.
It might be argued that there should be a provision that, should the service be notified and the content actually be shown to be infringing, that there should be a burden on the service to take reasonable steps to prevent a repeat occurrence. I don't remember there actually being such a provision, but I might simply have missed it.
It wouldn't be surprising if one reason why many artists don't make much money is that most of the money is made from the recordings of relatively few artists. There are probably numerous artists whose market value is far less than they think it is, just as there are many who think that they're good authors but aren't necessarily marketable. Clearly, the ones at the very top have enough leverage to get quite a bit of money -- enough for all the bling, cocaine, hookers and bail money they might need. The rest may simply be finding out the financial reality behind why the vast majority of the working population isn't supporting itself through hobbies and arts, but through work that they quite possibly don't love to do.
It might also be noted that those copyright protections are the only reason why a distribution and marketing company would offer anything to an artist. Those rights are what are being sold. Lower the value of those rights, and you lower the value. If one goes to an extreme suggesting that such things as "distribution of content should be free without license", you likely will see obvious abuses such as distribution houses attempting to obliterate each others' markets by distributing competitors' content at no charge (or at marginal cost, if that's permitted). That would radically devalue for-profit distribution rights.
That's only true where AT&T is the only affordable game in town; otherwise, they lose customers. And the current trend seems to be the government slowly chipping away at the concept of local communications monopolies by allowing different companies to play in each others' markets.
If there's a monopoly, then some form of neutrality makes sense -- but I would not extend this protection to ISPs whose traffic is deemed harmful, as blocking their traffic is one of the few ways to exert leverage on the large number of bulletproof foreign spamhouses. If kornet.kr or hananet wishes to remain a spam-infested hellhole, I see no obligation to carry any of their traffic whatsoever.
I seem to recall that there is a legal obligation to report certain classes of suspicious activity if they become aware of it -- notably, child pornography. They may not be obligated to actively search for it, but if they spot indications that a user is involved in that while analyzing their logs...
A cynic might suggest that there is a difference between criticizing a president who is largely a loudmouthed figurehead, and something more substantial such as criticizing the Guardian Council or the very structure of the Iranian government in so far as said Council has the most of the actual power. The Council may be happy with letting Ahmadinejad take some heat, if it makes themselves look more reasonable and their own power is unquestioned.
I'm not entirely sure that covering a street in partly digested food is a better alternative, from a public-health point of view. And why would be being made to vomit gain any less sympathy or resentment?
If the march is actively interfering with others -- for instance, by deliberately snarling traffic in contravention of existing laws -- then they're trying to enforce their will through coercion.
What, you think the police are going to take Polaroid snaps of all the troublemakers, and compare them with faces when they charge an unruly mob with batons? That it's easy to pick out the problems in a melee when people may be running around? Or that rubber bullets don't ricochet or miss -- and sometimes kill in the process, given that they're rubber-coated bullets?
People also can and do suffer long-term injury from batons, rubber bullets, and Tasers. This... less likely.
Nikon DSLRs still use F-mount. Canon DSLRs use EF mount, so AE lenses would require an adapter of some sort, if that was ever made. *shrug*
There -are- digital-only lenses, primarily for the Four-Thirds system (Olympus; FT is a different mount, not OM) and wide-angle lenses for other DSLR systems.
My 2003-vintage-technology DSLR is a splash-proof body, with not outrageously expensive splashproofed lenses, with an anti-dust system (no dust issues for the 2yrs I've had mine... and I change lenses pretty often), and has a built-in pixel mapping feature for dealing with hot pixels. Not that I've ever had to activate the pixel mapping, either.
A non-DSLR's LCD shows you something like the shot would have looked like... had you taken it before you actually did. They also are bounded by not-outrageously-high frame rates. These two factors help you miss shots.
They also require a sensor design which supports live video; traditional DSLRs use sensors which take advantage of -not- needing to do this to have more circuitry for capturing photons per unit area of sensor. Live video also affects power consumption, which affects heat, which in turn affects imaging noise... although this factor has improved in recent generations.
That's the catch. If you want a superzoom camera that is actually compact, you pretty much need a smaller sensor.
In good light, that may be perfectly acceptable.
In bad light -- well, for instance I've been shooting outdoor softball, after sunset, lit only by field lights. If I don't want motion blur, and don't want to potentially distract a player with a flash (and I doubt my 4xAA, GN 50m @ ISO 100 flash will reach the outfield...), I'm going to be using ISO 1600 or 3200. That's not going to be pretty on a small-sensor camera.
Tribunals only do their work when the ruler's actually brought down -- be it by an invasion, coup d'etat or popular uprising.
Pres. Hussein's most obvious error was invading and completely annexing a country (a fairly unusual step these days, with most disputes being over specific regions but not whole countries) with substantial oil exports, and then spending the next decade stubbornly poking the eyes of his conquerors while irreversibly failing to comply with specified resolutions (non-verifiable destruction of unknown quantities of proscribed materials -- this could never be undone, and was explicitly prohibited). War was probably inevitable after that, although timing was uncertain. Might have been earlier if the attempt to assassinate Pres. GHW Bush and the Kuwaiti Emir had succeeded -- failure bought Pres. Hussein a bit more time for continued risk-taking.
The world isn't lacking in despots, even somewhat unpredictably paranoid and homicidal ones. Most of them don't get tossed out by external forces. Some of them even die natural deaths while still powerful and wealthy, giving birth to new 419 scams.
There is a possible benefit in a heavily multilingual society, if the machine can be programmed with instructions in a variety of languages and can record selections on a generic ballot. That saves the problem of having to estimate precisely how many ballots in English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, et al are necessary.
A ballot has no security if anybody can walk in and vote no matter how many times they've already voted or whether they, in fact, have the privilege of voting in that district.
Your indignation does not outweigh the compelling interest in having an election which is not completely trivial to defraud in ways that, by now, are absolutely time-tested.
Interviews of self-selected respondents on an online forum, many of whom are largely anonymous in the absence of the site administrator's willingness to disclose identities (if they even -have- anything more than a possible throw-away e-mail address), would seem to be an invitation to malicious jokers.
While there's going to be some likelihood of deception in an in-person interview, at least one might obtain an identify for confirming such basics as the respondents actually having been married and divorced, as those should be matters of public record. In addition, one can restrict it to cases where one can also interview the spouse. Identifying the spouse of a pseudonymous respondent is... tricky.
When you're looking at issues that do not have an obvious, objective, experimentally or mathematically provable answer, it's hardly unusual for ad hominems to be tossed based on a researcher's background. See the 'who funds them' response here to any study that questions, say, Linux TCO, or the allegations that Lott's work can be discredited due to industry support for the endowment that helps fund his academic position. Conversely, even "peer review" can give shoddy work a pass based on the author's reputation; see Alan Sokal's successful publication of a deliberately impenetrable, incomprehensible, nonsensical hoax paper in "Social Text", for instance.
I notice, for instance, that you seem to lob an ad hominem based on a completely unsupported assumption that the author referred to is ignorant of the thesis committee process.
The bias issue is particularly true for studies involving surveys, interviews and other techniques which may be prone to biases in subject sampling bias, choice and phrasing of questions, et al.
Oh, and by the way -- thesis committee members other than the student's advisor do not necessarily have a very in-depth awareness of the topic. Committee members, after all, tend to have their own students to worry about first; they may not have even seen the manuscript until a month or so beforehand.
Care != understand. Care != care to understand, even.
How many people who rant about GM, for instance, even know the difference betweeen a genotype and a phenotype; know that there are non-Mendelian genetically linked traits; could coherently compare gene modification through selective breeding with chimeras; or can describe what sort of molecule a gene's base pairs encodes?
And that's all basic, well-defined science (well, not so much the chimera-vs-breeding issue, which is a bit of semantics) -- not something more complicated like the ramifications of agricultural subsidies and import tariffs. Care, people might. Even attempt to understand, let alone succeed, no.
Hell, I can't tell you the number of times I've had to correct people on this site who vehemently argue about intellectual property, but who believe myths regarding "abandonware", or who think that broadcasting something makes it public domain, or who think that non-commercial use always means non-infringing, or so forth. Or see reporting about firearms, and see a reporter miseducating people by describing every banana-mag semi-automatic rifle as an AK-47, or show video footage of a clearly burst-capable weapon while talking about the AWB (which focused on semiautomatics with certain "military-style" features and 15+-round mags; fully-automatics and selective-fire weapons are covered under older and still-active legislation ex. 1934 NFA... facts that any journalist could trivially discover with minutes of searching, if they cared to).
I think it depends upon the qualifications required. I know of an embedded software company, for instance, whose requirements are fairly selective due to the nature of the work, and they've tended to recruit heavily but reject most applicants. It's not a bad time for data miners, too, as far as I can tell. Experience with Oracle or Sybase administration isn't universal, either.
On the other hand, if the cards one holds are relatively common, like some basic imperative programming languages and perhaps some web development with ECMAScript, then looking competitive is going to be somewhat harder.
And mere UNIX/Linux system administration; well, well-designed machines don't NEED -that- many sysadmins, and having run a Linux box in college is hardly distinctive among computer science students, I'd suspect.
The whole point of copyright is temporary exclusivity. To prove that the RIAA is going further than the law specifically allows, would essentially require proving that the RIAA is going after music services which are not actually involving music owned by the RIAA's members... or that the RIAA compelled LimeWire to use RIAA music. If LimeWire can't prove either point, their suit should probably be tossed out, since it's a case of copyright being used precisely as designed.
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Not for sporting events, movies, or other productions that huge portions of the audience would only want to see once.
It's mostly entertainment. How often would you want to re-watch the same video? How many people would bother to see the same Super Bowl over and over?
It does make sense to minimize the time zone difference involved.
For instance, if there has to be an urgent phone call between a CEO of an oil services company, and the head of a sovereign nation that retains both de facto and de jure control over resources that are increasingly difficult to find across the world, and somebody is going to be inconvenienced by the time -- I don't think it's going to be the emir who's getting woken up at 3AM to talk business unless it's really, really an emergency.
A tax filer who has debt might see his tax refund garnished -- for certain kinds of debt, at least. One of the examples most likely to be combined with bitterness would be non-payment of child support.
The nature of mathematics and the sciences also makes it far easier for students to figure out when they're being fed bullshit by a teacher who doesn't actually understand the material, or for somebody who really knows what he's doing to get a far more lucrative position outside of education.
Some wiseguy in the class asks you whether or not it's possible to conclusively prove or disprove every possible conjecture given a standard set of postulates and axioms -- the fact that there IS in answer lying in the incompleteness theorem that the wiseguy might well have heard of gives him an easy way to show you up. Mathematics also requires a good grounding in formal logic, not sophistry -- and consulting an answer book while going through even a simple proof like that of Pythagoras's Theorem or that there's an infinite number of prime numbers is pretty poor.
Likewise, a physics teacher is going to be expected to know experimental history and to fluently explain *why* things behave as they are, and again the nature of it makes it easy for students to test you. If you can't remember off the bat what Rutherford tested or how a random lab apparatus works or otherwise answer the inevitable torrent of "why" questions, you're going to flounder.
Conversely, it's going to be far easier to "teach" _Antigone_ or spend time having the class read through _Macbeth_, so long as you do little bit of a brush-up on archaic diction and a little bit of history. After all, there's a damn good chance your students will be just going by the Cliff's Notes, anyway, and the rest are going to have a harder time contradicting you. After all, you're going to be grading their essays through your subjective lens, and they know it.
That might depend on whether German law offers anything like the Safe Harbor provision of the United States' DMCA. Yes, in the US a formal complaint from the copyright holder can be required, and even then takedown need not be automatic (if the uploader positively affirms that it is not infringing, if memory serves)... but that has no bearing on what a German court might rule unless some treaty says otherwise.
It might be argued that there should be a provision that, should the service be notified and the content actually be shown to be infringing, that there should be a burden on the service to take reasonable steps to prevent a repeat occurrence. I don't remember there actually being such a provision, but I might simply have missed it.
It wouldn't be surprising if one reason why many artists don't make much money is that most of the money is made from the recordings of relatively few artists. There are probably numerous artists whose market value is far less than they think it is, just as there are many who think that they're good authors but aren't necessarily marketable. Clearly, the ones at the very top have enough leverage to get quite a bit of money -- enough for all the bling, cocaine, hookers and bail money they might need. The rest may simply be finding out the financial reality behind why the vast majority of the working population isn't supporting itself through hobbies and arts, but through work that they quite possibly don't love to do.
It might also be noted that those copyright protections are the only reason why a distribution and marketing company would offer anything to an artist. Those rights are what are being sold. Lower the value of those rights, and you lower the value. If one goes to an extreme suggesting that such things as "distribution of content should be free without license", you likely will see obvious abuses such as distribution houses attempting to obliterate each others' markets by distributing competitors' content at no charge (or at marginal cost, if that's permitted). That would radically devalue for-profit distribution rights.
That's only true where AT&T is the only affordable game in town; otherwise, they lose customers. And the current trend seems to be the government slowly chipping away at the concept of local communications monopolies by allowing different companies to play in each others' markets.
If there's a monopoly, then some form of neutrality makes sense -- but I would not extend this protection to ISPs whose traffic is deemed harmful, as blocking their traffic is one of the few ways to exert leverage on the large number of bulletproof foreign spamhouses. If kornet.kr or hananet wishes to remain a spam-infested hellhole, I see no obligation to carry any of their traffic whatsoever.
I seem to recall that there is a legal obligation to report certain classes of suspicious activity if they become aware of it -- notably, child pornography. They may not be obligated to actively search for it, but if they spot indications that a user is involved in that while analyzing their logs...
A cynic might suggest that there is a difference between criticizing a president who is largely a loudmouthed figurehead, and something more substantial such as criticizing the Guardian Council or the very structure of the Iranian government in so far as said Council has the most of the actual power. The Council may be happy with letting Ahmadinejad take some heat, if it makes themselves look more reasonable and their own power is unquestioned.
I'm not entirely sure that covering a street in partly digested food is a better alternative, from a public-health point of view. And why would be being made to vomit gain any less sympathy or resentment?
If the march is actively interfering with others -- for instance, by deliberately snarling traffic in contravention of existing laws -- then they're trying to enforce their will through coercion.
What, you think the police are going to take Polaroid snaps of all the troublemakers, and compare them with faces when they charge an unruly mob with batons? That it's easy to pick out the problems in a melee when people may be running around? Or that rubber bullets don't ricochet or miss -- and sometimes kill in the process, given that they're rubber-coated bullets?
People also can and do suffer long-term injury from batons, rubber bullets, and Tasers. This... less likely.
Nikon DSLRs still use F-mount. Canon DSLRs use EF mount, so AE lenses would require an adapter of some sort, if that was ever made. *shrug*
There -are- digital-only lenses, primarily for the Four-Thirds system (Olympus; FT is a different mount, not OM) and wide-angle lenses for other DSLR systems.
My 2003-vintage-technology DSLR is a splash-proof body, with not outrageously expensive splashproofed lenses, with an anti-dust system (no dust issues for the 2yrs I've had mine... and I change lenses pretty often), and has a built-in pixel mapping feature for dealing with hot pixels. Not that I've ever had to activate the pixel mapping, either.
A non-DSLR's LCD shows you something like the shot would have looked like... had you taken it before you actually did. They also are bounded by not-outrageously-high frame rates. These two factors help you miss shots.
They also require a sensor design which supports live video; traditional DSLRs use sensors which take advantage of -not- needing to do this to have more circuitry for capturing photons per unit area of sensor. Live video also affects power consumption, which affects heat, which in turn affects imaging noise... although this factor has improved in recent generations.
That's the catch. If you want a superzoom camera that is actually compact, you pretty much need a smaller sensor.
In good light, that may be perfectly acceptable.
In bad light -- well, for instance I've been shooting outdoor softball, after sunset, lit only by field lights. If I don't want motion blur, and don't want to potentially distract a player with a flash (and I doubt my 4xAA, GN 50m @ ISO 100 flash will reach the outfield...), I'm going to be using ISO 1600 or 3200. That's not going to be pretty on a small-sensor camera.
The investigation of the UN Oil-for-Food program certainly revealed widespread corruption.
If you don't believe that, perhaps you just received a rather large financial gift from a not particularly well-off aunt in Cyprus.
Tribunals only do their work when the ruler's actually brought down -- be it by an invasion, coup d'etat or popular uprising.
Pres. Hussein's most obvious error was invading and completely annexing a country (a fairly unusual step these days, with most disputes being over specific regions but not whole countries) with substantial oil exports, and then spending the next decade stubbornly poking the eyes of his conquerors while irreversibly failing to comply with specified resolutions (non-verifiable destruction of unknown quantities of proscribed materials -- this could never be undone, and was explicitly prohibited). War was probably inevitable after that, although timing was uncertain. Might have been earlier if the attempt to assassinate Pres. GHW Bush and the Kuwaiti Emir had succeeded -- failure bought Pres. Hussein a bit more time for continued risk-taking.
The world isn't lacking in despots, even somewhat unpredictably paranoid and homicidal ones. Most of them don't get tossed out by external forces. Some of them even die natural deaths while still powerful and wealthy, giving birth to new 419 scams.
Literacy in the appropriate language.
There is a possible benefit in a heavily multilingual society, if the machine can be programmed with instructions in a variety of languages and can record selections on a generic ballot. That saves the problem of having to estimate precisely how many ballots in English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, et al are necessary.
A ballot has no security if anybody can walk in and vote no matter how many times they've already voted or whether they, in fact, have the privilege of voting in that district.
Your indignation does not outweigh the compelling interest in having an election which is not completely trivial to defraud in ways that, by now, are absolutely time-tested.
Interviews of self-selected respondents on an online forum, many of whom are largely anonymous in the absence of the site administrator's willingness to disclose identities (if they even -have- anything more than a possible throw-away e-mail address), would seem to be an invitation to malicious jokers.
While there's going to be some likelihood of deception in an in-person interview, at least one might obtain an identify for confirming such basics as the respondents actually having been married and divorced, as those should be matters of public record. In addition, one can restrict it to cases where one can also interview the spouse. Identifying the spouse of a pseudonymous respondent is... tricky.
When you're looking at issues that do not have an obvious, objective, experimentally or mathematically provable answer, it's hardly unusual for ad hominems to be tossed based on a researcher's background. See the 'who funds them' response here to any study that questions, say, Linux TCO, or the allegations that Lott's work can be discredited due to industry support for the endowment that helps fund his academic position. Conversely, even "peer review" can give shoddy work a pass based on the author's reputation; see Alan Sokal's successful publication of a deliberately impenetrable, incomprehensible, nonsensical hoax paper in "Social Text", for instance.
I notice, for instance, that you seem to lob an ad hominem based on a completely unsupported assumption that the author referred to is ignorant of the thesis committee process.
The bias issue is particularly true for studies involving surveys, interviews and other techniques which may be prone to biases in subject sampling bias, choice and phrasing of questions, et al.
Oh, and by the way -- thesis committee members other than the student's advisor do not necessarily have a very in-depth awareness of the topic. Committee members, after all, tend to have their own students to worry about first; they may not have even seen the manuscript until a month or so beforehand.
Care != understand. Care != care to understand, even.
How many people who rant about GM, for instance, even know the difference betweeen a genotype and a phenotype; know that there are non-Mendelian genetically linked traits; could coherently compare gene modification through selective breeding with chimeras; or can describe what sort of molecule a gene's base pairs encodes?
And that's all basic, well-defined science (well, not so much the chimera-vs-breeding issue, which is a bit of semantics) -- not something more complicated like the ramifications of agricultural subsidies and import tariffs. Care, people might. Even attempt to understand, let alone succeed, no.
Hell, I can't tell you the number of times I've had to correct people on this site who vehemently argue about intellectual property, but who believe myths regarding "abandonware", or who think that broadcasting something makes it public domain, or who think that non-commercial use always means non-infringing, or so forth. Or see reporting about firearms, and see a reporter miseducating people by describing every banana-mag semi-automatic rifle as an AK-47, or show video footage of a clearly burst-capable weapon while talking about the AWB (which focused on semiautomatics with certain "military-style" features and 15+-round mags; fully-automatics and selective-fire weapons are covered under older and still-active legislation ex. 1934 NFA... facts that any journalist could trivially discover with minutes of searching, if they cared to).
I think it depends upon the qualifications required. I know of an embedded software company, for instance, whose requirements are fairly selective due to the nature of the work, and they've tended to recruit heavily but reject most applicants. It's not a bad time for data miners, too, as far as I can tell. Experience with Oracle or Sybase administration isn't universal, either.
On the other hand, if the cards one holds are relatively common, like some basic imperative programming languages and perhaps some web development with ECMAScript, then looking competitive is going to be somewhat harder.
And mere UNIX/Linux system administration; well, well-designed machines don't NEED -that- many sysadmins, and having run a Linux box in college is hardly distinctive among computer science students, I'd suspect.
The whole point of copyright is temporary exclusivity. To prove that the RIAA is going further than the law specifically allows, would essentially require proving that the RIAA is going after music services which are not actually involving music owned by the RIAA's members... or that the RIAA compelled LimeWire to use RIAA music. If LimeWire can't prove either point, their suit should probably be tossed out, since it's a case of copyright being used precisely as designed.