Those same US politicians see the US as the ruler of the world. The present US national security policy (originally drafted by the PNAC) is based on the same presumptions. Go read it. They aren't coy about it. Not at all.
The funny part is they have sold their power to China for a few peices of silver......and that will become ever more obvious in the decades ahead.
Critics of bio-fuels pointed out a long time ago that you can't grow enough to make much difference to fuels, but the effect of displacing food production would be to push food prices up and / or create local / regional food deficits.
This is now coming to pass, as predicted......with a loaf of bread now over $4 where I live and most food items now much more expensive than last year.....in tandem with higher food prices.
We should consider banning bio-fuels as socially irresponsible.
I recently changed to the 1.3litre car and I now spend the same on gas as I used to back when it was half the price it is today. If the US car fleet were to downsize similarly, gas usage / demand could fall by over 30% within a year.
Conservation makes more sense than continued wastage and displacing food production to support continued wastage.
The usual company "agreement" (sign or work elsewhere) says they own anything and everything you do while you work for them. Some may limit themselves to the area you work in or that the company deals in, but I've seen agreements that essentially any idea you while working for them is theirs.
I tried to alter one of these and the pressure to conform was intense and not at all subtle.
North America seems backward in most respects for voice and txt charges on cells. In the rest of the world, only the caller pays for a voice call. The receiver pays nothing. Where I live (NZ), txts are 20 cents each (NZ$) for the sender only....though almost anyone who txts regularly is on a plan of some sort (eg: $10 / month for 2000 txts or similar)...which works out at barely 2 cents / message....and that for the sender only.
I have two daughters in their late teens and I'm just hsy of 50. We have at least one thing in common: We don't like most of the music now on offer. So why would be buy it? We have bought fewer records this year than any other BECAUSE we just don't like it.
As those baby boombers age and the young folks find little - as a group - that attracts them in large numbers, sales certainly WILL fall.
I'm not saying there is no good music. I'm saying that the proportion is so low we / I can't be bothered listening to the radio or wading through the TV music videos to find the few bits we do like.
Hip hop? Just another vid with writhing female dancers (better with the sound off) while the men slope around looking stupid and sounding like monosyllabic dolts.
Pay for that? Why?
The whole DRM construct seems to be based around the assumption the user is guilty and all imposition or error must be put up with and no one is accountable for it. Apple (or any vendor) shold be required to compensate - in cash - users who suffer the loss of access to REAL function they have paid for.....as they have suffered REAL losses....while there is no proof that a downloader would have paid for any of the content s/he downloads.
I recently went through the 440+ VINYL LPs I bought in the 1980s....and there would be perhaps 50 LPs there I would have *really* bought had I heard all that what was on them before buying them. I just didn't have the time to stand around in record stores for hours and hours listening to stuff I then wasn't going to buy.
These days, when I buy music, I *know* want to pay for it.
The issue here appears to be backward compatibility. If you write an in-house application that is important to you and only works with v6.102 of another piece of software......and then find that every other version of that piece of externally-sourced software breaks your in-house application.....you've got a problem and it could prove to be an expensive one.
Better to avoid writing such "fussy" applications at all.....though having done it I agree that you need to keep it running until you've addressed the underlying stupidity that put you in this position in the first place.
Smoking? Who would hire people with a time-wasting addiction like that? Read in a story a week ago that in Canada today only 17.5% of adults smoke regularly. Well down on the 28% of a couple of decades ago. Good riddance to the last 17.5%. The smell alone is bad enough....sitting next to one of them on a bus on a wet day can be a real gross-out.....and they PAY to stink like that!!!
An old story. Trends versus anecdotal events. Broadly, more and more US students are falling below the optimal acheivement curve in math and science, but there are still large numbers, in absolute terms, who are not.
Plus, a lot of R & D in the US is done by immigrants who have come from other places where they received excellent education.....despite perhaps being in the third world. The US benefits hugely from the tax-funded education of people from other countries. It's one of the ways the US has been staving off the effects of the failure of its own education systems in many parts of the US. At the same time, there are still many schools in the US committed to providing excellent, reality-based (no creationism or other faith-based mumbo-jumbo) education in the sciences.
....that creationism nonsense has suckered so many. I used to be very tolerant of religion: believe what you like as loong as you don't inflict it on me. But now, I see blind faith as the true enemy of reason and truth and i don't care which blind faith you're talking about. They're all dangerous once the "faithful" abandon reality in favour of whatever nonsense they choose to believe. Look at where blind faith too Bush and his followers. They were SURE there were WMD in Iraq......never mind there was no proof of any WMD. They just KNEW. The same goes for creationism, where the incredulity of the believers is used as "proof" to support their contention. "The universe is so complex, it can ONLY have been created!". Crap.
I remember the hype around the first Fischer / Spassky meeting in 1970....and it was probably the beginning of the end of my confidence in the mainstream media. It's just a game for chrissake......yet you'd think the fate of the world hung on the outcome judging by the press at the time. Even though i was only 13 then, and living in a small city in northern Ontario, Canada, this seemed more than weird to me.
I have to agree with you. This is confirmation that the President (provided he is a Republican) can break the law and not fear any comeback at all. Bus hahs lied, tortured, murdered, destroyed evidence, perverted and subverted justice (by appointing obedient cronies as Attorney General). The media have snoozed through it all and a large chunk of the American people have been complicit and most of the rest have been negligent - either voting for him or not voting at all.
You can't really blame Intel. Every corporation that relies on sales staff incented to meet sales targets (or lose their jobs) would have behaved the same way. If the OLPC element wasn't build into the sales plan and rewarded accordingly, then the OLPC thing never stood a chance.......and that would be true of ANY company, not just Intel.
Sales: Where Everest gets taller every year and Edmund Hillary was the newbie who bailed out after year One.
This is why I haven't seen many movies this year and don't plan to apend much money on Hollywood for the forseeable suture. They just make you feel bad about their product. I have so many choices as to how to spend my time, Hollywood's product gets demoted low enough I rarely feel the need for it.
Congress can't amend the Constitution so they and the Executive branch simply ignore it hire lawyers who will claim that black is white and that what is illegal isn't really.
Former US AG Gonzales anyone? This was his main claim to fame - redefining the Constitution out of existence in practical terms.
The 4th Amendment supposedly outlaws the warrantless, causeless searches and seizures that daily events.
"Bleeding hearts" have no issues with punishing the guilty, provided, of course, that you aren't imposing sentences totally out of proportion to the crime committed. The death sentence for stealing a loaf of bread, for example, would rightly attract criticism.
More likely the generals running Thailand have banned Youtube because the deposed Prime Minister, Shinawatra, has been posting vids there for Thais to see. The defacing of the King's image is either an excuse for closing access to Shina watra's vids or a pretext created by an agent provocateur for the coup government.
That must have been a long time ago as I have been buying the long-life min-flouros for the past 7 years (mainly Philips brand) and never seen the behaviour you're describing. Those bulbs has lasted me an average of 5 years each.....MORE than paying themselves along with the fact I don't have to get the ladder out for literally years to change a bulb on high ceilings.
Huge numbers of people download TV shows because they can't see them any other way. Maybe the cable company locally doesn't carry them. Maybe there is no cable company at all. Maybe the local broadcaster buys the rights and then sits on the show for a year or several (like TVNZ did with ST:TNG), happy that the competition didn't get it first. Bugger the viewers. Maybe the local broadcaster can't be arsed showing ALL the episodes (say 8 instead of 24) or all of any given episode (46 mins instead of 50 - butchering the storyline). Maybe the downloaded ones are in stereo sound while the local broadcast is in mono. Maybe you live in a rural area and the free-to-air broadcast has nasty bursts of static making it almost unlistenable....while your broadband connection is ready and waiting. Maybe you hate wasting time on ads and those downloaded shows are 10-15 minutes shorter without them.
Maybe all of the above. Welcome to my world. Watching TV shows downloaded removes ALL of the above hassles....and I have suffered every single one of them at one time or another and most of them at any given time.
I've been happily using the rt2400 chipset from RaLink with my Linux systems for a couple of years. OK, it's only 802.11b, but it works and its rock solid....My Internet connection is 3.5Mbits and the WLAN is 11Mbits.....so even with several machine online accessing the Net at the same time and printing, you really don't notice the 'slower" speed. The only time it really is a pain is when I'm trying to copy GBs between systems....at which point patience IS a virtue. It happens....just slower than I might like.
I've spent some time in Malaysia and live in the A/P region. What you say fits with my own experience. It's a shame that Dr. Mahathir Mohammed had to resign. He was able to think freely and design effective policies while governments in Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere just follow the same consultants who (mis)advise government globally. Dr. Mahathir's handling of the 1998 Asian meltdown by restricting sp[eculative currency flows through exchange controls, was contrary to the "received wisdom" and worked well, while other countries who followed that received wisdom and let their currencies continue to freely float saw their economies seriously impacted for the worse.
I was thinking of the higher end of the market, yeah......and $500 could either guarantee one hour with a goddess or 4 hours with someone slightly less attractive, but probably much more fun.:-)
Criminal gangs should be able to offer some very "creative" fringe benefit packages. You want $200,000 a year? Or maybe $150,000 and a two hookers / week?
Tax that!
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Those same US politicians see the US as the ruler of the world. The present US national security policy (originally drafted by the PNAC) is based on the same presumptions. Go read it. They aren't coy about it. Not at all. The funny part is they have sold their power to China for a few peices of silver......and that will become ever more obvious in the decades ahead.
Critics of bio-fuels pointed out a long time ago that you can't grow enough to make much difference to fuels, but the effect of displacing food production would be to push food prices up and / or create local / regional food deficits. This is now coming to pass, as predicted......with a loaf of bread now over $4 where I live and most food items now much more expensive than last year.....in tandem with higher food prices. We should consider banning bio-fuels as socially irresponsible. I recently changed to the 1.3litre car and I now spend the same on gas as I used to back when it was half the price it is today. If the US car fleet were to downsize similarly, gas usage / demand could fall by over 30% within a year. Conservation makes more sense than continued wastage and displacing food production to support continued wastage.
The usual company "agreement" (sign or work elsewhere) says they own anything and everything you do while you work for them. Some may limit themselves to the area you work in or that the company deals in, but I've seen agreements that essentially any idea you while working for them is theirs. I tried to alter one of these and the pressure to conform was intense and not at all subtle.
North America seems backward in most respects for voice and txt charges on cells. In the rest of the world, only the caller pays for a voice call. The receiver pays nothing. Where I live (NZ), txts are 20 cents each (NZ$) for the sender only....though almost anyone who txts regularly is on a plan of some sort (eg: $10 / month for 2000 txts or similar)...which works out at barely 2 cents / message....and that for the sender only.
I have two daughters in their late teens and I'm just hsy of 50. We have at least one thing in common: We don't like most of the music now on offer. So why would be buy it? We have bought fewer records this year than any other BECAUSE we just don't like it. As those baby boombers age and the young folks find little - as a group - that attracts them in large numbers, sales certainly WILL fall. I'm not saying there is no good music. I'm saying that the proportion is so low we / I can't be bothered listening to the radio or wading through the TV music videos to find the few bits we do like. Hip hop? Just another vid with writhing female dancers (better with the sound off) while the men slope around looking stupid and sounding like monosyllabic dolts. Pay for that? Why?
The whole DRM construct seems to be based around the assumption the user is guilty and all imposition or error must be put up with and no one is accountable for it. Apple (or any vendor) shold be required to compensate - in cash - users who suffer the loss of access to REAL function they have paid for.....as they have suffered REAL losses....while there is no proof that a downloader would have paid for any of the content s/he downloads. I recently went through the 440+ VINYL LPs I bought in the 1980s....and there would be perhaps 50 LPs there I would have *really* bought had I heard all that what was on them before buying them. I just didn't have the time to stand around in record stores for hours and hours listening to stuff I then wasn't going to buy. These days, when I buy music, I *know* want to pay for it.
The issue here appears to be backward compatibility. If you write an in-house application that is important to you and only works with v6.102 of another piece of software......and then find that every other version of that piece of externally-sourced software breaks your in-house application.....you've got a problem and it could prove to be an expensive one. Better to avoid writing such "fussy" applications at all.....though having done it I agree that you need to keep it running until you've addressed the underlying stupidity that put you in this position in the first place.
Smoking? Who would hire people with a time-wasting addiction like that? Read in a story a week ago that in Canada today only 17.5% of adults smoke regularly. Well down on the 28% of a couple of decades ago. Good riddance to the last 17.5%. The smell alone is bad enough....sitting next to one of them on a bus on a wet day can be a real gross-out.....and they PAY to stink like that!!!
An old story. Trends versus anecdotal events. Broadly, more and more US students are falling below the optimal acheivement curve in math and science, but there are still large numbers, in absolute terms, who are not. Plus, a lot of R & D in the US is done by immigrants who have come from other places where they received excellent education.....despite perhaps being in the third world. The US benefits hugely from the tax-funded education of people from other countries. It's one of the ways the US has been staving off the effects of the failure of its own education systems in many parts of the US. At the same time, there are still many schools in the US committed to providing excellent, reality-based (no creationism or other faith-based mumbo-jumbo) education in the sciences.
....that creationism nonsense has suckered so many. I used to be very tolerant of religion: believe what you like as loong as you don't inflict it on me. But now, I see blind faith as the true enemy of reason and truth and i don't care which blind faith you're talking about. They're all dangerous once the "faithful" abandon reality in favour of whatever nonsense they choose to believe. Look at where blind faith too Bush and his followers. They were SURE there were WMD in Iraq......never mind there was no proof of any WMD. They just KNEW. The same goes for creationism, where the incredulity of the believers is used as "proof" to support their contention. "The universe is so complex, it can ONLY have been created!". Crap.
I remember the hype around the first Fischer / Spassky meeting in 1970....and it was probably the beginning of the end of my confidence in the mainstream media. It's just a game for chrissake......yet you'd think the fate of the world hung on the outcome judging by the press at the time. Even though i was only 13 then, and living in a small city in northern Ontario, Canada, this seemed more than weird to me.
I have to agree with you. This is confirmation that the President (provided he is a Republican) can break the law and not fear any comeback at all. Bus hahs lied, tortured, murdered, destroyed evidence, perverted and subverted justice (by appointing obedient cronies as Attorney General). The media have snoozed through it all and a large chunk of the American people have been complicit and most of the rest have been negligent - either voting for him or not voting at all.
You can't really blame Intel. Every corporation that relies on sales staff incented to meet sales targets (or lose their jobs) would have behaved the same way. If the OLPC element wasn't build into the sales plan and rewarded accordingly, then the OLPC thing never stood a chance.......and that would be true of ANY company, not just Intel. Sales: Where Everest gets taller every year and Edmund Hillary was the newbie who bailed out after year One.
This is why I haven't seen many movies this year and don't plan to apend much money on Hollywood for the forseeable suture. They just make you feel bad about their product. I have so many choices as to how to spend my time, Hollywood's product gets demoted low enough I rarely feel the need for it.
Congress can't amend the Constitution so they and the Executive branch simply ignore it hire lawyers who will claim that black is white and that what is illegal isn't really. Former US AG Gonzales anyone? This was his main claim to fame - redefining the Constitution out of existence in practical terms. The 4th Amendment supposedly outlaws the warrantless, causeless searches and seizures that daily events.
"Bleeding hearts" have no issues with punishing the guilty, provided, of course, that you aren't imposing sentences totally out of proportion to the crime committed. The death sentence for stealing a loaf of bread, for example, would rightly attract criticism.
More likely the generals running Thailand have banned Youtube because the deposed Prime Minister, Shinawatra, has been posting vids there for Thais to see. The defacing of the King's image is either an excuse for closing access to Shina watra's vids or a pretext created by an agent provocateur for the coup government.
That must have been a long time ago as I have been buying the long-life min-flouros for the past 7 years (mainly Philips brand) and never seen the behaviour you're describing. Those bulbs has lasted me an average of 5 years each.....MORE than paying themselves along with the fact I don't have to get the ladder out for literally years to change a bulb on high ceilings.
Huge numbers of people download TV shows because they can't see them any other way. Maybe the cable company locally doesn't carry them. Maybe there is no cable company at all. Maybe the local broadcaster buys the rights and then sits on the show for a year or several (like TVNZ did with ST:TNG), happy that the competition didn't get it first. Bugger the viewers. Maybe the local broadcaster can't be arsed showing ALL the episodes (say 8 instead of 24) or all of any given episode (46 mins instead of 50 - butchering the storyline). Maybe the downloaded ones are in stereo sound while the local broadcast is in mono. Maybe you live in a rural area and the free-to-air broadcast has nasty bursts of static making it almost unlistenable....while your broadband connection is ready and waiting. Maybe you hate wasting time on ads and those downloaded shows are 10-15 minutes shorter without them. Maybe all of the above. Welcome to my world. Watching TV shows downloaded removes ALL of the above hassles....and I have suffered every single one of them at one time or another and most of them at any given time.
I've been happily using the rt2400 chipset from RaLink with my Linux systems for a couple of years. OK, it's only 802.11b, but it works and its rock solid....My Internet connection is 3.5Mbits and the WLAN is 11Mbits.....so even with several machine online accessing the Net at the same time and printing, you really don't notice the 'slower" speed. The only time it really is a pain is when I'm trying to copy GBs between systems....at which point patience IS a virtue. It happens....just slower than I might like.
G W Bush is really just a representative of the people who still deny there is a problem or that people are in any way responsible for it.
People LIKE G W Bush definitely HAVE blocked, sidetracked and suspended efforts to address climate change over the past 20 years or so.
It is right and fitting that he be held up as a model of a politician you do NOT want. No one needs liars and deniers.
I've spent some time in Malaysia and live in the A/P region. What you say fits with my own experience. It's a shame that Dr. Mahathir Mohammed had to resign. He was able to think freely and design effective policies while governments in Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere just follow the same consultants who (mis)advise government globally. Dr. Mahathir's handling of the 1998 Asian meltdown by restricting sp[eculative currency flows through exchange controls, was contrary to the "received wisdom" and worked well, while other countries who followed that received wisdom and let their currencies continue to freely float saw their economies seriously impacted for the worse.
Malaysia....for this policy to change, something was traded. No doubt about that. :-)
I was thinking of the higher end of the market, yeah......and $500 could either guarantee one hour with a goddess or 4 hours with someone slightly less attractive, but probably much more fun. :-)
Criminal gangs should be able to offer some very "creative" fringe benefit packages. You want $200,000 a year? Or maybe $150,000 and a two hookers / week? Tax that!