Not a single one of those students voted for that rule.
And I didn't vote for income tax, but that doesn't mean the IRS don't come a-knockin'.
Whether you personally voted for a rule has essentially no bearing on whether it applies to you.
Why should they stop doing what they want anyway?
They don't have to, but that doesn't make the consequences of their actions go away.
They really were forced against their will to sign that document to do some thing that they wanted to do.
You've got a pretty weird definition of free will.
The students wanted to be on a sports team. The school said they had to sign a document to be on the team. The students chose to sign that document.
Just because that was the only way they could do something they wanted doesn't make it "against their will". That's as stupid as saying a nightclub is taking my money "against my will" if I choose to go there, or that MacDonald's is taking my money "against my will" if I want a Big Mac.
The school didn't hold a gun to any kid's head to force them to join a team. Joining - and signing - was voluntary. Playing high school football ain't a right, no matter how important some people think it is.
The Republican result is for the same reason as the Democratic result - a correlation between city size, machine-countedness, and voting pattern.
If you take a look at the two largest cities (Manchester and Nashua, ~10% of the total vote), Romney got 35% of the vote, vs. 25% state-wide. Those two cities alone are enough to give Romney 2700 "extra" votes, or 15-20% of the machine-vs-hand "discrepancy".
Large towns (> 5,000 votes) heavily favoured Clinton. Large towns (> 5,000 votes) were all machine-counted.
Based on that, it's not entirely surprising that machine-counted areas favoured Clinton - both were positively correlated with town size. The original analysis should have noticed that, but didn't since (a) it asked a slightly different question, and (b) it aggregated the data strangely, so it ended up with a misleading result.
There's an important lesson here: not everything you read online is correct.
So not only do you need to RTFA, you need to think about TFA. (The horror!)
It's important to note that in all these precincts the exit polls agreed with the actual results.
It's also important to note that there's actually a very simple explanation for the results: cities like Clinton.
If you take the cities from TFA (> 5,000 votes, all counted by machine), you get:
Concord: 10,939 votes, 3898 vs. 4367
Derry: 5,230 votes, 2387 vs. 1632
Dover: 7,405 votes, 2901 vs. 2772
Keene: 6,282 votes, 1922 vs. 2553
Londonderry: 5,369 votes, 1958 vs, 1803
Manchester: 20,935 votes, 9492 vs. 6382
Merrimack: 5,478 votes, 2325 vs. 1954
Nashua: 17,160 votes, 7713 vs. 5597
Portsmouth: 6,758 votes, 2368 vs. 2807
Rochester: 5,939 votes, 2682 vs. 1796
Salem: 5,599 votes, 2867 vs. 1508
That sums up to 97,094 votes (1/3 of the total), of which 42% went for Clinton and 34% Obama. If you restrict to just the largest cities (> 15,000 votes, 13% of total), it's 45% to 31%.
So while it's clear that support for Clinton vs. Obama is correlated with machine-counting vs. hand-counting, it's also clear that both of those are correlated with city size, suggesting a much simpler and rather less nefarious underlying common cause. The tables in TFA don't show that simply because of the highly unbalanced manner in which they split up towns into size classes.
(That being said, of course I'd love to see this be the death knell for vote-counting machines which lack a paper trail. Beats me how anyone ever thought those were acceptable; they may be cheaper than hand-counting, but they simply don't do the same job, making a direct price comparison irrelevant. It's like buying a hammer because it's cheaper than a saw.)
If any company could legally crank out knock-off drugs as soon as they'd reverse-engineered them, what would be the incentive to spend large amounts developing a new drug whose costs would take several years of sales to recoup?
You just answered your own question. What would be the incentive to spend time and energy writing posts for no return salary? You just did that.
Rapidly developing new high-impact drugs can't be done by a guy plinking away in his free time. Huge quantities of work - and money - are involved.
The incentive to spend large amounts developing new drugs would be born by those who have aliments they want remedied.
And how does the money get from them to the people who'll do the research? How are you going to avoid the economically-rational strategy of using research paid for by others without paying for it?
Public funding is one way, but are you proposing that governments should be the only source of funding for research? If so, doesn't that come with risks of its own? If not, what is the economic rationale for person X or company Y to spend their own money on a 10-year research project rather than waiting to use the fruits of others' spending for free?
Have you thought this through in pragmatic, rather than idealistic terms? You can't simply wave your hands and assume the money will come from "somewhere".
But basic lemonade stands abound from every field of business. That's all you need to prove that the incentive allegation is false. The amount of research and development resources is IMMATERIAL.
You're simply wrong. R&D is crucial to certain businesses - where do you think those new drugs come from?
You're drawing a false analogy here. A lemonade stand is akin to a drug production company, not a drug development company. Of course R&D costs don't matter if you specify an industry where those costs are zero.
pharmaceutical companies would earn profits, would earn salaries exactly the same way as IT techs, providing a service of research and development. They would be competing for backing of research and development projects on the basis of past success and promising judgments of future delivery.
Service to whom? Who exactly do you expect to pay the hundreds of millions it takes to develop a new drug?
A company? What's their motivation for paying $500M for a new drug when they could reverse-engineer a competitor's drug for $5M?
A wealthy individual? He has no more profit motivation to do it than a company does, and if he needs it for his own ailment, the average 10-year turnaround time will make him likely to look to more readily available forms of treatment?
Joe Average? Why would he? His personal contribution will be less than 1% of 1% of the funds, meaning it makes effectively no difference if he contributes or not, meaning it's economically rational for him to keep his money. Classic free rider problem.
A government? Sure, but only if it's willing to use its tax dollars to subsidize every other country in the world.
Money doesn't just appear because you think it should. None of your arguments contain any economic rationale for why new money would be put up for drug development.
2) It's strongly collectivist. That's not necessarily bad, but it's certainly going to be unpopular with many, many everyday people.
No, it bridges a heretofore insurmountable intellectual gap between the libertarians and the socialists. The hardcore ends of the political spectrum can be united in bringing radical universally beneficial change to the real world.
You realize you're not actually disagreeing with me here, don't you?
FYI, 3E is not without its flaws (it's still D&D) but it is way simpler than what came before. Getting rid of THAC0 alone is a huge help
Certainly, 2ed had THACO. What it did not have was touch AC, flatfooted AC, flatfooted touch AC, ethereal touch AC, flatfooted ethereal touch AC, Dodge AC, Dodge touch AC, ethereal Dodge touch AC, combat expertise +7 fighting defensively with tumbling ethereal Dodge touch AC with cover against giants while Enlarged,...
All of those are potentially different, and that's not even taking into account the bonus to attack with power attack / combat expertise / flanking / favoured enemy / bane / holy / haste / fatigue / charge / Deft Opportunist / iterative attacks / whatever affecting it. That's literally thousands of possible different bonuses to attack for a single character being applied on his roll against dozens of possible AC values for a single target.
And that's simpler than "roll your dice, look up the result on a one-line table"??
D&D3e is many things, but "simpler" is not one of them.
and that's before you consider simplified saving throws (or do you want to remember your saves for PPD, PP, RSW, BW and Spells separately?)
Simpler saves? Quick, how did the saving throw for a 1st-level spell in 2ed compare to a 4th-level spell? Or 6th-level? Or 2nd-level?
All the same. All that matters is the one number written on the character sheet.
Compare that to 3ed, where you need to know the caster's Intelligence (unless it's Wisdom or Charisma or...) plus the level of the spell plus whether he has Spell Focus in that school plus whether the spell is Heightened plus whether he has Red Wizard levels plus...
It's not "simplification" to cut from 5 down to 3xbillion...
(Not to mention that the whole save mechanism in 3ed is terribly broken, since high-level characters are frequently subject to nearly impossible saves to avoid death. Mr. Badass High-Level-Fighter is no fun to play if the first Wizard to come along has a 90% chance per spell to take take control of Badass's mind for weeks at a stretch, with little or nothing he can do about it.)
attacks of opportunity, etc.
Please do explain how attacks of opportunity - a mechanism so famously convoluted that it's frequently played for humour - is simpler than 2ed's mechanism, which was...nothing at all.
You may like how D&D3ed does things more than you liked 2ed, but don't for a moment delude yourself into thinking it's "simpler".
There's a great essay, "Against Intellectual Property," by Brian Martin
While reading his essay, the same thought keeps coming up again and again:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the fact that his argument appears to be significantly based on collectivism means a great number of people are going to very strongly disagree with it, and the odds of it gaining broad acceptance are near zero. This kind of thing:
Given the enormous exploitation of poor peoples built into the world trade system, it would only seem fair for ideas produced in rich countries to be provided at no cost to poor countries.
...simply isn't going to make a broadly persuasive argument.
There's also some sloppy thinking going on:
the whole argument is built on a contradiction, namely that in order to promote the development of ideas, it is necessary to reduce people's freedom to use them.
That's not at all a contradiction; it's simply a tradeoff.
It should be noted that although the scale and pace of intellectual work has increased over the past few centuries, the duration of protection of intellectual property has not been reduced, as might be expected, but greatly increased....This suggests that even if intellectual property can be justified on the basis of fostering new ideas, this is not the driving force behind the present system of copyrights and patents.
As far as I can tell, he has that exactly backwards. Innovation has increased as protection has increased; if anything, that suggests that protection is correlated with innovation.
Correlation is not causation, of course, but the evidence he presents doesn't point the way he says it does. I don't suppose that should be surprising, though, since he appears to make claims about how other people think based on his own personal feelings:
After all, few writers feel a greater incentive to write and publish just because their works are copyrighted for 70 years after they die, rather than just until they die.
Based on what does he make this claim? Has he conducted a representative survey of writers? Or is he simply putting his own beliefs in the mouths of others?
What about all the writers, inventors and others who depend for their livelihood on royalties? First, it should be mentioned that only a very few individuals make enough money from royalties to live on.
Assuming you completely ignore the companies whose very lifeblood is their patented IP. If any company could legally crank out knock-off drugs as soon as they'd reverse-engineered them, what would be the incentive to spend large amounts developing a new drug whose costs would take several years of sales to recoup?
He appears to be talking about all IP as though it were just about music and books.
Jurassic Park and Lost World T-shirts, toys and trinkets could be produced at will.
And an author's most personal creations could be freely used to hawk toilet paper and sex toys.
Creative control is about more than money.
*****
Basically, his argument is long on idealism and short on realism. I see three main fatal flaws with it:
1) It pretends all IP is like copyrights on art. Not all innovation follows that model; new drugs are one example.
2) It's strongly collectivist. That's not necessarily bad, but it's certainly going to be unpopular with many, many everyday people.
3) It makes a number of factual assertions that appear to be based on his personal opinion, rather than actual facts. That makes it easy to dismiss the entire argument as fantasy.
He has some very interesting points, but unfortunately it's preaching to the choir - unless you already agree with him, he's unlikely to be convincing. I agree that there are some very serious problems with current IP legislation, but I disagree that his essay lays out either a sensible or a compelling approach to changing that.
"Another common belief, but the sad reality is that most music has always stunk."
I disagree with this. I personally
That you personally like older music tells us very little about its quality.:)
More importantly, though, your point about the dynamic range of music - while true - clearly doesn't explain the drop in sales since 2000. As you point out, that change was pretty much complete by the early 90s, but sales continued to rise for quite a few years until their peak in 2000, so that change is highly unlikely to be responsible for the drop in sales.
It would be interesting to look at the demographics of the US and see if some particular cohort that tends to buy music peaked in 2000.
Hmm - the number of people in the 20-44 age group is flat between 2000-2010, as is the 5-19 age group; from the looks of the 1990 data, I'd guess that the prime music-buying age groups have stopped growing to a substantial extent. Couple that with the significant increase in people at or near the poverty rate since 2000, and it's hardly surprising that music sales are down.
One of the strengths of science is that there are always people asking weird questions.
Yes, but asking them by way of sloppy logic and weird assertions is not a good way to do it.
Consider, for example, this excerpt from p.8:
One of the mysteries of our world is how every photon of light, every electron and quark, and indeed every point of space itself, seems to just "know" what to do at each moment. The mystery is that these tiniest parts of the universe have no mechanisms or structures by which to make such decisions. Yet if the world is a virtual reality, this problem disappears.
His argument is nonsensical. It's like asking how a hammer "knows" to fall if you lift it up and then let go of it. The standard explanation of this "mystery" is simply that the innate nature of objects makes them behave in a manner we characterize as physical laws. They don't "know" what to do, they simply do, and we describe the result.
He's mixing up causality; particles follow the laws of nature because the laws of nature are defined by their ability to describe the actions of particles.
Other examples of how a VR approach could illuminate current physics issues include: 1. Virtual reality creation. A virtual reality usually arises from "nothing", as the big bang
theory proposes our universe did (see next section).
Contrary to his claim, this solves nothing - it just shifts the "where did everything come from?" out of the simulation and into the real universe around it.
2. Maximum processing rate. The maximum speed a pixel in a virtual reality game can cross a screen is limited by the processing capacity of the computer running it. In general, a virtual world's maximum event rate is fixed by the allocated processing capacity. In our world, the fixed maximum that comes to mind is the speed of light. That there is an absolute maximum speed could reflect a maximum information processing rate
Argument from spurious similarity fallacy. It's like saying "the universe has a speed limit, and highways in my state have a speed limit, so maybe my state government is responsible for the universe's speed limit."
Besides, how does it "illuminate current physics issues" like he claims? His list doesn't "illuminate" anything - he's just listing in a vague, handwavy kind of way how computers and the universe might be similar. Putting that kind of list under the heading "A prima facie case that the physical world is a virtual reality" is nothing short of misleading.
Individually none of the above short points is convincing, but taken together they constitute what a court might call circumstantial evidence
And a scientist might call it data dredging. If you compare two huge lists (of properties, in this case), eventually you'll find similarities by sheer chance.
More powerful evidence is provided by cases which a VR theory explains easily but which OR approaches have great difficulty with. Two such cases are now given in more detail.
He should, at the very least, cover this - his real argument - first, before launching into his little "look at all the similarities!1!" diatribe. Or just leave out the latter part entirely, and stick to the regular scientific practice of seeing how theories handle problems and predictions.
Unfortunately, his arguments on these two points are simply wrong. He claims that "VR theory" explains where the universe came from, but all he's doing is explaining where the simulation came from, and his theory offers nothing on how the entire universe (simulation+outside) came from. He's not solving anything - all he's
>>> Simple Math tells us that even with India's huge population the USA >>> consumes 4 times more energy than India. Therefore it sounds a bit >>> lame when people in America express concern about a few people in >>> India get some small cars while they themselves ride around in gas >>> guzzling SUVs.
It's not "lame". The word you're looking for is "selfish".
The developed world - and North America in particular - has no right to say to the rest of the world that they can't develop, too. But we do have the opportunity to say "let me help you develop cleanly", which is something that would benefit both groups.
>>> If it is true that usually multiple people use cars in India, imagine what >>> tandem velomobiles could do
Price everyone out of the market?
You are, frankly, being absurd - you're touting a rich man's toy as a replacement for a poor man's car. At $7,500 for one seat with minimal cargo capacity, your velomobile is maybe a third as useful as the car you're suggesting it replace, and at three times the price.
If they wanted a bike, they'd buy a bike. Hell, a bike would be more useful - at least there's space for a bunch of cargo or a friend or two - and at 1% the price.
>>> Especially when you start to factor in carpooling.
That won't make as much of a difference as you think; when I was in India, it was vanishingly rare to see a motorbike with only one person on it. 2-3 was the average, and I saw 4 a few times...and this on bikes that would be considered tiny in North America.
So it's likely there will be at best a small increase in the number of passengers per vehicle with this car compared to a motorbike.
Mind you, it's likely that there will be at worst a modest increase in petrol consumption, too - this car is said to get 59mpg, which is 25-50% worse than Indian-style motorbikes.
People-per-vehicle can't increase by more than 2x, but petrol-per-vehicle can't, either, so the end result is likely to be a fairly modest change in petrol-per-person.
Mercury bio-accumulates - concentrates in animals higher up the food chain - leading to things like our seafood having dangerous levels of it. So that's not a very good solution.
>>> The manufacturer demands that I ship the dead bulb to them, AT MY COST
Buy from a different manufacturer - people here have mentioned ones that replaced the bulbs quickly, freely, and with no shipping required. That your supplier sucks is not the fault of the product.
>>> All at inordinately inflated prices
They're not inflated if that's the cost of the product. Moreover, given that a $4 bulb will save you about $30 in electricity, complaining about the price is perhaps the least persuasive thing you could do.
>>> I've had CFLs get hot enough to melt their plastic bases.
Something was wrong with either the bulb or the lamp, as no bulb (incandescent or CFL) should do that. Again, buy from a decent supplier.
>>> Do you realize that 20 bucks is an hour and a half's labor for the median family in the US
And 50 watts saved x 8,000hrs rated life x $0.10/kWh = $40, representing a net savings of $20.
>>> And I suppose that you can buy these in the grocery store next to all the other bulbs, right?
I don't know about the original poster, but I certainly do. ~$3 each
Unless you're talking about the ones which are rated for termperatures of 0F; if your indoor lights need that rating, though, I would argue you have bigger problems to deal with.
>>> And I'm SURE they're price-competitive with a regular incandescent.
They're about 1/4 the price, once you take powering them into account.
>>> Do you expect me to open my clothes closet and stand there with my hands in my pocket for a >>> minute before the bulb has warmed enough that I can tell a green shirt from a blue one?
I expect you to be able to tell immediately; I can. Our eyes are so enormously adaptive - we run through about 5 orders of magnitude of light levels on a daily basis - that even the reduced light available instantly from a CFL is going to be more than enough for anything other than reading or similar detail work.
>>>>>> * CFLs with electric ballasts don't "hum" like the old ones did. >>> >>> That's right, our products were crappy before, but don't worry, they're slightly less crappy now.
"Slightly less crappy" would be "they hum less"; they don't hum at all now.
It sounds like you've had bad experiences with early CFLs; my experiences with them in the last year have been quite positive. For many of the main uses of light in one's home - e.g., the main lights in the living room that are continuously on for hours at a time - CFLs offer large savings, with no hum, no light quality issues (see the PopMech link I gave), and very little exposure to the fact that they take a minute to go from 50% to 100% light.
I would recommend trying them out again, buying just a few from a reputable supplier and putting them where they'll make the most sense. If you still don't like them. you're out about $10; if you don't mind them, you'll make back that $10 in about 2 months.
>>> According to Wikipedia, the OSHA maximum occupational exposure to mercury is 0.1 mg/m3.
And according to OSHA, that's the acceptable amount for a full 8-hour shift of work. At roughly 1L/s, that's about 3.6m3/hr, or about 3mg/shift.
Or the entire contents of a CFL every day and a half.
>>> Somehow you haven't quite convinced me that inhaling four milligrams directly into >>> my lungs isn't going to be a bad, if not a deadly, thing for me.
One presumes you don't go around snorting CFL bulbs; if you don't, you're never going to get the entire contents in a short period of time. Indeed, you're highly unlikely to get the entire contents at all if you simply air out the room like everyone suggests, and based on the shape of CFLs it's unlikely that anything less than crushing a bulb would release more more than a fraction of the mercury.
It's probably not a good idea to take up huffing CFLs, though, as the "immediate danger" level of mercury vapour is set at 10mg/m3. At ~5L/breath, that's about 20 breaths per mg, suggesting that rapid inhallation of large amounts of mercury isn't going to be much fun. It's pretty questionable whether it would be damaging, though, as animal studies show that mild organ damage occurs after an hour of 30mg/m3 exposure - a human in that environment would have breathed in over 100mg of mercury by then.
>>> When I start buying as many computers as I do light bulbs, I'll try to remember your enlightening comparison.
Try also to remember that computers are often bigger than light bulbs. Size - as you may have heard - matters.
4.65mg more = twice as much. Mind you, that's assuming coal-fired electricity. Only half of electricity in the US is coal-fired (link), making incandescent and trashed CFL bulbs turn out to be almost exactly equal in terms of mercury emissions. Many stores (such as Ikea) have free CFL recycling, though, so one would expect a substantial number of those CFL bulbs won't just be thrown in the trash, making CFL a net winner in terms of mercury emissions.
Admittedly, the study done by Popular Mechanics has too few participants to draw statistically significant conclusions; however, it's telling that all seven of the CFLs they tested were scored as providing higher quality light than a normal incandescent. For most people, then, "light quality" is not going to be a (rational) barrier to using CFLs.
>>> That's a nice story, but experience disagrees with you.
Uh, dude? The story you link doesn't say what you suggested it did. At no point does it come to the conclusion that people can't run down antelopes. Indeed, the narrator seems to think it's likely, and that it's almost certain people did so historically.
Moreover, you put far too much stock in the ability of an aging ex-smoker, his nerdy brother with a heart problem, and a few of their friends to represent the utmost of human capabilities. The fact that none of them managed to run down an antelope doesn't really tell us a whole lot about whether a trained and fit group of hunters could do it.
For example, one of the problems the guys in this story talked about was identifying which antelope they'd started chasing; I would imagine that someone who hunted down antelope for a living would be rather better at antelope identification. As the narrator himself says, "The main problem is not the running; the main problem is knowledge of the terrain and the animal itself." He's certainly not going to have that, doing this a couple days at a time.
Indeed, the narrator describes the technique (as described by the natives he talked to) as a difficult technique that requires substantial knowledge and training, so his own failure tells us very little. Basically, it tells us that running down an antelope is at least very hard; not exactly a surprise.
Finally, it's worth noting that antelope are rather exceptional in their running capabilities, so if man cannot run down the world's best non-human distance runner, that doesn't tell us so much about whether man can run down typical quadrupeds.
For what it's worth, though, the narrator's own conclusion is that it's quite possible for someone fit enough and who knows what he's doing to run down an antelope. Listening to story and reading interviews by its narrator basically gives exactly the opposite impression you tried to give.
By the Iraq Body Count staff researchers. It seems that the Lancet study implies some things that available data does not support, such as that 90% of Iraqis wounded by violence did not seek treatment at hospitals or were not recorded.
I went looking into this with the expectation that I'd provide a quote from IBC saying how their numbers are a guaranteed underestimate - and they are - but I was very surprised to find their analysis of the Lancet study, and surprised to find that they raised some very good points. The Lancet study was done on only 47 clusters of homes, meaning that an unusual level of violence in only a handful of places could substantially skew their results. Based on that, and on some of the concerns IBC raises, it seems likely that the Lancet estimate may not be the most reliable.
That's not to say the numbers aren't large - IBC estimates 80,000 civilian deaths from violence, which is known to be an underestimate of civilian deaths by violence, which doesn't take into account numbers of violent deaths classified as insurgent (also tens of thousands, based on military reports), and which doesn't take into account deaths due to the breakdown of infrastructure (such as lack of electricity or clean water) - and that's not to say those large numbers aren't tragic, infuriating, undeserved, unnecessary, and deeply sad. It's just that there appear to be legitimate concerns with the Lancet study, and scientific honesty compels me to point that out, regardless of my own personal beliefs on the issue it addresses.
>>> most of these options would be considerably more expensive than the present energy sources
Wind is cost-competitive with coal and gas. We're on track to have 10% of total world electricity generation come from wind in about 2020 (based on fitting a logistic adoption curve to either the capacity or capacity-addition data).
Is it so unlikely that he was intentionally drawing contrast?
That's absolutely possible. I think perhaps one of the key points here is simply that what he wore or did not wear matters. The overall effect may have been good, bad, mixed, or simply weird (a slashdot thread hijacked by discussing clothes??), but the fact of the matter is that an effect was effected.
Humans are inherently social; appearance is inherently important. There is no way to get away from that, and attempting to ignore it is its own powerful statement.
In my opinion, the clothes are irrelevant and basically a filter
Quite true - anyone who blatantly flouts societal norms is obviously an outsider whose interests are irrelevant to mainstream society, and hence can be safely ignored by the vast majority.
Or is that not what you meant? Because, I assure you, that's the filter a whole lot of people are using. And not entirely without reason.
Humans are social animals, whether you like it or not, and many of the silly social customs and mores we have were developed in order to make the massive, crowded society we have now run smoothly. Willfully ignoring our social nature is immensely selfish, as it actively undermines the glue that holds society together. A stable society is one that has feedback mechanisms to maintain and reinforce its glue, and marginalizing those who would undermine it is a likely one.
Now, you may argue that society is changing, that the current glue is being replaced, that what is is not what must be. I agree. But the fact is that how you present yourself matters, a great deal, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. That's not so important for most people, but - like it or not - it's very important for public figures, of which Stallman is one.
Does that mean he's a liability because of his behaviour? I don't know enough to say. But, make no mistake, his behaviour absolutely influences how his message is perceived.
It certainly influenced you quite strongly. Just remember that those positive feelings from him being in your in-group are going to be negative feelings for many, many people who see him as part of an out-group. Would it be more effective to have the message delivered in a more neutral manner, the better to have it assessed on its own merits?
>>> Not only do you think it is "illegal" to download music
Well, downloading copyrighted music for which you don't have permission is against the law as written. That would make it "illegal", no? Regardless of what you think the law should be, that's what the law is.
(Assuming he's in the US; the laws are different in different countries.)
>>> you've also taken the ridiculous position that there is >>> anything more than a million to one chance that you will >>> be one of the unlucky few to get noticed by these vultures.
There have been 26,000 Americans sued over the last 4 years. Simple arithmetic reveals that even assuming every single person in the USA illegally downloads music, they have a better than 1-in-12,000 chance of being sued.
In order to see anything useful, you should also plot the Euro and the Yen. While the CAD has increased slightly in buying power in recent years, the bigger news is that the USD has plummeted, likely due to bad fiscal policy (war debt).
Not really. The US$ hasn't fallen with respect to the Yen (graph) or the Mexican Peso (graph), and it's fallen only slightly (5%) against the Chinese Yuan (graph). So of its top four trading partners, it's only Canada that the US dollar has seriously fallen against, and in general it's mostly the CDN$ and Euro that've increased so much against it.
The US$ and Euro are major trading blocs - each about 20% of the world economy - but they're not the only story.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether you personally voted for a rule has essentially no bearing on whether it applies to you.They don't have to, but that doesn't make the consequences of their actions go away.You've got a pretty weird definition of free will.
The students wanted to be on a sports team.
The school said they had to sign a document to be on the team.
The students chose to sign that document.
Just because that was the only way they could do something they wanted doesn't make it "against their will". That's as stupid as saying a nightclub is taking my money "against my will" if I choose to go there, or that MacDonald's is taking my money "against my will" if I want a Big Mac.
The school didn't hold a gun to any kid's head to force them to join a team. Joining - and signing - was voluntary. Playing high school football ain't a right, no matter how important some people think it is.
The Republican result is for the same reason as the Democratic result - a correlation between city size, machine-countedness, and voting pattern.
If you take a look at the two largest cities (Manchester and Nashua, ~10% of the total vote), Romney got 35% of the vote, vs. 25% state-wide. Those two cities alone are enough to give Romney 2700 "extra" votes, or 15-20% of the machine-vs-hand "discrepancy".
Basically, it's a classic example of a spurious relationship.
No they don't.
Large towns (> 5,000 votes) heavily favoured Clinton.
Large towns (> 5,000 votes) were all machine-counted.
Based on that, it's not entirely surprising that machine-counted areas favoured Clinton - both were positively correlated with town size. The original analysis should have noticed that, but didn't since (a) it asked a slightly different question, and (b) it aggregated the data strangely, so it ended up with a misleading result.
There's an important lesson here: not everything you read online is correct.
So not only do you need to RTFA, you need to think about TFA. (The horror!)
Yes.
It's also important to note that there's actually a very simple explanation for the results: cities like Clinton.
If you take the cities from TFA (> 5,000 votes, all counted by machine), you get:
That sums up to 97,094 votes (1/3 of the total), of which 42% went for Clinton and 34% Obama. If you restrict to just the largest cities (> 15,000 votes, 13% of total), it's 45% to 31%.
So while it's clear that support for Clinton vs. Obama is correlated with machine-counting vs. hand-counting, it's also clear that both of those are correlated with city size, suggesting a much simpler and rather less nefarious underlying common cause. The tables in TFA don't show that simply because of the highly unbalanced manner in which they split up towns into size classes.
(That being said, of course I'd love to see this be the death knell for vote-counting machines which lack a paper trail. Beats me how anyone ever thought those were acceptable; they may be cheaper than hand-counting, but they simply don't do the same job, making a direct price comparison irrelevant. It's like buying a hammer because it's cheaper than a saw.)
Rapidly developing new high-impact drugs can't be done by a guy plinking away in his free time. Huge quantities of work - and money - are involved.
And how does the money get from them to the people who'll do the research? How are you going to avoid the economically-rational strategy of using research paid for by others without paying for it?
Public funding is one way, but are you proposing that governments should be the only source of funding for research? If so, doesn't that come with risks of its own? If not, what is the economic rationale for person X or company Y to spend their own money on a 10-year research project rather than waiting to use the fruits of others' spending for free?
Have you thought this through in pragmatic, rather than idealistic terms? You can't simply wave your hands and assume the money will come from "somewhere".
You're simply wrong. R&D is crucial to certain businesses - where do you think those new drugs come from?
You're drawing a false analogy here. A lemonade stand is akin to a drug production company, not a drug development company. Of course R&D costs don't matter if you specify an industry where those costs are zero.
Service to whom? Who exactly do you expect to pay the hundreds of millions it takes to develop a new drug?
A company? What's their motivation for paying $500M for a new drug when they could reverse-engineer a competitor's drug for $5M?
A wealthy individual? He has no more profit motivation to do it than a company does, and if he needs it for his own ailment, the average 10-year turnaround time will make him likely to look to more readily available forms of treatment?
Joe Average? Why would he? His personal contribution will be less than 1% of 1% of the funds, meaning it makes effectively no difference if he contributes or not, meaning it's economically rational for him to keep his money. Classic free rider problem.
A government? Sure, but only if it's willing to use its tax dollars to subsidize every other country in the world.
Money doesn't just appear because you think it should. None of your arguments contain any economic rationale for why new money would be put up for drug development.
You realize you're not actually disagreeing with me here, don't you?
Sure, the hard-core libertarians and colle
Certainly, 2ed had THACO. What it did not have was touch AC, flatfooted AC, flatfooted touch AC, ethereal touch AC, flatfooted ethereal touch AC, Dodge AC, Dodge touch AC, ethereal Dodge touch AC, combat expertise +7 fighting defensively with tumbling ethereal Dodge touch AC with cover against giants while Enlarged,
All of those are potentially different, and that's not even taking into account the bonus to attack with power attack / combat expertise / flanking / favoured enemy / bane / holy / haste / fatigue / charge / Deft Opportunist / iterative attacks / whatever affecting it. That's literally thousands of possible different bonuses to attack for a single character being applied on his roll against dozens of possible AC values for a single target.
And that's simpler than "roll your dice, look up the result on a one-line table"??
D&D3e is many things, but "simpler" is not one of them.
Simpler saves? Quick, how did the saving throw for a 1st-level spell in 2ed compare to a 4th-level spell? Or 6th-level? Or 2nd-level?
All the same. All that matters is the one number written on the character sheet.
Compare that to 3ed, where you need to know the caster's Intelligence (unless it's Wisdom or Charisma or...) plus the level of the spell plus whether he has Spell Focus in that school plus whether the spell is Heightened plus whether he has Red Wizard levels plus
It's not "simplification" to cut from 5 down to 3xbillion...
(Not to mention that the whole save mechanism in 3ed is terribly broken, since high-level characters are frequently subject to nearly impossible saves to avoid death. Mr. Badass High-Level-Fighter is no fun to play if the first Wizard to come along has a 90% chance per spell to take take control of Badass's mind for weeks at a stretch, with little or nothing he can do about it.)
Please do explain how attacks of opportunity - a mechanism so famously convoluted that it's frequently played for humour - is simpler than 2ed's mechanism, which was...nothing at all.
You may like how D&D3ed does things more than you liked 2ed, but don't for a moment delude yourself into thinking it's "simpler".
While reading his essay, the same thought keeps coming up again and again:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the fact that his argument appears to be significantly based on collectivism means a great number of people are going to very strongly disagree with it, and the odds of it gaining broad acceptance are near zero. This kind of thing:
There's also some sloppy thinking going on:
That's not at all a contradiction; it's simply a tradeoff.
As far as I can tell, he has that exactly backwards. Innovation has increased as protection has increased; if anything, that suggests that protection is correlated with innovation.
Correlation is not causation, of course, but the evidence he presents doesn't point the way he says it does. I don't suppose that should be surprising, though, since he appears to make claims about how other people think based on his own personal feelings:
Based on what does he make this claim? Has he conducted a representative survey of writers? Or is he simply putting his own beliefs in the mouths of others?
Assuming you completely ignore the companies whose very lifeblood is their patented IP. If any company could legally crank out knock-off drugs as soon as they'd reverse-engineered them, what would be the incentive to spend large amounts developing a new drug whose costs would take several years of sales to recoup?
He appears to be talking about all IP as though it were just about music and books.
And an author's most personal creations could be freely used to hawk toilet paper and sex toys.
Creative control is about more than money.
*****
Basically, his argument is long on idealism and short on realism. I see three main fatal flaws with it:
1) It pretends all IP is like copyrights on art. Not all innovation follows that model; new drugs are one example.
2) It's strongly collectivist. That's not necessarily bad, but it's certainly going to be unpopular with many, many everyday people.
3) It makes a number of factual assertions that appear to be based on his personal opinion, rather than actual facts. That makes it easy to dismiss the entire argument as fantasy.
He has some very interesting points, but unfortunately it's preaching to the choir - unless you already agree with him, he's unlikely to be convincing. I agree that there are some very serious problems with current IP legislation, but I disagree that his essay lays out either a sensible or a compelling approach to changing that.
That you personally like older music tells us very little about its quality.
More importantly, though, your point about the dynamic range of music - while true - clearly doesn't explain the drop in sales since 2000. As you point out, that change was pretty much complete by the early 90s, but sales continued to rise for quite a few years until their peak in 2000, so that change is highly unlikely to be responsible for the drop in sales.
It would be interesting to look at the demographics of the US and see if some particular cohort that tends to buy music peaked in 2000.
Hmm - the number of people in the 20-44 age group is flat between 2000-2010, as is the 5-19 age group; from the looks of the 1990 data, I'd guess that the prime music-buying age groups have stopped growing to a substantial extent. Couple that with the significant increase in people at or near the poverty rate since 2000, and it's hardly surprising that music sales are down.
Yes, but asking them by way of sloppy logic and weird assertions is not a good way to do it.
Consider, for example, this excerpt from p.8:
His argument is nonsensical. It's like asking how a hammer "knows" to fall if you lift it up and then let go of it. The standard explanation of this "mystery" is simply that the innate nature of objects makes them behave in a manner we characterize as physical laws. They don't "know" what to do, they simply do, and we describe the result.
He's mixing up causality; particles follow the laws of nature because the laws of nature are defined by their ability to describe the actions of particles.
Contrary to his claim, this solves nothing - it just shifts the "where did everything come from?" out of the simulation and into the real universe around it.
Argument from spurious similarity fallacy. It's like saying "the universe has a speed limit, and highways in my state have a speed limit, so maybe my state government is responsible for the universe's speed limit."
Besides, how does it "illuminate current physics issues" like he claims? His list doesn't "illuminate" anything - he's just listing in a vague, handwavy kind of way how computers and the universe might be similar. Putting that kind of list under the heading "A prima facie case that the physical world is a virtual reality" is nothing short of misleading.
And a scientist might call it data dredging. If you compare two huge lists (of properties, in this case), eventually you'll find similarities by sheer chance.
He should, at the very least, cover this - his real argument - first, before launching into his little "look at all the similarities!1!" diatribe. Or just leave out the latter part entirely, and stick to the regular scientific practice of seeing how theories handle problems and predictions.
Unfortunately, his arguments on these two points are simply wrong. He claims that "VR theory" explains where the universe came from, but all he's doing is explaining where the simulation came from, and his theory offers nothing on how the entire universe (simulation+outside) came from. He's not solving anything - all he's
>>> Simple Math tells us that even with India's huge population the USA
>>> consumes 4 times more energy than India. Therefore it sounds a bit
>>> lame when people in America express concern about a few people in
>>> India get some small cars while they themselves ride around in gas
>>> guzzling SUVs.
It's not "lame". The word you're looking for is "selfish".
The developed world - and North America in particular - has no right to say to the rest of the world that they can't develop, too. But we do have the opportunity to say "let me help you develop cleanly", which is something that would benefit both groups.
>>> If it is true that usually multiple people use cars in India, imagine what
>>> tandem velomobiles could do
Price everyone out of the market?
You are, frankly, being absurd - you're touting a rich man's toy as a replacement for a poor man's car. At $7,500 for one seat with minimal cargo capacity, your velomobile is maybe a third as useful as the car you're suggesting it replace, and at three times the price.
If they wanted a bike, they'd buy a bike. Hell, a bike would be more useful - at least there's space for a bunch of cargo or a friend or two - and at 1% the price.
>>> Especially when you start to factor in carpooling.
That won't make as much of a difference as you think; when I was in India, it was vanishingly rare to see a motorbike with only one person on it. 2-3 was the average, and I saw 4 a few times...and this on bikes that would be considered tiny in North America.
So it's likely there will be at best a small increase in the number of passengers per vehicle with this car compared to a motorbike.
Mind you, it's likely that there will be at worst a modest increase in petrol consumption, too - this car is said to get 59mpg, which is 25-50% worse than Indian-style motorbikes.
People-per-vehicle can't increase by more than 2x, but petrol-per-vehicle can't, either, so the end result is likely to be a fairly modest change in petrol-per-person.
>>> The solution to pollution is dilution.
Mercury bio-accumulates - concentrates in animals higher up the food chain - leading to things like our seafood having dangerous levels of it. So that's not a very good solution.
>>> The manufacturer demands that I ship the dead bulb to them, AT MY COST
Buy from a different manufacturer - people here have mentioned ones that replaced the bulbs quickly, freely, and with no shipping required. That your supplier sucks is not the fault of the product.
>>> All at inordinately inflated prices
They're not inflated if that's the cost of the product. Moreover, given that a $4 bulb will save you about $30 in electricity, complaining about the price is perhaps the least persuasive thing you could do.
>>> I've had CFLs get hot enough to melt their plastic bases.
Something was wrong with either the bulb or the lamp, as no bulb (incandescent or CFL) should do that. Again, buy from a decent supplier.
>>> Do you realize that 20 bucks is an hour and a half's labor for the median family in the US
And 50 watts saved x 8,000hrs rated life x $0.10/kWh = $40, representing a net savings of $20.
>>> And I suppose that you can buy these in the grocery store next to all the other bulbs, right?
I don't know about the original poster, but I certainly do. ~$3 each
Unless you're talking about the ones which are rated for termperatures of 0F; if your indoor lights need that rating, though, I would argue you have bigger problems to deal with.
>>> And I'm SURE they're price-competitive with a regular incandescent.
They're about 1/4 the price, once you take powering them into account.
>>> Do you expect me to open my clothes closet and stand there with my hands in my pocket for a
>>> minute before the bulb has warmed enough that I can tell a green shirt from a blue one?
I expect you to be able to tell immediately; I can. Our eyes are so enormously adaptive - we run through about 5 orders of magnitude of light levels on a daily basis - that even the reduced light available instantly from a CFL is going to be more than enough for anything other than reading or similar detail work.
>>>>>> * CFLs with electric ballasts don't "hum" like the old ones did.
>>>
>>> That's right, our products were crappy before, but don't worry, they're slightly less crappy now.
"Slightly less crappy" would be "they hum less"; they don't hum at all now.
It sounds like you've had bad experiences with early CFLs; my experiences with them in the last year have been quite positive. For many of the main uses of light in one's home - e.g., the main lights in the living room that are continuously on for hours at a time - CFLs offer large savings, with no hum, no light quality issues (see the PopMech link I gave), and very little exposure to the fact that they take a minute to go from 50% to 100% light.
I would recommend trying them out again, buying just a few from a reputable supplier and putting them where they'll make the most sense. If you still don't like them. you're out about $10; if you don't mind them, you'll make back that $10 in about 2 months.
>>> According to Wikipedia, the OSHA maximum occupational exposure to mercury is 0.1 mg/m3.
And according to OSHA, that's the acceptable amount for a full 8-hour shift of work. At roughly 1L/s, that's about 3.6m3/hr, or about 3mg/shift.
Or the entire contents of a CFL every day and a half.
>>> Somehow you haven't quite convinced me that inhaling four milligrams directly into
>>> my lungs isn't going to be a bad, if not a deadly, thing for me.
One presumes you don't go around snorting CFL bulbs; if you don't, you're never going to get the entire contents in a short period of time. Indeed, you're highly unlikely to get the entire contents at all if you simply air out the room like everyone suggests, and based on the shape of CFLs it's unlikely that anything less than crushing a bulb would release more more than a fraction of the mercury.
It's probably not a good idea to take up huffing CFLs, though, as the "immediate danger" level of mercury vapour is set at 10mg/m3. At ~5L/breath, that's about 20 breaths per mg, suggesting that rapid inhallation of large amounts of mercury isn't going to be much fun. It's pretty questionable whether it would be damaging, though, as animal studies show that mild organ damage occurs after an hour of 30mg/m3 exposure - a human in that environment would have breathed in over 100mg of mercury by then.
>>> When I start buying as many computers as I do light bulbs, I'll try to remember your enlightening comparison.
Try also to remember that computers are often bigger than light bulbs. Size - as you may have heard - matters.
>>> Very few people talk about the dangers of CLFs.They contain mercury
"Even if the mercury contained in a CFL was directly released into the atmosphere, an incandescent would still contribute 4.65 more milligrams of mercury into the environment over its lifetime."
4.65mg more = twice as much. Mind you, that's assuming coal-fired electricity. Only half of electricity in the US is coal-fired (link), making incandescent and trashed CFL bulbs turn out to be almost exactly equal in terms of mercury emissions. Many stores (such as Ikea) have free CFL recycling, though, so one would expect a substantial number of those CFL bulbs won't just be thrown in the trash, making CFL a net winner in terms of mercury emissions.
So your rant is simply ill-informed.
>>> I like the warmer light of light bulb.
Most people don't agree with you.
Admittedly, the study done by Popular Mechanics has too few participants to draw statistically significant conclusions; however, it's telling that all seven of the CFLs they tested were scored as providing higher quality light than a normal incandescent. For most people, then, "light quality" is not going to be a (rational) barrier to using CFLs.
>>> That's a nice story, but experience disagrees with you.
Uh, dude? The story you link doesn't say what you suggested it did. At no point does it come to the conclusion that people can't run down antelopes. Indeed, the narrator seems to think it's likely, and that it's almost certain people did so historically.
Moreover, you put far too much stock in the ability of an aging ex-smoker, his nerdy brother with a heart problem, and a few of their friends to represent the utmost of human capabilities. The fact that none of them managed to run down an antelope doesn't really tell us a whole lot about whether a trained and fit group of hunters could do it.
For example, one of the problems the guys in this story talked about was identifying which antelope they'd started chasing; I would imagine that someone who hunted down antelope for a living would be rather better at antelope identification. As the narrator himself says, "The main problem is not the running; the main problem is knowledge of the terrain and the animal itself." He's certainly not going to have that, doing this a couple days at a time.
Indeed, the narrator describes the technique (as described by the natives he talked to) as a difficult technique that requires substantial knowledge and training, so his own failure tells us very little. Basically, it tells us that running down an antelope is at least very hard; not exactly a surprise.
Finally, it's worth noting that antelope are rather exceptional in their running capabilities, so if man cannot run down the world's best non-human distance runner, that doesn't tell us so much about whether man can run down typical quadrupeds.
For what it's worth, though, the narrator's own conclusion is that it's quite possible for someone fit enough and who knows what he's doing to run down an antelope. Listening to story and reading interviews by its narrator basically gives exactly the opposite impression you tried to give.
>>> Before the semaphore telegraph a man could travel faster than information.
"The Egyptians and the Persians first used carrier pigeons 3,000 years ago. They also were used to proclaim the winner of the Olympics."
The ancient world was not so primitive as some might think.
>>> Discredited by who?
By the Iraq Body Count staff researchers. It seems that the Lancet study implies some things that available data does not support, such as that 90% of Iraqis wounded by violence did not seek treatment at hospitals or were not recorded.
I went looking into this with the expectation that I'd provide a quote from IBC saying how their numbers are a guaranteed underestimate - and they are - but I was very surprised to find their analysis of the Lancet study, and surprised to find that they raised some very good points. The Lancet study was done on only 47 clusters of homes, meaning that an unusual level of violence in only a handful of places could substantially skew their results. Based on that, and on some of the concerns IBC raises, it seems likely that the Lancet estimate may not be the most reliable.
That's not to say the numbers aren't large - IBC estimates 80,000 civilian deaths from violence, which is known to be an underestimate of civilian deaths by violence, which doesn't take into account numbers of violent deaths classified as insurgent (also tens of thousands, based on military reports), and which doesn't take into account deaths due to the breakdown of infrastructure (such as lack of electricity or clean water) - and that's not to say those large numbers aren't tragic, infuriating, undeserved, unnecessary, and deeply sad. It's just that there appear to be legitimate concerns with the Lancet study, and scientific honesty compels me to point that out, regardless of my own personal beliefs on the issue it addresses.
>>> most of these options would be considerably more expensive than the present energy sources
Wind is cost-competitive with coal and gas. We're on track to have 10% of total world electricity generation come from wind in about 2020 (based on fitting a logistic adoption curve to either the capacity or capacity-addition data).
That's absolutely possible. I think perhaps one of the key points here is simply that what he wore or did not wear matters. The overall effect may have been good, bad, mixed, or simply weird (a slashdot thread hijacked by discussing clothes??), but the fact of the matter is that an effect was effected.
Humans are inherently social; appearance is inherently important. There is no way to get away from that, and attempting to ignore it is its own powerful statement.
Quite true - anyone who blatantly flouts societal norms is obviously an outsider whose interests are irrelevant to mainstream society, and hence can be safely ignored by the vast majority.
Or is that not what you meant? Because, I assure you, that's the filter a whole lot of people are using. And not entirely without reason.
Humans are social animals, whether you like it or not, and many of the silly social customs and mores we have were developed in order to make the massive, crowded society we have now run smoothly. Willfully ignoring our social nature is immensely selfish, as it actively undermines the glue that holds society together. A stable society is one that has feedback mechanisms to maintain and reinforce its glue, and marginalizing those who would undermine it is a likely one.
Now, you may argue that society is changing, that the current glue is being replaced, that what is is not what must be. I agree. But the fact is that how you present yourself matters, a great deal, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. That's not so important for most people, but - like it or not - it's very important for public figures, of which Stallman is one.
Does that mean he's a liability because of his behaviour? I don't know enough to say. But, make no mistake, his behaviour absolutely influences how his message is perceived.
It certainly influenced you quite strongly. Just remember that those positive feelings from him being in your in-group are going to be negative feelings for many, many people who see him as part of an out-group. Would it be more effective to have the message delivered in a more neutral manner, the better to have it assessed on its own merits?
>>> Not only do you think it is "illegal" to download music
Well, downloading copyrighted music for which you don't have permission is against the law as written. That would make it "illegal", no?
Regardless of what you think the law should be, that's what the law is.
(Assuming he's in the US; the laws are different in different countries.)
>>> you've also taken the ridiculous position that there is
>>> anything more than a million to one chance that you will
>>> be one of the unlucky few to get noticed by these vultures.
There have been 26,000 Americans sued over the last 4 years. Simple arithmetic reveals that even assuming every single person in the USA illegally downloads music, they have a better than 1-in-12,000 chance of being sued.
So the ridiculous position here is not his.
Not really. The US$ hasn't fallen with respect to the Yen (graph) or the Mexican Peso (graph), and it's fallen only slightly (5%) against the Chinese Yuan (graph). So of its top four trading partners, it's only Canada that the US dollar has seriously fallen against, and in general it's mostly the CDN$ and Euro that've increased so much against it.
The US$ and Euro are major trading blocs - each about 20% of the world economy - but they're not the only story.