I'm a reasonable person who doesn't want to see the environment destroyed and all, but what idiot wrote a law saying that a cleanup effort must return something over 95% pure water to the ocean, rather than allowing for some purity level greater than the water coming in (at least for cleanup situations)? It sounds like the kind of boneheaded law that makes it much more likely for cleanup efforts to say "fuck it" and not do anything at all. Sure, getting it purer is good, but if you had something that could only remove half the oil from a volume of water but could pump several orders of magnitude better than anything else, wouldn't that be a decent trade off, at least for big spills? Sure, it'd be better to return 99.9...9% seawater, but with an area this large, anything that reduces the oil amount (instead of just hiding it) seems worth it.
It would be fair if the people sending the take down notice specifically had to say they they owned the copyright involved or face perjury charges (and fines, etc), and then actually have that enforced in courts. Right now there's not much stopping lawyers from drafting up notices without even really caring if the material infringes anything they own or not.
There were plenty of shitty games for the 8, 16, and 32 bit eras (The Angry Video Game Nerd site has quite a few). The difference is that many reviewers have gotten cozy with the game publishers and will review unfinished games and trust all the assurances they get that the games will be fixed up before release. Look at Empire: Total War as an example of a game released with not just minor bugs here and there, but game crashing bugs, abysmal pathfinding, and an AI that couldn't transport troops over the ocean at all (which sort of matters when dealing with an era called "The Age of Sail"). Reviews in magazines were almost all over 90%. It seems like the only people that are willing to review a game negatively are people who do nothing but review negative aspects of a game (Zero Punctuation), which is also not very helpful. I'd prefer a magazine that actually went out and bought a retail copy of a game and played that. None of this trusting it to get better, just accurately document if the game that actually happens is shit or not.
If it makes someone think, I'm sure that there's someone out there that wants to ban it. I am absolutely certain that there are people (and not just out in the middle of Bumfuck, Texas) that want anything that doesn't actively involve worshiping their very specific god to be illegal, and everything else should lead to prison (or probably death). There's probably a few dozen politicians at the national stage who think this way, or at least pretend to in order to get power. And somehow, we're supposed to come to a reasonable consensus with this kind of person. Fucking nuts.
We should ban sugar. Every known drug user consumed sugar before they started to use drugs. Hell, it'll solve a lot of other problems too. Hitler ate sugar. You don't want to turn out like Hitler, do you?
Really, how insane as a society are we that a government agency can put out a warning about sound being used like a drug, and not have it be some stupid intern's idea of a funny joke?
AHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH, thanks I needed a good laugh this morning.
Seriously, stop reading apologist crap and pick up a real science book (or go to talkorigins.org). At best, if you read things very figuratively and very generously, a few small parts of the Bible end up being close enough to be recognizable (and the rest tends to be laughable wrong, or things that we haven't found even a single shred of evidence for, like Egypt holding Jews captive).
Really, science, by definition, is about a continual refinement of knowledge based upon new evidence and observations. It is the result of countless curious minds saying "Huh, that's funny...", coming up with a consistent explanation, and testing that. The worst you could say about science is that it assumes that we all exist in a shared, objective experience. That's the only thing science takes "on faith".
A lot can be said about faith, but it is not something that many people honestly test. There's no evidence to be found or observations to be made. Many different belief systems claim that things have been revealed to them, yet not one can point to something that the other can't. Either there is/are deities (who lie all the time), or humans are wrong. In the absence of any evidence for the existence of gods, and a large body of evidence to support the idea that humans screw things up, I have to go with what I have evidence for.
It's too soon and the technology is too shitty. You're not going to convince people to switch from good 40-60 inch flat screens that they just bought a few years ago (that they probably still haven't payed off, but that's another issue) to pseudo 3d screens where they have to wear special glasses and sit at one particular angle to get the right effect (assuming that the reality around them doesn't ruin it anyway). Then again, I can't see 3d anyway, so all it is to me is someone asking me to pay a fuckton more for shit I can't use.
Even if not treason, have some graduated scale based on number of votes for unconstitutionality in the supreme court where if it's 5-4 nothing happens, 6-3 can't introduce bills for a year, 7-2 can't introduce bills for the rest of your current term, 8-1 thrown out of office, unanimous thrown out and can't run for any further public office. Unanimous votes on the court are few and far between, so when you get one, you know someone fucked up.
Seriously? It would cost a fraction of what the board of directory on any of these companies makes in order to actually protect data. Not only that, but why is "well, the companies will just try to find ways around it" a good excuse for just letting them do what they want anyway. Yes, we might have to play whack-a-mole with some oddly structured corporations (huh, funny, this group of privately held corporations funneling money to each other is all run by the same group of people. Maybe we should look into that...). This whole notion that we must respect legal fictions and ignore reality when dealing with "artificial persons" is nonsense. When company A owns companies B, C, and D, we shouldn't let them sever all ties with B, C, and D at a whim (or as a shell game to avoid responsibility for their actions). I'm not saying we should go after the individual shareholders of a publicly traded company (because by and large they don't have any power), but I've no compunction against taking a good hard look at CEOs and the like when things get fishy.
A senior? You'll probably be dead. Life plus 70 means that if a work is created the day you were born by a 35 year old, who then lives to 80, you would have to live to 115 years old just to finally be able to use it freely (assuming there's not another retroactive extension, and so long as Disney exists, there will be). Your children will be retired by the time it's public domain. Your children's children will probably be in middle management. Your children's children's children will be entering adulthood. You might even have great-great grandchildren. Do we really need to lock up culture down to the 4th generation? Is that really reasonable?
Art in school pretty much isn't. I remember I hated art in school because it almost never actually gave us any ability to experiment with something completely different or just go off on our own and do something. If you took each individual student's work on a project and put them together, they'd all be pretty much the same.
On a whim I took one art class in college and even though I wasn't great within it, I had so much more satisfaction in what I did produce (though the professor still read way too into projects where I had no clue what I was doing), and could truly say that what I did was unique.
It probably didn't help that Crysis required a supercomputer at the time to run at anywhere near what they claimed on the box. I can't blame people for downloading something like that to make sure that it even runs on their system before plunking down $60 on something that might not even work on their box.
I think Robert Hooke described "Simple Harmonic Motion" long before you. Good luck in court against that guy, no matter how many times you shoot him down, he'll spring back up!
People who signed "net" deals are entitled to the real actual net profits. Hiding those profits by filtering them through intermediaries and paying the company with it's own money to do services provided by itself is tantamount to fraud. This is exactly why treating subsidiaries and shell companies as separate entities from their "parent" corporations is so fucked up. If I tried to borrow money from myself then tell the IRS that I lost money because I couldn't pay myself back, I'd be slapped down in court so fast your head would spin. When Hollywood does it, they're praised for being great businessmen.
This is a story about Australia, a country that is not owned by the US (also the standing armies bit was a gripe from the Declaration of Independence about violations of longstanding British custom and established laws, etc, etc). As a bonus, here's the unabridged Aussie constitution:
G'day mate. All swagmen have the right to take jumbucks by the billabong, Vegemite shall be the national food, every mention of Australia must be accompanied by a picture of the Sydney Opera House, and Michael Atkinson must be a douche. Now, let's all hop inside some kangaroo pouches and ride our way to the future. Also, those Kiwi's from New Zealand can suck it!
They seem like a rowdy bunch. It's a good thing they've got their own island.
You must be talking about a reasonable patent system. Here in the US we don't bother with human readable patents or silly things like being limited to things you can actually explain. It's enough to say "and any similar techniques" and your patent goes to a narrow definition of a subset of an obscure problem to suddenly encompassing damn near everything even remotely related to it. Half the time you can just state the problem itself and that's good enough. No need to actually solve anything, as if anyone would want to get their hands dirty to actually invent anything anymore.
1)The media doesn't bother to do any research or any real criticism of politicians anymore. They'll whine and scream and jump up and down at all the usual talking points. They'll call every politician from the other side a liberal hippie communist or a right wing jingoist fascist, and even cover a sex scandal or two, but they don't actually criticize the real stupidity involved in the process. I'm pretty sure The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the only shows that actually call politicians out on their bullshit (yes, they've got a liberal bent, but they take plenty of shots at democrats too, so unbunch your panties), and that frightens me. We've devolved as a country to the point where the only regular source that calls politicians on their bullshit are comedy shows. I'm grateful for their work, don't get me wrong, but I wish it didn't take a jester to say the truth.
2)In this country, it's political suicide to admit that you've ever been wrong about anything ever. It's seen as a weakness to admit that you're a fallible human being. If you are wrong and you know it, lying apparently makes people think that you've got a set of huge brass balls, and that it's totally awesome! [/sarcasm] It may be related to this whole idea in this country that unabashed faith in an unchanging (well, except for every translation and reworking ever made to it) Bible is somehow the best thing ever. Never mind that the best thing to happen to us as a species is a framework based entirely around the idea that we might be wrong about what we think, so we should be willing to change it when new evidence comes along (science).
Kaolinite is a common food additive and useful for some medicinal purposes. It's also a type of clay (remember that next time you eat a Snickers). Many other clay rocks are similarly used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicinal_clay
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I'm a reasonable person who doesn't want to see the environment destroyed and all, but what idiot wrote a law saying that a cleanup effort must return something over 95% pure water to the ocean, rather than allowing for some purity level greater than the water coming in (at least for cleanup situations)? It sounds like the kind of boneheaded law that makes it much more likely for cleanup efforts to say "fuck it" and not do anything at all. Sure, getting it purer is good, but if you had something that could only remove half the oil from a volume of water but could pump several orders of magnitude better than anything else, wouldn't that be a decent trade off, at least for big spills? Sure, it'd be better to return 99.9...9% seawater, but with an area this large, anything that reduces the oil amount (instead of just hiding it) seems worth it.
Since when do standardized tests test anything besides test taking ability?
Talk WITH them for a significant part of every day, even if you have something more important to do.
They're your kids. Raising them is the most important thing you have to do.
Actually, you do, you're on Slashdot, for crying out loud.
I use IP by pigeon, you insensitive clod!
It would be fair if the people sending the take down notice specifically had to say they they owned the copyright involved or face perjury charges (and fines, etc), and then actually have that enforced in courts. Right now there's not much stopping lawyers from drafting up notices without even really caring if the material infringes anything they own or not.
There were plenty of shitty games for the 8, 16, and 32 bit eras (The Angry Video Game Nerd site has quite a few). The difference is that many reviewers have gotten cozy with the game publishers and will review unfinished games and trust all the assurances they get that the games will be fixed up before release. Look at Empire: Total War as an example of a game released with not just minor bugs here and there, but game crashing bugs, abysmal pathfinding, and an AI that couldn't transport troops over the ocean at all (which sort of matters when dealing with an era called "The Age of Sail"). Reviews in magazines were almost all over 90%. It seems like the only people that are willing to review a game negatively are people who do nothing but review negative aspects of a game (Zero Punctuation), which is also not very helpful. I'd prefer a magazine that actually went out and bought a retail copy of a game and played that. None of this trusting it to get better, just accurately document if the game that actually happens is shit or not.
If it makes someone think, I'm sure that there's someone out there that wants to ban it. I am absolutely certain that there are people (and not just out in the middle of Bumfuck, Texas) that want anything that doesn't actively involve worshiping their very specific god to be illegal, and everything else should lead to prison (or probably death). There's probably a few dozen politicians at the national stage who think this way, or at least pretend to in order to get power. And somehow, we're supposed to come to a reasonable consensus with this kind of person. Fucking nuts.
We should ban sugar. Every known drug user consumed sugar before they started to use drugs. Hell, it'll solve a lot of other problems too. Hitler ate sugar. You don't want to turn out like Hitler, do you?
Really, how insane as a society are we that a government agency can put out a warning about sound being used like a drug, and not have it be some stupid intern's idea of a funny joke?
And you're running it on a computer you built (in a cave, with a box of scraps!).
The Bible (...) is a solid truth...
AHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH, thanks I needed a good laugh this morning.
Seriously, stop reading apologist crap and pick up a real science book (or go to talkorigins.org). At best, if you read things very figuratively and very generously, a few small parts of the Bible end up being close enough to be recognizable (and the rest tends to be laughable wrong, or things that we haven't found even a single shred of evidence for, like Egypt holding Jews captive).
Really, science, by definition, is about a continual refinement of knowledge based upon new evidence and observations. It is the result of countless curious minds saying "Huh, that's funny...", coming up with a consistent explanation, and testing that. The worst you could say about science is that it assumes that we all exist in a shared, objective experience. That's the only thing science takes "on faith".
A lot can be said about faith, but it is not something that many people honestly test. There's no evidence to be found or observations to be made. Many different belief systems claim that things have been revealed to them, yet not one can point to something that the other can't. Either there is/are deities (who lie all the time), or humans are wrong. In the absence of any evidence for the existence of gods, and a large body of evidence to support the idea that humans screw things up, I have to go with what I have evidence for.
It's too soon and the technology is too shitty. You're not going to convince people to switch from good 40-60 inch flat screens that they just bought a few years ago (that they probably still haven't payed off, but that's another issue) to pseudo 3d screens where they have to wear special glasses and sit at one particular angle to get the right effect (assuming that the reality around them doesn't ruin it anyway). Then again, I can't see 3d anyway, so all it is to me is someone asking me to pay a fuckton more for shit I can't use.
Even if not treason, have some graduated scale based on number of votes for unconstitutionality in the supreme court where if it's 5-4 nothing happens, 6-3 can't introduce bills for a year, 7-2 can't introduce bills for the rest of your current term, 8-1 thrown out of office, unanimous thrown out and can't run for any further public office. Unanimous votes on the court are few and far between, so when you get one, you know someone fucked up.
Seriously? It would cost a fraction of what the board of directory on any of these companies makes in order to actually protect data. Not only that, but why is "well, the companies will just try to find ways around it" a good excuse for just letting them do what they want anyway. Yes, we might have to play whack-a-mole with some oddly structured corporations (huh, funny, this group of privately held corporations funneling money to each other is all run by the same group of people. Maybe we should look into that...). This whole notion that we must respect legal fictions and ignore reality when dealing with "artificial persons" is nonsense. When company A owns companies B, C, and D, we shouldn't let them sever all ties with B, C, and D at a whim (or as a shell game to avoid responsibility for their actions). I'm not saying we should go after the individual shareholders of a publicly traded company (because by and large they don't have any power), but I've no compunction against taking a good hard look at CEOs and the like when things get fishy.
A senior? You'll probably be dead. Life plus 70 means that if a work is created the day you were born by a 35 year old, who then lives to 80, you would have to live to 115 years old just to finally be able to use it freely (assuming there's not another retroactive extension, and so long as Disney exists, there will be). Your children will be retired by the time it's public domain. Your children's children will probably be in middle management. Your children's children's children will be entering adulthood. You might even have great-great grandchildren. Do we really need to lock up culture down to the 4th generation? Is that really reasonable?
Art in school pretty much isn't. I remember I hated art in school because it almost never actually gave us any ability to experiment with something completely different or just go off on our own and do something. If you took each individual student's work on a project and put them together, they'd all be pretty much the same.
On a whim I took one art class in college and even though I wasn't great within it, I had so much more satisfaction in what I did produce (though the professor still read way too into projects where I had no clue what I was doing), and could truly say that what I did was unique.
It probably didn't help that Crysis required a supercomputer at the time to run at anywhere near what they claimed on the box. I can't blame people for downloading something like that to make sure that it even runs on their system before plunking down $60 on something that might not even work on their box.
I think Robert Hooke described "Simple Harmonic Motion" long before you. Good luck in court against that guy, no matter how many times you shoot him down, he'll spring back up!
Parry would be even more fun.
I work in a company that does government contracts. If we tried anything like that, people would be fired/go to jail and the company would get sued.
People who signed "net" deals are entitled to the real actual net profits. Hiding those profits by filtering them through intermediaries and paying the company with it's own money to do services provided by itself is tantamount to fraud. This is exactly why treating subsidiaries and shell companies as separate entities from their "parent" corporations is so fucked up. If I tried to borrow money from myself then tell the IRS that I lost money because I couldn't pay myself back, I'd be slapped down in court so fast your head would spin. When Hollywood does it, they're praised for being great businessmen.
G'day mate. All swagmen have the right to take jumbucks by the billabong, Vegemite shall be the national food, every mention of Australia must be accompanied by a picture of the Sydney Opera House, and Michael Atkinson must be a douche. Now, let's all hop inside some kangaroo pouches and ride our way to the future. Also, those Kiwi's from New Zealand can suck it!
They seem like a rowdy bunch. It's a good thing they've got their own island.
You must be talking about a reasonable patent system. Here in the US we don't bother with human readable patents or silly things like being limited to things you can actually explain. It's enough to say "and any similar techniques" and your patent goes to a narrow definition of a subset of an obscure problem to suddenly encompassing damn near everything even remotely related to it. Half the time you can just state the problem itself and that's good enough. No need to actually solve anything, as if anyone would want to get their hands dirty to actually invent anything anymore.
restless genitalia syndrome
I thought that was already called "The Y Chromosome".
It comes down to two things:
1)The media doesn't bother to do any research or any real criticism of politicians anymore. They'll whine and scream and jump up and down at all the usual talking points. They'll call every politician from the other side a liberal hippie communist or a right wing jingoist fascist, and even cover a sex scandal or two, but they don't actually criticize the real stupidity involved in the process. I'm pretty sure The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the only shows that actually call politicians out on their bullshit (yes, they've got a liberal bent, but they take plenty of shots at democrats too, so unbunch your panties), and that frightens me. We've devolved as a country to the point where the only regular source that calls politicians on their bullshit are comedy shows. I'm grateful for their work, don't get me wrong, but I wish it didn't take a jester to say the truth.
2)In this country, it's political suicide to admit that you've ever been wrong about anything ever. It's seen as a weakness to admit that you're a fallible human being. If you are wrong and you know it, lying apparently makes people think that you've got a set of huge brass balls, and that it's totally awesome! [/sarcasm] It may be related to this whole idea in this country that unabashed faith in an unchanging (well, except for every translation and reworking ever made to it) Bible is somehow the best thing ever. Never mind that the best thing to happen to us as a species is a framework based entirely around the idea that we might be wrong about what we think, so we should be willing to change it when new evidence comes along (science).
Kaolinite is a common food additive and useful for some medicinal purposes. It's also a type of clay (remember that next time you eat a Snickers). Many other clay rocks are similarly used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicinal_clay