Even more accurately, $75 trillion is the GDP of the whole fucking planet. Even $400 billion is more than the GDP of Belgium.
The only thing I can possibly assume is that they'll try to act like they're really hurting to "only" sue for a few tens of billions, then when they don't get paid, they'll find some way to write it off on their tax returns for the next INTEGER_OVERFLOW years so that they won't have to pay a cent of taxes ever again. Heck, they might come crying to the government saying that their balance sheets show a loss of trillions of dollars, so they need a bailout. I so very much want to see a judge listen to their entire argument very calmly, then just chuckle.
Nobody knows China's last 150 years of history, which was basically one disaster after another. The nation was divided and without a common language, and Mao united the people under one flag, stopped the wars of province against province, and gave the people the gift of a common language that could unite their diverse cultures.
And then promptly enacted economic reforms that caused tens of millions of deaths! Besides, it's not like some cultures want to not be part of China (*cough* Tibet. *cough* Uyghurs.).
We're only using 40% of our arable land, and not even in the most efficient manner (cash crops, crops that are for luxury food, crops grown to feed animals, etc). If humans really wanted to we could feed several times the current population level without even bringing in genetically modified crops into the picture. The reason people are still starving on the planet is purely greed based, there's no profit to be made in having supply exceed demand.
Really? Humans have planted non-food crops for thousands of years. Flax has been planted to make linens since at least Ancient Egypt, not to mention the long history of cotton, hemp, jute, etc. Even if no written records survive, I'm sure they can figure out what was going on.
There are two ceilings to worry about: The price for which your product is worth it, and the amount of work I have to do to actually access your product.
The first one was my primary concern as a college student. I just plain didn't have the money to buy everything that I'd want to, especially at say a $50-$60 price point for games, and a $20 price point for movies. I did, however, have a lot of time and a fat internet pipe going straight to my room.
The other side, which is more relevant now, is the work I have to do. I can buy enough entertainment at retail prices to keep me busy, so quite frankly, if your game/movie/music requires me to put a bunch of time into getting it to work, I'll move onto the next thing and not give you my money or find a crack, but if the pirates are offering a better product, why go through legit sources? If I literally can't get your product (hello everything stuck in licensing hell), you leave me exactly one option to get your series.
Basically, if you want to make more money, don't make it easier for people to pirate your shit than pay for it. Sure, this may not work for some things (no, I will not give out my credit card to some starving artist using a shady pay service who only wants a buck for his album, I probably won't get it at all at that point), and you'll probably never get college students to pay full price for everything (you can't get blood from a stone), but make it easier for people who work all day and don't want to jump through 8 layers of hoops just to play their fucking game for an hour or two a night.
What would the solution to this be? A variable cap that changes based on how busy the network is?
How about telecoms actually build out their infrastructure so that it's not a problem? Boo-hoo that they have to spend money to upgrade the infrastructure to meet demand instead of giving their CEOs huge bonuses.
Wait, if we get rid of HAM radio we might get rid of Twitter? I'm all for this bill!
Seriously though, I'd like it if we'd stop having our politicians sell off our spectrum for a quick buck so that us citizens can get fucked three ways to Sunday. Is it too much to ask to keep some of it public (though possibly with guidelines on what activities should be done over certain frequencies)?
Why should any drug be prohibited? If it's about the bodily harm it can do, then we should ban household cleaners, since those will fuck you up a lot faster than any recreational drug. If it's about addiction, then let's ban nicotine and caffeine. If it's about people losing all their money to them, why aren't we going after Wall Street?
Besides, who decides what a "hard drug" is? Is LSD a hard drug, even though no one has ever died from overdose? Where's the line in the sand drawn for painkillers? Aspirine? Codeine? Morphine? Heroin? Can we agree that meth is dangerous to use, oh wait, it's prescribed to children for ADHD, and that's a'ok. Sure, we can say "it's about the dose" all we want, but we don't restrict alcohol, even though people die from alcohol poisoning or liver damage all the time.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we should encourage any drug, but we can't say "alcohol is a delightful all American product that will get you laid by beautiful women coming out of nowhere" and then turn around and say "LSD will cause people to go axe crazy and kill women and children". But maybe I just wish that successful people who use drugs wouldn't have to hide it, so we could really see that it's not the worst thing in the world.
(Note to internet police: I don't use drugs. Don't backtrace my IP and take my comic book collection by shopping around till you find a judge who doesn't care about due process.)
Essentially, lacking the predicate to introduce the radar into evidence, the officer was saying "he was speeding because I said so, and therefore I wrote him a ticket." Of course the judge threw it out.
You must not work in Ohio, where an officers "estimate" is all that's needed, with no corroborating evidence.
People like the idea of Robin Hood stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, but no one likes the idea of King John stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
And then grandma still downloads the "awesome screensaver" and clicks whatever warning popups come up telling her that the screensaver will do horrible things because "she wants to see the cute kittens". You can't use technology to fix stupidity.
It's the "starve the beast" philosophy. (Some) Conservatives since Reagan have believed that if you institute tax cuts then the resultant deficit will eventually force future cuts in government. Of course, this sort of seems like someone saying that they'll max out their credit cards so they can learn to live frugally. Yeah, you might get that effect, or you'll bankrupt yourself and quite possibly have creditors taking whatever they can.
On the contrary, they have a lot of things they do to try to find contraband and keep it out. They do cavity searches on prisoners before and after visiting time. They have drug/cell phone sniffing dogs go through their cells in random searches, and officers will toss the cells. Hell, a lot of prisoners don't even have cells, they've got a cot on an open gymnasium floor. Yet contraband still flows in and gets used (prisoners will wire up cell phone chargers into lights, radios, even directly into the prison electrical system). Charles Manson has been in Corcoran's protective housing unit under solitary confinement, yet even he managed to get a cell phone.
There will probably still be plenty of cows and steers around for those purists who want the good old fashioned "off the bone" taste. Heck, I really doubt that even if lab grown meat becomes common in homes and fast food joints that it would ever become mainstream even in places as low on the restaurant chain as Olive Garden or Applebees, let alone your Michelin Star level fine dining.
...in stereoscopy (NOT "3D!): one aspect of parallax is quite wrong - the "doubling" of objects in front of focus plane, of background behind it, etc. Strangely, people hardly realize it's there...maybe because it's so unavoidable.
This is why I really don't mind being stereoblind. Having a bunch of doubled objects in my view seems like it'd be distracting as hell.
What kind of back asswards system do you live under that lets you think it makes sense that you can automatically be opted in to having your face used for ads without your explicit consent (i.e. actually signing shit)? Besides, I went through the privacy settings and didn't see anything specifically related to "don't use me to advertise", so what the fuck do I do? Wait till they put the option in, and thus only get a chance to click it off after they've sold my likeness in perpetuity to everyone who would give them a nickle for it? How does that help?
No one else thought it made any sense to, so Microsoft wrote some nonsense, sent it into the patent office, and, what do you know, they managed to get a patent?
That's what corporate America wants. Worker bees who will take all the expense of training on their own shoulders. This means the company doesn't have to spend a dime and the worker can't afford to quit or get fired (and so will do anything). Ideally the worker bees will think they're intelligent and reasonable people, yet will never actually think outside the narrow confines given to them. I think the hope is to get even most of the white collar positions to the point where anyone with a suit could sit in and do the job, then they'll ship as many of those jobs as they can overseas too. Sooner or later we'll get to having nothing but upper management, their hairdressers, and the unemployed. Then, people overseas will realize that they're the ones actually in control of all the company assets and just say "fuck it, it's ours now". Then we're really screwed.
Seriously, are college grads today really any worse than the counterculture from the 60s/70s? Or Gen X'ers in the 80s/90's? Or pretty much every generation in history (Back through at least the Ancient Greeks, and probably beyond)? It is in our nature to assume that our cohort is the pinnacle of human thought, and all generations before and after had, have, and will have mannerisms that are contrary to what "decent people" should aspire to. Don't blame this generation, your generations was probably just as stupid (and just as reviled) as this one when you were 20.
The same could (and has been) said for running water, electricity, telephone, broadcast TV, and cable TV. Now, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone (outside of the Amish) that would seriously say that those aren't important things for people to have access to. Sure, you probably won't get hoards of farmers signing up for fiber optic lines this year, or even this decade (just as large parts of rural US didn't get electricity for decades after the rest of the US), but as more and more gets put on the internet, it becomes more important to build out adequate infrastructure everywhere, rather than leave large swaths of the country behind the times.
Slashdot Mirror
Floods? In my Germany? It's more likely than you think.
Sure, nothing at the 15 meter level, but certainly something to take many precautions for.
Even more accurately, $75 trillion is the GDP of the whole fucking planet. Even $400 billion is more than the GDP of Belgium.
The only thing I can possibly assume is that they'll try to act like they're really hurting to "only" sue for a few tens of billions, then when they don't get paid, they'll find some way to write it off on their tax returns for the next INTEGER_OVERFLOW years so that they won't have to pay a cent of taxes ever again. Heck, they might come crying to the government saying that their balance sheets show a loss of trillions of dollars, so they need a bailout. I so very much want to see a judge listen to their entire argument very calmly, then just chuckle.
If it's from the future, any word on if Duke Nukem Forever actually ended up coming out?
Nobody knows China's last 150 years of history, which was basically one disaster after another. The nation was divided and without a common language, and Mao united the people under one flag, stopped the wars of province against province, and gave the people the gift of a common language that could unite their diverse cultures.
And then promptly enacted economic reforms that caused tens of millions of deaths! Besides, it's not like some cultures want to not be part of China (*cough* Tibet. *cough* Uyghurs.).
We're only using 40% of our arable land, and not even in the most efficient manner (cash crops, crops that are for luxury food, crops grown to feed animals, etc). If humans really wanted to we could feed several times the current population level without even bringing in genetically modified crops into the picture. The reason people are still starving on the planet is purely greed based, there's no profit to be made in having supply exceed demand.
Really? Humans have planted non-food crops for thousands of years. Flax has been planted to make linens since at least Ancient Egypt, not to mention the long history of cotton, hemp, jute, etc. Even if no written records survive, I'm sure they can figure out what was going on.
There are two ceilings to worry about: The price for which your product is worth it, and the amount of work I have to do to actually access your product.
The first one was my primary concern as a college student. I just plain didn't have the money to buy everything that I'd want to, especially at say a $50-$60 price point for games, and a $20 price point for movies. I did, however, have a lot of time and a fat internet pipe going straight to my room.
The other side, which is more relevant now, is the work I have to do. I can buy enough entertainment at retail prices to keep me busy, so quite frankly, if your game/movie/music requires me to put a bunch of time into getting it to work, I'll move onto the next thing and not give you my money or find a crack, but if the pirates are offering a better product, why go through legit sources? If I literally can't get your product (hello everything stuck in licensing hell), you leave me exactly one option to get your series.
Basically, if you want to make more money, don't make it easier for people to pirate your shit than pay for it. Sure, this may not work for some things (no, I will not give out my credit card to some starving artist using a shady pay service who only wants a buck for his album, I probably won't get it at all at that point), and you'll probably never get college students to pay full price for everything (you can't get blood from a stone), but make it easier for people who work all day and don't want to jump through 8 layers of hoops just to play their fucking game for an hour or two a night.
What would the solution to this be? A variable cap that changes based on how busy the network is?
How about telecoms actually build out their infrastructure so that it's not a problem? Boo-hoo that they have to spend money to upgrade the infrastructure to meet demand instead of giving their CEOs huge bonuses.
Wait, if we get rid of HAM radio we might get rid of Twitter? I'm all for this bill!
Seriously though, I'd like it if we'd stop having our politicians sell off our spectrum for a quick buck so that us citizens can get fucked three ways to Sunday. Is it too much to ask to keep some of it public (though possibly with guidelines on what activities should be done over certain frequencies)?
Why should any drug be prohibited? If it's about the bodily harm it can do, then we should ban household cleaners, since those will fuck you up a lot faster than any recreational drug. If it's about addiction, then let's ban nicotine and caffeine. If it's about people losing all their money to them, why aren't we going after Wall Street?
Besides, who decides what a "hard drug" is? Is LSD a hard drug, even though no one has ever died from overdose? Where's the line in the sand drawn for painkillers? Aspirine? Codeine? Morphine? Heroin? Can we agree that meth is dangerous to use, oh wait, it's prescribed to children for ADHD, and that's a'ok. Sure, we can say "it's about the dose" all we want, but we don't restrict alcohol, even though people die from alcohol poisoning or liver damage all the time.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we should encourage any drug, but we can't say "alcohol is a delightful all American product that will get you laid by beautiful women coming out of nowhere" and then turn around and say "LSD will cause people to go axe crazy and kill women and children". But maybe I just wish that successful people who use drugs wouldn't have to hide it, so we could really see that it's not the worst thing in the world.
(Note to internet police: I don't use drugs. Don't backtrace my IP and take my comic book collection by shopping around till you find a judge who doesn't care about due process.)
Don't worry, if Congress cuts funding to the EPA and increases funding for the TSA, you can get both!
Essentially, lacking the predicate to introduce the radar into evidence, the officer was saying "he was speeding because I said so, and therefore I wrote him a ticket." Of course the judge threw it out.
You must not work in Ohio, where an officers "estimate" is all that's needed, with no corroborating evidence.
People like the idea of Robin Hood stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, but no one likes the idea of King John stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
And then grandma still downloads the "awesome screensaver" and clicks whatever warning popups come up telling her that the screensaver will do horrible things because "she wants to see the cute kittens". You can't use technology to fix stupidity.
It's the "starve the beast" philosophy. (Some) Conservatives since Reagan have believed that if you institute tax cuts then the resultant deficit will eventually force future cuts in government. Of course, this sort of seems like someone saying that they'll max out their credit cards so they can learn to live frugally. Yeah, you might get that effect, or you'll bankrupt yourself and quite possibly have creditors taking whatever they can.
On the contrary, they have a lot of things they do to try to find contraband and keep it out. They do cavity searches on prisoners before and after visiting time. They have drug/cell phone sniffing dogs go through their cells in random searches, and officers will toss the cells. Hell, a lot of prisoners don't even have cells, they've got a cot on an open gymnasium floor. Yet contraband still flows in and gets used (prisoners will wire up cell phone chargers into lights, radios, even directly into the prison electrical system). Charles Manson has been in Corcoran's protective housing unit under solitary confinement, yet even he managed to get a cell phone.
There will probably still be plenty of cows and steers around for those purists who want the good old fashioned "off the bone" taste. Heck, I really doubt that even if lab grown meat becomes common in homes and fast food joints that it would ever become mainstream even in places as low on the restaurant chain as Olive Garden or Applebees, let alone your Michelin Star level fine dining.
...in stereoscopy (NOT "3D!): one aspect of parallax is quite wrong - the "doubling" of objects in front of focus plane, of background behind it, etc. Strangely, people hardly realize it's there...maybe because it's so unavoidable.
This is why I really don't mind being stereoblind. Having a bunch of doubled objects in my view seems like it'd be distracting as hell.
How many of the 9/11 hijackers were Egyptian? A number of them
That number being 1. Only Atta was Egyptian.
Just for clarification.
What kind of back asswards system do you live under that lets you think it makes sense that you can automatically be opted in to having your face used for ads without your explicit consent (i.e. actually signing shit)? Besides, I went through the privacy settings and didn't see anything specifically related to "don't use me to advertise", so what the fuck do I do? Wait till they put the option in, and thus only get a chance to click it off after they've sold my likeness in perpetuity to everyone who would give them a nickle for it? How does that help?
No one else thought it made any sense to, so Microsoft wrote some nonsense, sent it into the patent office, and, what do you know, they managed to get a patent?
That's what corporate America wants. Worker bees who will take all the expense of training on their own shoulders. This means the company doesn't have to spend a dime and the worker can't afford to quit or get fired (and so will do anything). Ideally the worker bees will think they're intelligent and reasonable people, yet will never actually think outside the narrow confines given to them. I think the hope is to get even most of the white collar positions to the point where anyone with a suit could sit in and do the job, then they'll ship as many of those jobs as they can overseas too. Sooner or later we'll get to having nothing but upper management, their hairdressers, and the unemployed. Then, people overseas will realize that they're the ones actually in control of all the company assets and just say "fuck it, it's ours now". Then we're really screwed.
And the won't get off your lawn, either!
Seriously, are college grads today really any worse than the counterculture from the 60s/70s? Or Gen X'ers in the 80s/90's? Or pretty much every generation in history (Back through at least the Ancient Greeks, and probably beyond)? It is in our nature to assume that our cohort is the pinnacle of human thought, and all generations before and after had, have, and will have mannerisms that are contrary to what "decent people" should aspire to. Don't blame this generation, your generations was probably just as stupid (and just as reviled) as this one when you were 20.
The same could (and has been) said for running water, electricity, telephone, broadcast TV, and cable TV. Now, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone (outside of the Amish) that would seriously say that those aren't important things for people to have access to. Sure, you probably won't get hoards of farmers signing up for fiber optic lines this year, or even this decade (just as large parts of rural US didn't get electricity for decades after the rest of the US), but as more and more gets put on the internet, it becomes more important to build out adequate infrastructure everywhere, rather than leave large swaths of the country behind the times.
So what you're saying is that Iran has called the cyber police, those cyber police can backtrace you, and the consequences will never be the same?