it's about money and dumbing people down to make them better consumers
I wish I lived in a world where there were people in enough control who were smart enough to make these kinds of policy - surely any group with this much smarts and control would shepherd us better than the types of leadership we seem to get? With the level of competence I see around me at every levels, I find it hard to believe that anyone is that much on top of things.
On the other hand, I can see that there are systemic pressures (social, political, and economic) that favour one type of thought and behaviour over others (dare I say these are similar to biological evolutionary pressures?)
"evolution" at its most basic is the idea that a system that makes imperfect copies and has selective pressures will change over multiple generations. This is almost a tautology - similar in many respects to 1+1=2. It is difficult to imagine a universe where 1+1 is not true or a universe where systems that make imperfect copies and have selective pressures do not change over multiple generations.
Since biological system make imperfect copies and are subject to selective pressures, it is hard to see why they would not change over multiple generations.
The details of how much change, how much pressure, how imperfect the copies, etc. are available to inquiry, but how productive will you be if you spend your time questioning the "1+1" level of the system?
Yes, not as many people would be employed by a Wind Farm of equal capacity to a lost Nuclear Power Plant....
Are you sure about that? Nuke plants can be a few 1000 MW ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations ) while (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country ) seems to incidate the larges wind installations are only a few hundred MW:
As of 2011, the Roscoe Wind Farm (781 MW) in the United States is the world's largest wind farm.[6] As of September 2010, the Thanet Wind Farm in United Kingdom is the largest offshore wind farm in the world at 300 MW, followed by Horns Rev II (209 MW) in Denmark. The United Kingdom is the world's leading generator of offshore wind power, followed by Denmark.[7]
There are many large wind farms under construction and these include BARD Offshore 1 (400 MW), Clyde Wind Farm (548 MW), Greater Gabbard wind farm (500 MW), Lincs Wind Farm (270 MW), London Array (1000 MW), Lower Snake River Wind Project (343 MW), Macarthur Wind Farm (420 MW), Shepherds Flat Wind Farm (845 MW), Sheringham Shoal (317 MW), and the Walney Wind Farm (367 MW).
I would not be surprised to find that per MW, wind provides for more employment.
On a related note, I recall from years back that on a per MW basis, solar is very dangerous - no big disaster deaths or black lung mining problems, but lots of people falling off roofs and relatively small amount of power being produced.
All that means is that at some point, when so many problems have been solved that there is almost nothing left for humans to do, society will have to be restructured to cope with it. Maybe capitalism will stop being the way economies are organized. Maybe we will have societies where people can relax all day because there is no need for them to work. Maybe one day the most intelligent people will be offered a chance to live in luxurious accommodations that are not available to the rest of society, in exchange for working -- while everyone else can spend their days relaxing sans luxury.
I fear however that unless we start trying to work towards that type of utopia, we are going to end up with our current system cracking under the pressure of a huge number of unemployed poor folk with no hope for their future who pick up all those firearms laying around and start shooting people they are pissed off at. Maybe from the ashes of that bonfire we can put together a better system, but I would prefer that we try to step around that problem and move directly to the long term solution.
Technology only destroys jobs if you accept that the vast majority of the improvement in quality of life resulting from less labor required for survival should be reserved for a handful of plutocrats. Employment is low. Profits are high. Fewer people work more to get less out of fear that they will be cut next.
What technology can do is increase everyone's quality of life. Lower the work week to 32 hours and abolish the distinction between part time and full time employees and increase minimum wage to a scale that follows the cost of basic food, utilities, shelter and transportation (it would be around $18 an hour if it had been). More people working less and having more time for family or other hobbies that actually make life worth living.
That's crazy talk! Soon you'll be saying that the country is productive enough so that everyone could get health care! What's next? Give people enough to eat?
With the advances in productivity we have made since the 1930s when the 8 hour work day started to get wide adoption, we should be able to have complete employment and a 10 hour work week by now.
Unfortunately I don't know of any system to automatically shift some of the benefit of increased productivity to the workers rather than having it accrue to the business owners or though inter-company competition have it all benefit the consumer by way of cheaper or more plentiful goods and services. Thus we have inexpensive high powered portable computer systems, but our national average working class wage has dropped when inflation adjusted, and the amount of time spent working has not decreased.
I would love to see some attempts to legislate some of these benefits - perhaps a gradual minimum wage increase 2% per year (or one third of the GNP growth?) for the next few decades or something like that, and add a new national holiday every two years for the next few decades or something like that. However, each country is not alone in this world, and if one makes this type of policy change, then maybe the jobs would move elsewhere. However as a counter example, there are pretty large differences in first world countries between total yearly work hours and minimum wages and social safety nets - so there is a lot of room for improvements for those countries with low pay and long work hours without too much danger of everything going to pot.
Of course we have world's fairs. They are called Expos. The Shanghai one was in 2010 and the Aichi one was in 2005. You must be American to be so unaware of what is happening in the world.
Orcas like eating other mammals. Usually seals, sea lions and other whales though. Sharks like eating fish.
I'm not sure that is completely accurate. As I recall from something like "Quirks and Quarks", there are at least two genetically separate (they don't cross breed) populations of Orca along the Pacific coast of NAmerica. The "resident" population who pretty much stick in the same place, and the "transient" population who travel up and down the coast. They have completely different diets - one of which I think is pretty much purely salmon, and the other which is mammalian. They each completely ignore the other food source.
I just looked up the above link - looks like since 1991 we've known about a third population "offshore" orca who eat sharks! Mount some lasers on the heads of those!
The question will come down to whether or not people see having reduced need for labor as being a good thing. Personally I always see it as being a good thing. I've frequently said I'd rather live in a world where my income is $10 an hour and my lunch costs $4 than being in a world where my income is $20 an hour and my lunch costs $20. In the later scenario, although I have more income, I am in fact poorer by every definition. Technology makes you wealthier, even if it might reduce your income - it makes nice stuff available for cheaper or available easier. Cheaper stuff means somebody got paid less to make it.
Ideally though, the increases in productivity get shared throughout society - but there are not very many mechanisms to make that happen. Since the 1920s productivity per worker in the USA has gone up by ya gazillion times, yet there are millions of working poor, millions of non-working poor, and a vanishingly small number of urber-rich. Forget the flying car - I want my 5 hour work-week at a living wage.
Around the country: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the-taxi-medallions (interesting look at ride-sharing disruption of taxi business) "In Boston, the price of a medallion is $625,000. In San Francisco, you need to drive a taxi at least 10 hours a week if you want to hold a medallion and lease it out. Veteran taxi drivers are able to sell their medallions for $300K...."
My friend from the Newfoundland reported an early childhood memory of a dinner table argument that finished "Well, when we are as rich as the Jones family then we can eat hamburger, but until then quit complaining and finish your lobster!".
She also reported that she always found it strange that in movies and on TV the visible minorities were always the "lower class" characters, whereas her experience was that the visible minorities who had emigrated to "the rock" were almost exclusively professionals (lawyers, doctors, etc) who were upper-middle-class or richer. It was only after moving to a big city on "the mainland" that she encountered large numbers of visible minorities, and the first time she met any who were not well-off.
Have a previous generation 11", and not buying another air. Reasons:... - no backlit keys. This is pretty much a show stopper. No keyboard should not have backlit keys.
While the other issues may be accurate in your opinion, the MBA does have a backlit keyboard for the current and previous generation at least. Are you sure it is not turned off?
I am sick of this "we cannot profile" crap. The israelis profile based on "behaviour" as their main focus. I don't care how "trained" a terrorist is, they will always have a "tell" and they will always be nervous. Stop irradiating people and stop with this random violation of human rights in the name of political correctness. I am sorry but I am not interested in playing russian roulette with my life. That is exactly what this is because it is based on the premise that they can randomly find the terrorist.
Enough is enough. We have to start profiling based on behaviour and background checks and allow law abiding citizens and visitors to travel relatively unmolested. If we continue not profiling then the terrorists have won. Find and prosecute the terrorists and attempted terrorists and leave people who want to visit peacefully and spend money in your countries alone.
Doing evidence based profiling would probably be a good idea, but it is difficult, and to do it well would require a level of background checking and data mining that I think many would be uncomfortable with. Heck, even determining with high confidence just the identity of the 300 people to board the plane is a non-trivial task. Having a purely random component to determining who gets increased scrutiny is a very good way of dealing with the limitations of our screening resources.
From a game-theory perspective, if your attacker can figure out your profiling system, they of course would work hard to get their attack vector into the profile with the lowest chance of being subject to extra scrutiny. Since the defender knows this, it makes sense to pay more attention to those who's profile would generally indicate low risk. When you iterate this process enough, you come out at the end with the idea that equal chance for everyone is a good strategy. If one percent of all travelers had their IDs, tickets, luggage and backgrounds thoroughly checked, it could have quite a deterrence effect.
Of course the whole thing is pretty much pointless - the cost in terms of money, time, and hassle for air-security is way way out of proportion for the level of risk. We would get much better bang-for-the-buck dumping all that money into perfecting driver-less cars and cut down on highway deaths.
Getting one's head bashed into the ground is a "life threatening situation" even here in liberal leaning Canada.
Sure, but I can see how that might be a tough sell if the only one who cam support that version of events is the accused. While it may be the truth, it is also true that the accused has great incentive to lie if the actual events where otherwise.
by a Vine reviewer (posted anonymously due to my Vine NDA terms).
I was invited into Vine several years ago. Since then, I have received about $10000 worth of merchandise for review. The items I've received have ranged from Post It notes and gel pens to a high-end DSLR and some decent hardware (NAS, external and internal hard drives, mice, keyboards, routers and printers)
(1) Each month, Vine reviewers are offered two chances to select items to review. The first list is a short one (10 to 20 items) that Amazon descrives as "targeted" to members. The amount of tampons, diapers and hair care products that have been offered to me (a middle-aged bald male) suggests the targeting is *very* general. Targeted items are offered to multiple members (but not universally), and the high end items are gone in seconds.
(2) A week later, all of the non-selected items remaining from the targeted list are offered to the entire Vine community. Same rapid response to high end items takes place. You have to navigate hundreds of choices instead of dozens.
(3) The demographics of who were selected are all over the place. --Some had long histories of purchasing from Amazon before being invited into Vine with both many and few (or no) previous reviews. --Some had short histories of purchases with amazon. -At the time I was selected, I had reviewed about 40 products (all most exclusively computer hardware or related literature) over a seven-year period --Attempts by the Vine community to determine the total population of Vine reviewers (both on amazon-hosted Vine forums and in informal groups away from the amazon mothership) suggest the Vine reviewer population can be counted in hundreds (probably the low hundreds) --I have some informal relationship with Vine members away from the mothership. While the sample size is WAY small to be meaningful, geographically we seem to be distributed consistent with the US population distribution in general. Generationally we seem to be mostly Boomers, but there are clearly a few Gen Y and millenials sprinkled in. Some of us clearly have high incomes, and some of us clearly do not.
(4) Originally Amazon required that we submit reviews on 80% of all items we selected.
(5) This year, Amazon changed the requirement. We must now review 100% of the items we select within 30 days of receipt. We can request a 10 day extension (and can do so 10 times per year).
(6) We know vendors pay Amazon to have items made available to Vine reviewers. We *think* this costs them around $5000, but this is based on a single data point from a Vine member who worked for a company that took a pass on paying that amount to be included in the Vine selections.
(7) For Vine reviews, the "Customer Review from the VIne Program" is essentially equivalent to an "Amazon Verified Purchase". Except that the reviewer received it at no cost...and is now obligated to review it within 30 days.
I can't speak for others, but I value my credibility as a reviewer, my % of helpful votes and my amazon reviewer ranking. Because of this, I never select books about technology issues (or technology items) that I do not already know something about (or am in the process of developing knowledge of). Similarly, I don't select or review genre fiction, since I don't read this for pleasure.
Yeah, some Vine reviews suck. So do some non-Vine reviews. As with ANY online resource, you always have to apply your own filters to help gauge the credibility.
And yes, I have happily awarded 1 and 2 star ratings to Vine products that sucked (and 4 and 5 star reviews to products that kicked ass).
Very informative! I've quoted the whole thing to move it up from the AC rating since I don't have any mod points to give it.
When one is called "100 Best Christian Cake Recipes" and another is "Butt-plugs and trap-ons: the definitive guide" you mostly want to keep your markets separate.
Note that I said mostly.
A very good point!
For other authors, keeping them all under one name makes it easier for readers to find your other stuff. If they buy one book, they are more likely to purchase other things in your "catalog".
Political correctness, is killing all the fun things in life for straight guys.
Depends on your definition of fun I suppose. I wonder if people ever said "The civil rights movement is killing all the fun things in life for members of the master race...."
This sounds reasonable, until you realize there isn't just one country in the world. Would you have to register your work in all 200 of them? Would this mean that it's okay to copy a work before it's released in your country?
Also, this would be problematic for open source software and especially GPL, because it basically wouldn't mean anything anymore (after the one free year).
True, it is not completely international - that could be addressed with agreements that would provide similar coverage in other countries.
It does weaken aspects of the GPL, but I think that is a valuable tradeoff. Any decrease in copyright protection weakens the GPL against people co-opting the code, but the largest reason copyleft exists in the software world is to get around restrictive copyright restrictions in the first place. Shorter copyright and a vibrant public domain does that as well.
Using google translate for German I got: She sat down at the kitchen table and discussed in the morning the news. For "chinese-simplified" They sat at the kitchen table and discuss the morning's news For chinese-traditionsl: They sat on the kitchen table to discuss the morning's news
Thanks for the response. I now understand the worry - any statements may be used to show an apparent contradiction that might be viewed negatively at trial.
I'm curious what a competent lawyer would advise in this case. Alice gets picked up, and refuses to talk until her lawyer shows up. Her and the lawyer converse - would the lawyer say she was at mom's place, or would the lawyer want to wait until trial?
This starts to become part of a "game theory" exercise. For an "innocent citizen" there is a chance that giving the police information that you have will help them to find the guilty party, which is a positive outcome for you. There is also a chance that giving information will make it more likely that you will have increased legal troubles, possibly up to being wrongly convicted of a crime you did not commit. How to behave in a given situation depends on the chances of each of those things happening, as well as how serious the consequences might be if they do.
If nobody ever talked to the police, solving crimes would be much harder. I refuse to live in fear that my behaving reasonably will come back to bite me - so when I see someone rob a bank, I will probably come forward to testify to what I saw to the best of my ability. If I was out shooting at the target range with no witnesses and drove home past my enemy's house and stopped to apologize for shouting "The next time I see you I'll kill you!" after our last barroom fight, and just as I was reaching the door my identical twin rushes out and hands me a bloody gun before running off into the night - I might seriously consider not speaking to the police without my lawyer's very careful advice.
Seems sensible, but you have to start higher than $10. I'd like the same formula with a $1000 starting point -> ~$2 million for year 10-20.
And I'd argue that one should start lower than 10 years. Most works should end up in PD after 8-15 years.
For the vast majority of stuff, a $10 fee is sufficient to prevent anyone who has no intention of trying to monetize something from filing the extension, and it is low enough that it is hard for anyone to complain about it being too high. Setting it at $1000 right from the outset might lead to the victimization of artists without deep enough pockets.
In my mind, the problem with current copyright is not that "great works" are locked up for a long time - Steamboat Willy can enjoy protection for an arbitrary time and I would think our cultural history would still be safe - but rather the problem is the fact that EVERYTHING is locked up for as long as SBW. If we put ANY renewal requirements in place, the VAST majority of things won't be renewed at all, and scholars and artists will have potential access to those items without the worry of copyright infringement. There is no great need to be super concerned that some things might still have a long copyright if 80% of things are public domain within a decade and 90% within two decades, and 99% within three.
Heck, as a first step, go with the Berne Convention (50 year minimums) and then start the doubling fee with at least a few thousand. The trick is to get the vast majority of stuff that is not providing the creator with income, into the public domain so that it can be used to build upon!
Slashdot Mirror
"but he cant intervene", "He can't be a personal God"
Why can't he?
it's about money and dumbing people down to make them better consumers
I wish I lived in a world where there were people in enough control who were smart enough to make these kinds of policy - surely any group with this much smarts and control would shepherd us better than the types of leadership we seem to get? With the level of competence I see around me at every levels, I find it hard to believe that anyone is that much on top of things.
On the other hand, I can see that there are systemic pressures (social, political, and economic) that favour one type of thought and behaviour over others (dare I say these are similar to biological evolutionary pressures?)
"evolution" at its most basic is the idea that a system that makes imperfect copies and has selective pressures will change over multiple generations. This is almost a tautology - similar in many respects to 1+1=2. It is difficult to imagine a universe where 1+1 is not true or a universe where systems that make imperfect copies and have selective pressures do not change over multiple generations.
Since biological system make imperfect copies and are subject to selective pressures, it is hard to see why they would not change over multiple generations.
The details of how much change, how much pressure, how imperfect the copies, etc. are available to inquiry, but how productive will you be if you spend your time questioning the "1+1" level of the system?
Yes, not as many people would be employed by a Wind Farm of equal capacity to a lost Nuclear Power Plant....
Are you sure about that? Nuke plants can be a few 1000 MW ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations ) while (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country ) seems to incidate the larges wind installations are only a few hundred MW:
As of 2011, the Roscoe Wind Farm (781 MW) in the United States is the world's largest wind farm.[6] As of September 2010, the Thanet Wind Farm in United Kingdom is the largest offshore wind farm in the world at 300 MW, followed by Horns Rev II (209 MW) in Denmark. The United Kingdom is the world's leading generator of offshore wind power, followed by Denmark.[7]
There are many large wind farms under construction and these include BARD Offshore 1 (400 MW), Clyde Wind Farm (548 MW), Greater Gabbard wind farm (500 MW), Lincs Wind Farm (270 MW), London Array (1000 MW), Lower Snake River Wind Project (343 MW), Macarthur Wind Farm (420 MW), Shepherds Flat Wind Farm (845 MW), Sheringham Shoal (317 MW), and the Walney Wind Farm (367 MW).
I would not be surprised to find that per MW, wind provides for more employment.
On a related note, I recall from years back that on a per MW basis, solar is very dangerous - no big disaster deaths or black lung mining problems, but lots of people falling off roofs and relatively small amount of power being produced.
good idea
All that means is that at some point, when so many problems have been solved that there is almost nothing left for humans to do, society will have to be restructured to cope with it. Maybe capitalism will stop being the way economies are organized. Maybe we will have societies where people can relax all day because there is no need for them to work. Maybe one day the most intelligent people will be offered a chance to live in luxurious accommodations that are not available to the rest of society, in exchange for working -- while everyone else can spend their days relaxing sans luxury.
I fear however that unless we start trying to work towards that type of utopia, we are going to end up with our current system cracking under the pressure of a huge number of unemployed poor folk with no hope for their future who pick up all those firearms laying around and start shooting people they are pissed off at. Maybe from the ashes of that bonfire we can put together a better system, but I would prefer that we try to step around that problem and move directly to the long term solution.
Instead they'll be fixing people hurt by broken self 'driving' cars.
Probably fewer of them though.
Technology only destroys jobs if you accept that the vast majority of the improvement in quality of life resulting from less labor required for survival should be reserved for a handful of plutocrats. Employment is low. Profits are high. Fewer people work more to get less out of fear that they will be cut next.
What technology can do is increase everyone's quality of life. Lower the work week to 32 hours and abolish the distinction between part time and full time employees and increase minimum wage to a scale that follows the cost of basic food, utilities, shelter and transportation (it would be around $18 an hour if it had been). More people working less and having more time for family or other hobbies that actually make life worth living.
That's crazy talk! Soon you'll be saying that the country is productive enough so that everyone could get health care! What's next? Give people enough to eat?
With the advances in productivity we have made since the 1930s when the 8 hour work day started to get wide adoption, we should be able to have complete employment and a 10 hour work week by now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States
Unfortunately I don't know of any system to automatically shift some of the benefit of increased productivity to the workers rather than having it accrue to the business owners or though inter-company competition have it all benefit the consumer by way of cheaper or more plentiful goods and services. Thus we have inexpensive high powered portable computer systems, but our national average working class wage has dropped when inflation adjusted, and the amount of time spent working has not decreased.
I would love to see some attempts to legislate some of these benefits - perhaps a gradual minimum wage increase 2% per year (or one third of the GNP growth?) for the next few decades or something like that, and add a new national holiday every two years for the next few decades or something like that. However, each country is not alone in this world, and if one makes this type of policy change, then maybe the jobs would move elsewhere. However as a counter example, there are pretty large differences in first world countries between total yearly work hours and minimum wages and social safety nets - so there is a lot of room for improvements for those countries with low pay and long work hours without too much danger of everything going to pot.
Of course we have world's fairs. They are called Expos. The Shanghai one was in 2010 and the Aichi one was in 2005. You must be American to be so unaware of what is happening in the world.
Looks like 2015 is scheduled for Italy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_fair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_expositions
Orcas like eating other mammals. Usually seals, sea lions and other whales though.
Sharks like eating fish.
I'm not sure that is completely accurate. As I recall from something like "Quirks and Quarks", there are at least two genetically separate (they don't cross breed) populations of Orca along the Pacific coast of NAmerica. The "resident" population who pretty much stick in the same place, and the "transient" population who travel up and down the coast. They have completely different diets - one of which I think is pretty much purely salmon, and the other which is mammalian. They each completely ignore the other food source.
http://www.orcaspirit.com/vancouver-island-marine-wildlife/vancouver-island-orcas-killer-whales/item/orcas-transient-versus-resident
I just looked up the above link - looks like since 1991 we've known about a third population "offshore" orca who eat sharks! Mount some lasers on the heads of those!
The question will come down to whether or not people see having reduced need for labor as being a good thing. Personally I always see it as being a good thing. I've frequently said I'd rather live in a world where my income is $10 an hour and my lunch costs $4 than being in a world where my income is $20 an hour and my lunch costs $20. In the later scenario, although I have more income, I am in fact poorer by every definition. Technology makes you wealthier, even if it might reduce your income - it makes nice stuff available for cheaper or available easier. Cheaper stuff means somebody got paid less to make it.
Ideally though, the increases in productivity get shared throughout society - but there are not very many mechanisms to make that happen. Since the 1920s productivity per worker in the USA has gone up by ya gazillion times, yet there are millions of working poor, millions of non-working poor, and a vanishingly small number of urber-rich. Forget the flying car - I want my 5 hour work-week at a living wage.
No, there are several competing taxi services and any company that wants to start a taxi company can start a service.
There are huge barriers to entry that have almost nothing to do with safety regulations.
In SF, the price of a taxi license or "medalion" is $150,000-$300,000 according to this story:
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/200-S-F-taxi-permits-price-150-000-4055492.php
Around the country: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the-taxi-medallions (interesting look at ride-sharing disruption of taxi business)
"In Boston, the price of a medallion is $625,000. In San Francisco, you need to drive a taxi at least 10 hours a week if you want to hold a medallion and lease it out. Veteran taxi drivers are able to sell their medallions for $300K...."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/us-business/fare-trade-the-rush-on-new-yorks-million-dollar-taxicab-licences/article12329086/
"In April, the price of a medallion sold to an individual buyer crossed $1-million for the first time (medallions sold to corporations broke through that barrier in 2011). In the past 12 months, prices for individual medallions have soared more than 40 per cent."
My friend from the Newfoundland reported an early childhood memory of a dinner table argument that finished "Well, when we are as rich as the Jones family then we can eat hamburger, but until then quit complaining and finish your lobster!".
She also reported that she always found it strange that in movies and on TV the visible minorities were always the "lower class" characters, whereas her experience was that the visible minorities who had emigrated to "the rock" were almost exclusively professionals (lawyers, doctors, etc) who were upper-middle-class or richer. It was only after moving to a big city on "the mainland" that she encountered large numbers of visible minorities, and the first time she met any who were not well-off.
Have a previous generation 11", and not buying another air. Reasons: ...
- no backlit keys. This is pretty much a show stopper. No keyboard should not have backlit keys.
While the other issues may be accurate in your opinion, the MBA does have a backlit keyboard for the current and previous generation at least. Are you sure it is not turned off?
here is a link to instructions :
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4001668?start=0&tstart=0
I am sick of this "we cannot profile" crap. The israelis profile based on "behaviour" as their main focus. I don't care how "trained" a terrorist is, they will always have a "tell" and they will always be nervous. Stop irradiating people and stop with this random violation of human rights in the name of political correctness. I am sorry but I am not interested in playing russian roulette with my life. That is exactly what this is because it is based on the premise that they can randomly find the terrorist.
Enough is enough. We have to start profiling based on behaviour and background checks and allow law abiding citizens and visitors to travel relatively unmolested. If we continue not profiling then the terrorists have won. Find and prosecute the terrorists and attempted terrorists and leave people who want to visit peacefully and spend money in your countries alone.
Doing evidence based profiling would probably be a good idea, but it is difficult, and to do it well would require a level of background checking and data mining that I think many would be uncomfortable with. Heck, even determining with high confidence just the identity of the 300 people to board the plane is a non-trivial task. Having a purely random component to determining who gets increased scrutiny is a very good way of dealing with the limitations of our screening resources.
From a game-theory perspective, if your attacker can figure out your profiling system, they of course would work hard to get their attack vector into the profile with the lowest chance of being subject to extra scrutiny. Since the defender knows this, it makes sense to pay more attention to those who's profile would generally indicate low risk. When you iterate this process enough, you come out at the end with the idea that equal chance for everyone is a good strategy. If one percent of all travelers had their IDs, tickets, luggage and backgrounds thoroughly checked, it could have quite a deterrence effect.
Of course the whole thing is pretty much pointless - the cost in terms of money, time, and hassle for air-security is way way out of proportion for the level of risk. We would get much better bang-for-the-buck dumping all that money into perfecting driver-less cars and cut down on highway deaths.
Getting one's head bashed into the ground is a "life threatening situation" even here in liberal leaning Canada.
Sure, but I can see how that might be a tough sell if the only one who cam support that version of events is the accused. While it may be the truth, it is also true that the accused has great incentive to lie if the actual events where otherwise.
by a Vine reviewer (posted anonymously due to my Vine NDA terms).
I was invited into Vine several years ago. Since then, I have received about $10000 worth of merchandise for review. The items I've received have ranged from Post It notes and gel pens to a high-end DSLR and some decent hardware (NAS, external and internal hard drives, mice, keyboards, routers and printers)
(1) Each month, Vine reviewers are offered two chances to select items to review. The first list is a short one (10 to 20 items) that Amazon descrives as "targeted" to members. The amount of tampons, diapers and hair care products that have been offered to me (a middle-aged bald male) suggests the targeting is *very* general. Targeted items are offered to multiple members (but not universally), and the high end items are gone in seconds.
(2) A week later, all of the non-selected items remaining from the targeted list are offered to the entire Vine community. Same rapid response to high end items takes place. You have to navigate hundreds of choices instead of dozens.
(3) The demographics of who were selected are all over the place.
--Some had long histories of purchasing from Amazon before being invited into Vine with both many and few (or no) previous reviews.
--Some had short histories of purchases with amazon.
-At the time I was selected, I had reviewed about 40 products (all most exclusively computer hardware or related literature) over a seven-year period
--Attempts by the Vine community to determine the total population of Vine reviewers (both on amazon-hosted Vine forums and in informal groups away from the amazon mothership) suggest the Vine reviewer population can be counted in hundreds (probably the low hundreds)
--I have some informal relationship with Vine members away from the mothership. While the sample size is WAY small to be meaningful, geographically we seem to be distributed consistent with the US population distribution in general. Generationally we seem to be mostly Boomers, but there are clearly a few Gen Y and millenials sprinkled in. Some of us clearly have high incomes, and some of us clearly do not.
(4) Originally Amazon required that we submit reviews on 80% of all items we selected.
(5) This year, Amazon changed the requirement. We must now review 100% of the items we select within 30 days of receipt. We can request a 10 day extension (and can do so 10 times per year).
(6) We know vendors pay Amazon to have items made available to Vine reviewers. We *think* this costs them around $5000, but this is based on a single data point from a Vine member who worked for a company that took a pass on paying that amount to be included in the Vine selections.
(7) For Vine reviews, the "Customer Review from the VIne Program" is essentially equivalent to an "Amazon Verified Purchase". Except that the reviewer received it at no cost...and is now obligated to review it within 30 days.
I can't speak for others, but I value my credibility as a reviewer, my % of helpful votes and my amazon reviewer ranking. Because of this, I never select books about technology issues (or technology items) that I do not already know something about (or am in the process of developing knowledge of). Similarly, I don't select or review genre fiction, since I don't read this for pleasure.
Yeah, some Vine reviews suck. So do some non-Vine reviews. As with ANY online resource, you always have to apply your own filters to help gauge the credibility.
And yes, I have happily awarded 1 and 2 star ratings to Vine products that sucked (and 4 and 5 star reviews to products that kicked ass).
Very informative! I've quoted the whole thing to move it up from the AC rating since I don't have any mod points to give it.
When one is called "100 Best Christian Cake Recipes" and another is "Butt-plugs and trap-ons: the definitive guide" you mostly want to keep your markets separate.
Note that I said mostly.
A very good point!
For other authors, keeping them all under one name makes it easier for readers to find your other stuff. If they buy one book, they are more likely to purchase other things in your "catalog".
Political correctness, is killing all the fun things in life for straight guys.
Depends on your definition of fun I suppose. I wonder if people ever said "The civil rights movement is killing all the fun things in life for members of the master race...."
This sounds reasonable, until you realize there isn't just one country in the world. Would you have to register your work in all 200 of them? Would this mean that it's okay to copy a work before it's released in your country?
Also, this would be problematic for open source software and especially GPL, because it basically wouldn't mean anything anymore (after the one free year).
True, it is not completely international - that could be addressed with agreements that would provide similar coverage in other countries.
It does weaken aspects of the GPL, but I think that is a valuable tradeoff. Any decrease in copyright protection weakens the GPL against people co-opting the code, but the largest reason copyleft exists in the software world is to get around restrictive copyright restrictions in the first place. Shorter copyright and a vibrant public domain does that as well.
Using google translate for German I got: She sat down at the kitchen table and discussed in the morning the news.
For "chinese-simplified" They sat at the kitchen table and discuss the morning's news
For chinese-traditionsl: They sat on the kitchen table to discuss the morning's news
<quote><p>Yup, it'd be trivial to write a program that would take 3 dirty copies and return a clean one.</p></quote>
So, if I give the program 3 copies of "50 shades of grey" it would return a version that is safe for my kids to read?
50? Go with 50 Thousand!
http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Thousand-Shades-Of-Grey-Ashen/dp/1479215430
The "look inside" first few pages are particularly droll.
Thanks for the response. I now understand the worry - any statements may be used to show an apparent contradiction that might be viewed negatively at trial.
I'm curious what a competent lawyer would advise in this case. Alice gets picked up, and refuses to talk until her lawyer shows up. Her and the lawyer converse - would the lawyer say she was at mom's place, or would the lawyer want to wait until trial?
This starts to become part of a "game theory" exercise. For an "innocent citizen" there is a chance that giving the police information that you have will help them to find the guilty party, which is a positive outcome for you. There is also a chance that giving information will make it more likely that you will have increased legal troubles, possibly up to being wrongly convicted of a crime you did not commit. How to behave in a given situation depends on the chances of each of those things happening, as well as how serious the consequences might be if they do.
If nobody ever talked to the police, solving crimes would be much harder. I refuse to live in fear that my behaving reasonably will come back to bite me - so when I see someone rob a bank, I will probably come forward to testify to what I saw to the best of my ability. If I was out shooting at the target range with no witnesses and drove home past my enemy's house and stopped to apologize for shouting "The next time I see you I'll kill you!" after our last barroom fight, and just as I was reaching the door my identical twin rushes out and hands me a bloody gun before running off into the night - I might seriously consider not speaking to the police without my lawyer's very careful advice.
Seems sensible, but you have to start higher than $10.
I'd like the same formula with a $1000 starting point -> ~$2 million for year 10-20.
And I'd argue that one should start lower than 10 years. Most works should end up in PD after 8-15 years.
For the vast majority of stuff, a $10 fee is sufficient to prevent anyone who has no intention of trying to monetize something from filing the extension, and it is low enough that it is hard for anyone to complain about it being too high. Setting it at $1000 right from the outset might lead to the victimization of artists without deep enough pockets.
In my mind, the problem with current copyright is not that "great works" are locked up for a long time - Steamboat Willy can enjoy protection for an arbitrary time and I would think our cultural history would still be safe - but rather the problem is the fact that EVERYTHING is locked up for as long as SBW. If we put ANY renewal requirements in place, the VAST majority of things won't be renewed at all, and scholars and artists will have potential access to those items without the worry of copyright infringement. There is no great need to be super concerned that some things might still have a long copyright if 80% of things are public domain within a decade and 90% within two decades, and 99% within three.
Heck, as a first step, go with the Berne Convention (50 year minimums) and then start the doubling fee with at least a few thousand. The trick is to get the vast majority of stuff that is not providing the creator with income, into the public domain so that it can be used to build upon!