It would seem as though "share alike" would be sufficient protection - if you want to use it, anyone else can use your derivative too. Sell it if you want, but anyone else can still build on your improvements. No need to prevent commercial activities.
"Earlier today, MacStories noted that markups in Australia average as much as 61.4% for music, 33.5% for movies and 25.9% for TV shows when a subset of content offerings is compared to prices in the United States once Australia's Goods and Services Tax (GST) has been accounted for. Markups for Apple's hardware products are more reasonable, with Mac, iPad and iPod prices in Australia generally falling within 10% of U.S. prices. The iPhone line, however, can go as high as a 16% markup for the iPhone 5 and 4S, while the iPhone 4 is actually slightly cheaper in Australia than it is in the United States."
"Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is."
Scary.
How do I get that one guy's job on edge of the graph?
You can use export in preview to force a kind of save-as and save an unamed duplicate will bring up a save-as dialogue.
This could have been handled better. Some of the time-machine and icloud integrations have had some interface problems..
Yeah, I haven't messed around with it as much as needed to figure out the best way for me to work with things. On the times when I have had to do so, I've been using a combination of export and re-opening the new document to get what I want done, but still need to figure out how to think about the "duplicate" could be used. Preview can be incredibly useful when dealing with PDFs, almost a "poor man's Acrobat Pro", but changing formats from jpg pdf was a lot easier before the "save as" went away.
One of my classmates in grad school is the daughter of a Catholic priest.
Her father is a devout Catholic, was married, had kids, etc. His wife (my classmate's mother) died. Her dad then went to seminary and was ordained a priest. The decision was based on the fact that he was celibate before and after marriage, did not violate any major church laws during any of that time, etc., so the Archbishop in Montreal said OK and the guy's now a priest.
I think you can also convert from being an Anglican priest and keep your wife. And the Eastern Catholic Churches (in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church) allows married men to be ordained
"Since at least the early 1950s, former Anglican, Lutheran and other clergy who join the Catholic Church have been granted such exceptions and is a practice mentioned in Pope Paul VI's encyclical Sacerdotalis caelibatus of 1967."
So if you plan ahead, you might be able to be a married priest, but it looks like you cannot make it to Bishop in the RCC.
I don't care what the Catholics believe. I care that they're trying to make me follow their rules.
Well, and you probably care because some of those rules are ones that you don't agree with. I doubt you're much upset about Catholic teachings on feeding the hungry or perhaps against capital punishment.
I suppose the important part is how a group goes about making others follow "their rules", yes? If I work to get the speed limit on highways changed by shooting motorists I would probably be condemned by most people, but lobbying politicians and holding rallies and stuff like that is probably OK. How can we possibly prohibit any of these types of things in support of any cause without running into huge freedom of speech issues? I suppose we could submit the causes to DuckDogers in his infinite wisdom to decide, but eventually good ole Duck's gonna retire and what could we do then? Trap all the Slashdot contributers in a room and wait for the right type of smoke to be seen?
Yet for some reason Peter never seemed to harp on his being the supreme vicar of Christ, or of that role being hereditary. Wierd.
Old Priest #1 - Do you think they'll ever allow priests to get married? Old Priest #2 - Not in our lifetimes, that's for sure... but maybe in our kids'....
See, it's funny because priests are not allowed to get married, so they shouldn't have any kids! The role of priest, bishop, or pope is certainly not "hereditary".
Applications no longer quit, instead they keep running in the background, if you click the red button.
Only a few programs in Mac OS X have ever quit when you closed the last window. "Quit" and "Close Window" have always been different commands. The ability to quit when hitting the "little red button" is only implemented in a few programs (but perhaps should be in more - people leaving dozens of programs running has been a problem ever since the multi-finder days of System 7 or earlier).
I do like the goal of not having things matter if I am launching, relaunching, or just returning to an application that was in the background, but I don't think we are quite there yet, and being confident that I have completely closed an application and it is not going to do something weird when I run it next time is still important.
With all that said, yeah this is a bit of "iOSification".
I haven't noticed any defaulting to iCloud saving issues, but my work with Preview has got me very flumuxed with this auto saving and lack of "save as" type of thing. If I was doing it often I would really need to figure out a better work-flow than I am currently using. Changing file formats is a pain in the ass when needing to export, then find and open the new file to start working on it, for example.
Installing from non-registered developers does require a control-click-open rather than just a double-click, which is not too onerous in my mind.
But I share TekkieGod's concern that things could easily go too far in the direction of iOS. It is not there yet in my opinion, but I can see how it might go that way, and it also makes me nervous.
The carriers don't really give a rat's ass what you do with your subsidized phone, as long as you fulfill your 24 months of minimum service.
They might care. What they don't want you to do is to load software that they haven't validated and then your device magically starts taking down cell towers.
Those foreigners in other parts of the world without this "locked phone" business model seem to be able to handle it. Those crafty foreigners.....
I wonder if the aquatic biomass has much communication with the atmosphere? If the O2 cannot get into the water efficiently it will remain in the atmosphere.
Plants do fine at night without producing O2 by burning their sugars and producing CO2 - I wonder how long they could survive with a very low C02 level? Probably about as long as they can survive in the dark - but I don't know how long that might be.
We might be able to mitigate some of this by quickly setting huge tracts of land ablaze to build up the CO2 levels at least locally....
Sorry to leave the impression I was disagreeing with you. I wasn't. I was just spouting off my own info trying to make everything think I was smarter than the average bear, as it were.
Sure, if you can get a carbon-neutral way of heating the greenhouse, then of course you are golden. Well, maybe not, since your workers probably have a higher carbon footprint themselves compared to the workers in some equatorial paradise....
Roads are usually paid for with a gasoline tax. This worked out great when everyone drove cars as the more you drove the more you paid. The problem is as we move to alternative fuels there will be no one left to pay for the roads.
Except for anyone making use of the roads for shipping of goods, or anyone who buys anything from them. EVERYONE pays gasoline tax, until all the shipping traffic moves to alternative fuels I suppose.
However, the carbon in the asparagus came from the atmosphere. The carbon from non-biofuels has been sequestered from the atmosphere for millions of years.
To be fair, the carbon attributed to the asparagus includes not only the few grams in the final grown plant, but all the CO2 released in doing the farming, making the fertilizer, shipping everything here and there, etc. Much of that carbon emission is also due to non-biofuels.
Actually shipping is very efficient. It can take far more fossil fuels to grow crops outside their ideal area vs transporting them.
I guess we could all only eat things grown in a 20 mile radius, but that would be pretty limiting.
Something like 10% of the carbon footprint of agriculture is due to transportation to the consumer. While "eating local" is generally a good idea, by itself it is not a complete solution. Winter hothouse tomatoes in Britain contribute significantly more CO2 than importing Spanish field tomatoes to Britain, for example.
No, no CO2 means none of the O2 is sequestered by carbon - we'll probably breath just fine for a few weeks/months.
It took a whole long time to build up O2 levels when plants first started churning it out, without anyone working to breath it in. I suspect it would take multiple centuries to breath up a planet's worth. Not that it would all be lightness and joy....
Some of my wife's relatives are of the "forward-to-all every-damn-thing-that-hits-my-mailbox" type. Naturally, every email address in the relative's address book is in the CC: line. So every desktop that sees those emails now has her email address, with predictable results.
I have a boilerplate response that I send (repeatedly) to friends, family, and various administrators, who do this. I really don't want to get mail with 800+ recipients' email addresses. Also of use is a template for bogus rumors linking to http://www.snopes.com/ .
It goes something like this:
xxxxx,
Sending email to lots of people who might not want their email addresses exchanged with random strangers, or others, is pretty rude. We get enough junk email without having all of your contacts' virus infested machines having a copy of my email address on them. I suspect that current privacy legislation prohibits this sort of behaviour. If you must send email messages out to lots of people, please use the Bcc header rather than "To:" or "Cc:"
Here is a copy of a message I typically send out to people who send me huge lists of strangers addresses:
I cannot recall if I have mentioned this to you recently, but I figure I will mention it again. Most of this is "boilerplate" that I send to everyone who makes the same mistake that you did, hopefully it is not too impersonal...
The message you just sent included the email address of ALL (or at least A LOT) of the recipients in either the "To:" or the "Cc:" fields, so that all recipients could view the others' email addresses. I recognize that there are reasons why it might be nice to include all recipients in an easily viewed format, but in general I think it is a bad idea. What with the amount of junk email that we all get, and the increased incidence of email worms/viruses which spread by finding new addresses to send themselves to, exposing private email addresses of your corespondents to each other is a bad idea.
In the recent past I have started receiving email viruses addressed to email addresses that are directly linked to people using them in legitimate "mass mailings" such as yours. If any one of the listed people's machines is or ever gets infected, all of your recipients could start getting junk and/or virus email from those infected machines. This is only one small reason for avoiding the practice. There are larger security and privacy issues to consider too.
Much better is to use the "bcc" header whenever possible when sending to large numbers of recipients. It looks neater to each recipient not having to read through a huge list of addresses, and provides some privacy protections. Here is some information about "bcc" in email in case it might be of use to you:
Even more dishonest, they are planning on using some of the money for food! Who knows what their workers will do with the big bucks after they get paid? Maybe go to a movie?
They say that if they get the money they will make the emoji. They are also saying they will do other things too. If you don't think the money will be well spent, then don't support it.
I think they made an error in detailing exactly how many hours they are expecting people to work and how much money they are going to pay them. They should probably have just said: "Toyama is going to make these emoji and we're managing to pay him a bit less than we would bill him out for to other clients for this project - thanks Toyama!"
I've seen some research showing how fascinating real guns are to kids - making it very very very challenging to train them to not play with ones they find. Many (albeit not all) ittle kids who have been extensively taught proper gun safety very often do not exhibit it when not being supervised, both by gun owning families and non-gun owning families. Thus my thoughts that pink guns probably wouldn't make it much worse.
Of course criminals could paint their illegal guns pink, but that wouldn't help them much if they got caught doing a crime anyway, and it would make them look less cool when hanging out in the crime-clubhouse. This is not really a proposal to directly address criminal activities, but rather one designed to influence the way firearms are perceived - both by gun owners and by non-gun owners.
As a tool for putting holes in things, a firearm works just as well regardless of its colour. If it is the "right tool for the right job" it would work just as well if it were neon pink. Making it less aesthetically pleasing without changing its functional aspects would certainly make it less marketable without limiting its usefulness for those with an actual need. We as a society mandate safety design issues in a lot of products, and it is certainly true that firearms can be quite dangerous. Making them less attractive would seem to be a viable strategy. If there were 30,000 electric drill related deaths in the USA, I suspect that there would be a lot more thought on ways to make them safer while still allowing them to be used for their useful ability to make holes in things.
Only if you define "net gain" as "a change over a time period which best suits my argument".
Most people involved in the conversation about human caused increases in atmospheric levels of CO2 define "net gain" as anything that increases the CO2 level compared to not doing the action. Pumping CO2 exhaust past algae to be used as later combustion material does increase the atmospheric CO2 when that material is later burned.
Of course using biodiesel is merely a carrier of solar energy, but if you are using "newly" created CO2 for its growth, you are not having a significant positive impact on atmospheric carbon levels.
If you don't care about atmospheric carbon levels, since "The co2 in the coal was atmospheric once before, and it will be again.", then why bother with the algae cycle at all? Just burn more coal, we've got quite a bit of it.
well, they could set up a bunch of PV panels to capture sunlight into electricity, and split the CO2 into carbon and oxygen using catalyzed electrolysis. Release the oxygen into the atmosphere, and just dump the carbon into the ground or something.
Or they could scrap the whole coal part of stuff and just use the PV to move those electrons around directly. Adding the PV to the coal system would be less efficient since you are basically using the PV system to reverse the coal system anyway. If the coal system produces X amount of electrical energy releasing Y tonnes of CO2, it is going to take a lot more than X amount of PV electrical energy (I would guess at least 5X being very conservative) in order to turn those Y tonnes of CO2 back into carbon and oxygen. It would be much more efficient to just use that 5X of PV electrical power without touching the coal at all.
Then when that fuel gets burned it gets released into the atmosphere. Sure, this may be marginally better than direct release, but it still is a net atmospheric gain of CO2
The problem isn't potential for abuse. The idea itself is an abuse of state power. The state has specific roles, specific privileges, and specific duties.
And those roles and duties are generally outlined by the legislation enacted by the elected representatives of "the people". If enough people think it is a good idea, as long as it passes constitutional muster, then it is not "an abuse of state power", almost by definition.
We already have rules about how your estate is to be disposed of absent a formal will. This could merely be an extension of this. Absent the potential for abuse (killing off some for the benefit of others for example) which you've already said is not a real problem, the only downsides would be the same as those experienced by people who die without a will - their estate being handled in a way that they might not like.
You cant be serious. The idea that the state has default rights to your body after your death is pretty awful, and Im a little astonished that a significant number of people think its OK to stake claims over the bodies of the deceased.
A valid concern. I wonder if any other large body of people have ever tried anything like that and made it work without abuses? Humm....
"As of 2010, 24 European countries have some form of presumed consent (opt-out) system...."
At least a few tens of millions of people think it is not such a bad idea. There certainly are not a lot of horror stories coming out of it. Maybe these EU countries just have better governments than we do? More trustworthy? Or do we think that somehow there is a fundamental change that takes place when people emigrate to North America and experiences in one place have no bearing on conditions in the other?
Your comment about "women and gays" makes it difficult to take seriously your more valid criticisms. While I suppose it might increase sales to some demographics, those demographics usually are not the ones with large problems with physical violence already. Getting guns out of the hands of "angry young men" would likely be a net positive even if some of those guns were shifted to "people who like the color pink".
I doubt, but would be interested to see any research, that any changes to the colour of a gun would have much effect on their attractiveness to children - they are almost unresistable as playthings no matter what the color. If children are able to casually pick up a firearm that they just find lying around, then we are already well past the dangerous point in terms of child access to weapons.
The creation of a "huge black market" seems possible, but how is that different than now? Regulating the color of firearms probably could pass constitutional muster, and it could immediately make it clear that a particular firearm was not legal. I think it would also have a huge impact on sales to the "macho" crowd. I think cops would look cute with pink firearms. And "gang bangers" might just look silly.
Slashdot Mirror
It would seem as though "share alike" would be sufficient protection - if you want to use it, anyone else can use your derivative too. Sell it if you want, but anyone else can still build on your improvements. No need to prevent commercial activities.
This article has a nice graphic: http://www.macrumors.com/2013/03/21/apple-blames-high-australian-markups-for-digital-content-on-media-rights-holders/
"Earlier today, MacStories noted that markups in Australia average as much as 61.4% for music, 33.5% for movies and 25.9% for TV shows when a subset of content offerings is compared to prices in the United States once Australia's Goods and Services Tax (GST) has been accounted for. Markups for Apple's hardware products are more reasonable, with Mac, iPad and iPod prices in Australia generally falling within 10% of U.S. prices. The iPhone line, however, can go as high as a 16% markup for the iPhone 5 and 4S, while the iPhone 4 is actually slightly cheaper in Australia than it is in the United States."
Even more detail at http://www.macstories.net/stories/quantifying-the-australian-apple-tax/
Fact is people have no idea just how incredibly inequitable the distribution is. They think they do, but it's way worse than even that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
"Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is."
Scary.
How do I get that one guy's job on edge of the graph?
You can use export in preview to force a kind of save-as and save an unamed duplicate will bring up a save-as dialogue.
This could have been handled better. Some of the time-machine and icloud integrations have had some interface problems..
Yeah, I haven't messed around with it as much as needed to figure out the best way for me to work with things. On the times when I have had to do so, I've been using a combination of export and re-opening the new document to get what I want done, but still need to figure out how to think about the "duplicate" could be used. Preview can be incredibly useful when dealing with PDFs, almost a "poor man's Acrobat Pro", but changing formats from jpg pdf was a lot easier before the "save as" went away.
Just remind everyone that the volume of a pizza of radius z and thickness a is pi z z a.
I like that.
One of my classmates in grad school is the daughter of a Catholic priest.
Her father is a devout Catholic, was married, had kids, etc. His wife (my classmate's mother) died. Her dad then went to seminary and was ordained a priest. The decision was based on the fact that he was celibate before and after marriage, did not violate any major church laws during any of that time, etc., so the Archbishop in Montreal said OK and the guy's now a priest.
I think you can also convert from being an Anglican priest and keep your wife. And the Eastern Catholic Churches (in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church) allows married men to be ordained
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerical_celibacy
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoral_provision
"Since at least the early 1950s, former Anglican, Lutheran and other clergy who join the Catholic Church have been granted such exceptions and is a practice mentioned in Pope Paul VI's encyclical Sacerdotalis caelibatus of 1967."
So if you plan ahead, you might be able to be a married priest, but it looks like you cannot make it to Bishop in the RCC.
I don't care what the Catholics believe. I care that they're trying to make me follow their rules.
Well, and you probably care because some of those rules are ones that you don't agree with. I doubt you're much upset about Catholic teachings on feeding the hungry or perhaps against capital punishment.
I suppose the important part is how a group goes about making others follow "their rules", yes? If I work to get the speed limit on highways changed by shooting motorists I would probably be condemned by most people, but lobbying politicians and holding rallies and stuff like that is probably OK. How can we possibly prohibit any of these types of things in support of any cause without running into huge freedom of speech issues? I suppose we could submit the causes to DuckDogers in his infinite wisdom to decide, but eventually good ole Duck's gonna retire and what could we do then? Trap all the Slashdot contributers in a room and wait for the right type of smoke to be seen?
Yet for some reason Peter never seemed to harp on his being the supreme vicar of Christ, or of that role being hereditary. Wierd.
Old Priest #1 - Do you think they'll ever allow priests to get married? ....
Old Priest #2 - Not in our lifetimes, that's for sure... but maybe in our kids'
See, it's funny because priests are not allowed to get married, so they shouldn't have any kids! The role of priest, bishop, or pope is certainly not "hereditary".
Applications no longer quit, instead they keep running in the background, if you click the red button.
Only a few programs in Mac OS X have ever quit when you closed the last window. "Quit" and "Close Window" have always been different commands. The ability to quit when hitting the "little red button" is only implemented in a few programs (but perhaps should be in more - people leaving dozens of programs running has been a problem ever since the multi-finder days of System 7 or earlier).
The "reopening" windows behaviour can be controlled from the "General" Systems Preferences control, and can be done on a case-by-case basis by using Option while quitting according to http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/apple/how-to-tame-mac-os-x-lion-annoyances-1088025
I do like the goal of not having things matter if I am launching, relaunching, or just returning to an application that was in the background, but I don't think we are quite there yet, and being confident that I have completely closed an application and it is not going to do something weird when I run it next time is still important.
With all that said, yeah this is a bit of "iOSification".
I haven't noticed any defaulting to iCloud saving issues, but my work with Preview has got me very flumuxed with this auto saving and lack of "save as" type of thing. If I was doing it often I would really need to figure out a better work-flow than I am currently using. Changing file formats is a pain in the ass when needing to export, then find and open the new file to start working on it, for example.
Installing from non-registered developers does require a control-click-open rather than just a double-click, which is not too onerous in my mind.
But I share TekkieGod's concern that things could easily go too far in the direction of iOS. It is not there yet in my opinion, but I can see how it might go that way, and it also makes me nervous.
The carriers don't really give a rat's ass what you do with your subsidized phone, as long as you fulfill your 24 months of minimum service.
They might care. What they don't want you to do is to load software that they haven't validated and then your device magically starts taking down cell towers.
Those foreigners in other parts of the world without this "locked phone" business model seem to be able to handle it. Those crafty foreigners.....
Nice math.
I wonder if the aquatic biomass has much communication with the atmosphere? If the O2 cannot get into the water efficiently it will remain in the atmosphere.
Plants do fine at night without producing O2 by burning their sugars and producing CO2 - I wonder how long they could survive with a very low C02 level? Probably about as long as they can survive in the dark - but I don't know how long that might be.
We might be able to mitigate some of this by quickly setting huge tracts of land ablaze to build up the CO2 levels at least locally....
Sorry to leave the impression I was disagreeing with you. I wasn't. I was just spouting off my own info trying to make everything think I was smarter than the average bear, as it were.
Sure, if you can get a carbon-neutral way of heating the greenhouse, then of course you are golden. Well, maybe not, since your workers probably have a higher carbon footprint themselves compared to the workers in some equatorial paradise....
Roads are usually paid for with a gasoline tax. This worked out great when everyone drove cars as the more you drove the more you paid. The problem is as we move to alternative fuels there will be no one left to pay for the roads.
Except for anyone making use of the roads for shipping of goods, or anyone who buys anything from them. EVERYONE pays gasoline tax, until all the shipping traffic moves to alternative fuels I suppose.
However, the carbon in the asparagus came from the atmosphere.
The carbon from non-biofuels has been sequestered from the atmosphere for millions of years.
To be fair, the carbon attributed to the asparagus includes not only the few grams in the final grown plant, but all the CO2 released in doing the farming, making the fertilizer, shipping everything here and there, etc. Much of that carbon emission is also due to non-biofuels.
Actually shipping is very efficient. It can take far more fossil fuels to grow crops outside their ideal area vs transporting them.
I guess we could all only eat things grown in a 20 mile radius, but that would be pretty limiting.
Something like 10% of the carbon footprint of agriculture is due to transportation to the consumer. While "eating local" is generally a good idea, by itself it is not a complete solution. Winter hothouse tomatoes in Britain contribute significantly more CO2 than importing Spanish field tomatoes to Britain, for example.
No, no CO2 means none of the O2 is sequestered by carbon - we'll probably breath just fine for a few weeks/months.
It took a whole long time to build up O2 levels when plants first started churning it out, without anyone working to breath it in. I suspect it would take multiple centuries to breath up a planet's worth. Not that it would all be lightness and joy....
Some of my wife's relatives are of the "forward-to-all every-damn-thing-that-hits-my-mailbox" type. Naturally, every email address in the relative's address book is in the CC: line. So every desktop that sees those emails now has her email address, with predictable results.
I have a boilerplate response that I send (repeatedly) to friends, family, and various administrators, who do this. I really don't want to get mail with 800+ recipients' email addresses. Also of use is a template for bogus rumors linking to http://www.snopes.com/ .
It goes something like this:
xxxxx,
Sending email to lots of people who might not want their email addresses exchanged with random strangers, or others, is pretty rude. We get enough junk email without having all of your contacts' virus infested machines having a copy of my email address on them. I suspect that current privacy legislation prohibits this sort of behaviour. If you must send email messages out to lots of people, please use the Bcc header rather than "To:" or "Cc:"
Here is a copy of a message I typically send out to people who send me huge lists of strangers addresses:
I cannot recall if I have mentioned this to you recently, but I figure I will mention it again. Most of this is "boilerplate" that I send to everyone who makes the same mistake that you did, hopefully it is not too impersonal...
The message you just sent included the email address of ALL (or at least A LOT) of the recipients in either the "To:" or the "Cc:" fields, so that all recipients could view the others' email addresses. I recognize that there are reasons why it might be nice to include all recipients in an easily viewed format, but in general I think it is a bad idea. What with the amount of junk email that we all get, and the increased incidence of email worms/viruses which spread by finding new addresses to send themselves to, exposing private email addresses of your corespondents to each other is a bad idea.
In the recent past I have started receiving email viruses addressed to email addresses that are directly linked to people using them in legitimate "mass mailings" such as yours. If any one of the listed people's machines is or ever gets infected, all of your recipients could start getting junk and/or virus email from those infected machines. This is only one small reason for avoiding the practice. There are larger security and privacy issues to consider too.
Much better is to use the "bcc" header whenever possible when sending to large numbers of recipients. It looks neater to each recipient not having to read through a huge list of addresses, and provides some privacy protections. Here is some information about "bcc" in email in case it might be of use to you:
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/bcc-for-privacy.html
Thanks for your attention to this issue.
Even more dishonest, they are planning on using some of the money for food! Who knows what their workers will do with the big bucks after they get paid? Maybe go to a movie?
They say that if they get the money they will make the emoji. They are also saying they will do other things too. If you don't think the money will be well spent, then don't support it.
I think they made an error in detailing exactly how many hours they are expecting people to work and how much money they are going to pay them. They should probably have just said: "Toyama is going to make these emoji and we're managing to pay him a bit less than we would bill him out for to other clients for this project - thanks Toyama!"
I've seen some research showing how fascinating real guns are to kids - making it very very very challenging to train them to not play with ones they find. Many (albeit not all) ittle kids who have been extensively taught proper gun safety very often do not exhibit it when not being supervised, both by gun owning families and non-gun owning families. Thus my thoughts that pink guns probably wouldn't make it much worse.
Of course criminals could paint their illegal guns pink, but that wouldn't help them much if they got caught doing a crime anyway, and it would make them look less cool when hanging out in the crime-clubhouse. This is not really a proposal to directly address criminal activities, but rather one designed to influence the way firearms are perceived - both by gun owners and by non-gun owners.
As a tool for putting holes in things, a firearm works just as well regardless of its colour. If it is the "right tool for the right job" it would work just as well if it were neon pink. Making it less aesthetically pleasing without changing its functional aspects would certainly make it less marketable without limiting its usefulness for those with an actual need. We as a society mandate safety design issues in a lot of products, and it is certainly true that firearms can be quite dangerous. Making them less attractive would seem to be a viable strategy. If there were 30,000 electric drill related deaths in the USA, I suspect that there would be a lot more thought on ways to make them safer while still allowing them to be used for their useful ability to make holes in things.
Anyhow, here's a Hello Kitty Assault Rifle:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9852603-1.html
Only if you define "net gain" as "a change over a time period which best suits my argument".
Most people involved in the conversation about human caused increases in atmospheric levels of CO2 define "net gain" as anything that increases the CO2 level compared to not doing the action. Pumping CO2 exhaust past algae to be used as later combustion material does increase the atmospheric CO2 when that material is later burned.
Of course using biodiesel is merely a carrier of solar energy, but if you are using "newly" created CO2 for its growth, you are not having a significant positive impact on atmospheric carbon levels.
If you don't care about atmospheric carbon levels, since "The co2 in the coal was atmospheric once before, and it will be again.", then why bother with the algae cycle at all? Just burn more coal, we've got quite a bit of it.
well, they could set up a bunch of PV panels to capture sunlight into electricity, and split the CO2 into carbon and oxygen using catalyzed electrolysis. Release the oxygen into the atmosphere, and just dump the carbon into the ground or something.
Or they could scrap the whole coal part of stuff and just use the PV to move those electrons around directly. Adding the PV to the coal system would be less efficient since you are basically using the PV system to reverse the coal system anyway. If the coal system produces X amount of electrical energy releasing Y tonnes of CO2, it is going to take a lot more than X amount of PV electrical energy (I would guess at least 5X being very conservative) in order to turn those Y tonnes of CO2 back into carbon and oxygen. It would be much more efficient to just use that 5X of PV electrical power without touching the coal at all.
Pump it into algae tubes to make fuel out of.
Like the Redhawk powerplant does.
Then when that fuel gets burned it gets released into the atmosphere. Sure, this may be marginally better than direct release, but it still is a net atmospheric gain of CO2
The problem isn't potential for abuse. The idea itself is an abuse of state power. The state has specific roles, specific privileges, and specific duties.
And those roles and duties are generally outlined by the legislation enacted by the elected representatives of "the people". If enough people think it is a good idea, as long as it passes constitutional muster, then it is not "an abuse of state power", almost by definition.
We already have rules about how your estate is to be disposed of absent a formal will. This could merely be an extension of this. Absent the potential for abuse (killing off some for the benefit of others for example) which you've already said is not a real problem, the only downsides would be the same as those experienced by people who die without a will - their estate being handled in a way that they might not like.
Organ donor opt-out...
You cant be serious. The idea that the state has default rights to your body after your death is pretty awful, and Im a little astonished that a significant number of people think its OK to stake claims over the bodies of the deceased.
A valid concern. I wonder if any other large body of people have ever tried anything like that and made it work without abuses? Humm....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation#Opt-in_vs._opt-out
"As of 2010, 24 European countries have some form of presumed consent (opt-out) system...."
At least a few tens of millions of people think it is not such a bad idea. There certainly are not a lot of horror stories coming out of it. Maybe these EU countries just have better governments than we do? More trustworthy? Or do we think that somehow there is a fundamental change that takes place when people emigrate to North America and experiences in one place have no bearing on conditions in the other?
Your comment about "women and gays" makes it difficult to take seriously your more valid criticisms. While I suppose it might increase sales to some demographics, those demographics usually are not the ones with large problems with physical violence already. Getting guns out of the hands of "angry young men" would likely be a net positive even if some of those guns were shifted to "people who like the color pink".
I doubt, but would be interested to see any research, that any changes to the colour of a gun would have much effect on their attractiveness to children - they are almost unresistable as playthings no matter what the color. If children are able to casually pick up a firearm that they just find lying around, then we are already well past the dangerous point in terms of child access to weapons.
The creation of a "huge black market" seems possible, but how is that different than now? Regulating the color of firearms probably could pass constitutional muster, and it could immediately make it clear that a particular firearm was not legal. I think it would also have a huge impact on sales to the "macho" crowd. I think cops would look cute with pink firearms. And "gang bangers" might just look silly.
Worth a try I say.