You've met your first one then: me! I don't go around compelling people to live by my standards.
There is a difference between "discouraging" and "compelling", and while it is possible that you feel no impetus to discourage various forms of behaviour, I suspect that in actually, there are many actions that you carry out daily that are designed to encourage and/or discourage a variety of behaviours in others.
You might for example, frown at people who talk in movie theaters, or say thank-you to people who bring you your meal in a restaurant. You might agree with some forms of traffic laws, product labeling laws, or a variety of other public safety legislation. You may feel that taxes may be used to encourage some forms of charity, or discourage some types of activities. You might feel that it is an appropriate role of government to inform the general population about the health benefits or dangers of various substances or activities. All of these are, to some extent, discouraging or encouraging certain behaviours.
In light of what we currently know, if tobacco were to have been discovered tomorrow, it would never be able to be sold for the uses it is currently being sold for due to its dangerous side effects - and the majority of our society support the safety barriers that new products need to get past. The only reason it is currently still widely available is due to its historic introduction. My silly proposal would in fact never require anyone to change their behaviour, but only prohibit certain people from starting that behaviour. Of course I have no illusions that it could ever be implemented.
I cannot find the study, but sometime within the past 24 months or so I heard a sound-bite on the CBC about a recently completed study of the effects of smoking in adolescents. According to my memory at least, the researchers found significant physiological effects on 12 year old subjects after only a single cigarette. The subjects seemed to be experiencing physical/chemical withdrawal effects after this one single exposure. This is in contrast with those over 21 who seem to develop chemical addiction to cigarettes much less easily.
If my memory is correct, and such findings are in fact valid, this would give further legitimacy to age restrictions on tobacco products.
Even if my memory (or the above mentioned study) is not completely valid, there are numerous other studies (I think) linking age of first cigarette with level of addiction, and a variety of studies showing the effectiveness of age limitation laws on tobacco purchase and future addiction levels.
Personally I have never encountered anyone (baring those employed in the tobacco industry) who actually is against society as a whole discouraging smoking by anyone - the differences of option are always in how we decide how to do that discouraging. I have always thought that we should implement a law that totally bans the use of tobacco products in those born after the year 1993 (14 year olds), which I don't think anyone could possibly have an argument against. Then every two years, move the tobacco ban up one year - so that in 2009 nobody born in 1994 or later could use tobacco, in 2011 nobody born in 1995 or later could use tobacco, and so on. After twenty years the ban will extend to those who are 24 years old, after forty years it extends to those who are 34 years old, after sixty years it extends to those who are 44 years old. The moving year of prohibition means that we are never taking current (legal) smokers and making their addiction legal, but at the same time we are gradually limiting the number of new smokers that the industry can sell to. It should give those in the industry to find something else to make their money on, while gradually weaning the whole society off of this unhealthy habit, all without ever forcing anyone to give up their lifestyle choices.
Should I submit that idea to the Turk to test it out?
No doctor in their right mind would call the Rhythm Method (what you are referring to) a fraud. It just isn't nearly as effective as the pill, or virtually any other common method of contraception.
"Natural Family Planning", or perhaps more correctly "Fertility Awareness" forms of birth control can, according to the references from wikipedia , "When used correctly and consistently, studies have shown some forms of FA to be 99% effective, the same as oral contraceptives." The "Rhythm Method" is a pretty old and "simple" method of NFP, with correspondingly less effectiveness - I can't recall if the original posting was talking about purely a calendar based system (Rhythm Method) or one of the more effective "Symptothermal" methods.
Of course one can spend a lot of time thinking about how to interpret birth control effectiveness statistics, both user and method rates, but it is clear that for those committed to the methods, they can be used with some degree of confidence. Cruising through the various wikipedia birth control articles, it is surprising how poor both "perfect use" and "typical use" effectiveness rates are for what at first glance I thought were highly effective methods - see for example here.
As dabraun surely would attest in any case, all of these methods are firmly grounded in science - though there might be considerable debate over the precise level of effectiveness, none of them go against widely accepted scientific understanding of infertility and conception
Archive copies are not just kept for historical purposes - it is often nice to have an easily editable copy available for further development. If you want to write a new contract based on the old one, having the old one in ODF might be better than just having it in PDF. Maybe your policy should keep copies of both formats? Note that PDF is not a guarantee that it has not been altered - maybe you need some read-only filesystems?
The quote states that the info would be pulled after a warrant is issued, which does not seem too unreasonable. Of course there is the potential of abuses by the people with access. I wonder what type of warrant they might need if they wanted to data-mine for suspects? Let us imagine a few bodies turn up around town, all having been dumped a few weeks back - will anyone be able to search the database for cars in those parts of town at the appropriate times (assuming the data exists - will anyone be able to ask "do we have data for Main & 23rd on July 12 around noon?" or does that need a warrant? Can we do searches that tell us "there are three cars that match the query" without a warrant if the system doesn't tell us which cars they are?
If I'm not mistaken, the first Apple computer to support USB was the iMac in 1998. But in 1997, I bought a Micron Millenium XKU, which was a budget PC, and it had USB. So it was actually already quite well established in the PC world.
Certainly it is true that USB ports were available prior the the iMac, however USB devices generally were not. After the introduction of the iMac, USB suddenly became prevalent, largely due to the fact that the fairly large body of iMac owners had no other options for connectivity - the ONLY ports the iMac had were USB and 10/100 Ethernet.
For a while, if you wanted a USB anything, it was invariably coloured "bondi-blue".
I don't know how much Apple's actions drove the market, but it seems fairly clear that the introduction of the iMac had a pretty large influence on adoption industry-wide. Without Apple, it seems quite possible that USB would have languished for a number of year until the number of new systems supporting USB became much much larger. As it was, the iMac provided a market for USB devices that was separate from devices with other ports - suddenly Macintosh hardware companies were forces to support USB, and were able to also sell to non-mac owners who had USB. Before the iMac, every computer had some system other than USB (did you Micron Millenium have ONLY USB?), so it made more sense to support those more widely available connectors.
It never was in front. Period. It was (and is) a *port* of OpenOffice. NeoOffice has never developed any new office features, and it has allways lagged behind OOo running on X on the Mac. Mind you, I'm an avid NeoOffice user.
I thought Neooffice had all sorts of advanced goodness from Novell's ooo-build project such as Excell macros which are not part of OOo running on X on the Mac.
It would be pretty difficult to prove that Ameritrade *causing* the spam. It sounds more like they have a security problem.
But such a security problem, for a financial institution involved in stock transactions, would seem to be a serious one, and thus of interest to the SEC and the media.
Just to keep the math easy: your investment is $28K and your return is almost $1.4K, so you are looking at a return of about 5%. You have already seen what the payback time for this is, but one factor that hasn't been mentioned is that investments that reduce expenses like this are really equivalent to tax-free returns. Investing the money in stocks might give a greater rate of return (long term numbers are like 10%) but you have to pay taxes on that income, while you do not have to pay taxes on the money you save by installing solar. With a reasonable income, the tax you pay can quickly cut what looks like a large return to something much closer to the 5% you are calculating above.
With all that said, I recall seeing that the best rate of return (much higher than stocks, etc.) can be had by investing in a solar water system for your hot water needs. Even in Canada, it is possible to get more than 50% of your hot water needs via solar, and I am sure that most readers here are in places with better numbers than that. These folks claim a return rate of around 15% - and again this is "tax free".
I would never have imagined, but last summer I saw at the fair a place for Deep fried Mars bars! I didn't get a chance to sample one... maybe next visit.
Consumer Reports is VERY protective of their independent status. If you have any evidence that they are being provided any 'support' from any manufacturers, you should shout it out loud and long. If you do not have any such evidence, you should be careful of liability for spreading such accusations. They have been known to aggressively sue advertisers for just alluding to their good reviews.
Personally I have found many of their "high-tech" reviews to be in my opinion misdirected, but I have never doubted their independence or their attempts at accuracy. They may be "wrong" but they do not seem to be maliciously wrong.
Arguments over race and intelligence went out ages ago, along with phrenology. I'm pretty sure it has been well established that racial makeup has little to do with the potential intelligence an individual may have. "Dumb" vs. "less intelligent" doesn't change the above argument any - dumb is just meant to be a "loaded" word.
I would tend to support this position - I think that modern understanding of genetics and race tend to refute the whole idea of "race" at least as commonly understood - I seem to recall something to the effect that any two non-Africans (for example a Scandinavian and a native Australian) are geneticially more closely related than members of any two separate African tribes (due to the limited number of people in the first migrations that established non-African human populations I believe.) But even with that said, just because current understanding shows no link between "race" and "intelligence", unquestioned acceptance of that understanding is no way to advance our knowledge. Sure, you don't want to devote a tonne of resources on investigating it, but to prohibit any questioning of the current understanding would be shortsighted.
I'm not a Mac user, and I have a lot of trouble understanding why anyone would want a case-insensitive, non-journaled filesystem.
The default formatting for Mac OS X is the journaled version of HFS+.
The arguments (which might not be persuasive in your case, but should at least be understandable) for case-insensitivity are largely based around the idea that from the user's perspective, there really should not be any difference between "README" and "readme" - allowing them to reference distinct files causes more problems than it addresses. From the programer's perspective it it harder to work with case-insensitivity, but it makes the user experience a bit better. Thus HFS+ is case-preserving, but as you state, case-insensitive. I think that Mac OS X server can do some case-sensitive stuff in HFS+ with the flip of a certain checkbox, but I am not completely familiar with the details.
As I read it, the agreement does not in fact comply with the various decisions that have gone against the US, it is in fact more favorable to the US than implementing the changes that those decisions mandated. If the US just implemented the mandated changes to their behavior, no "agreement" would be necessary. The agreement is needed because the US does not want to do what they are supposed to do under the various trade agreements already in place so they need Canada to agree to a new arrangement outside of the process - Canada of course wants (some of) its 5 billion bucks back and to get their injured forestry sector back to good health so it has some incentive to sign onto a deal that is not as good as the one that they though they already had withing the WTO and NAFTA arrangements.
If the US respected the WTO arbitration process it would just comply with the decisions of that process rather than need to negotiate separate arrangements.
You mean this dispute in which the WTO ultimately ruled in favor of the US?
I think it was this series of disputes (linked from your law.pitt.edu reference), most of which have been decided in favour of Canada, many of which have been ignored or misapplied by the US. Yes, some of the decisions have gone against Canada, but most of them seem to have gone against the US.
Is it too much to ask for examples (beyond the GP's, which was ultimately decided by the WTO in favor of the US).
As far as I can see both the Canadian softwood lumber issue and the Antigua gambling issue have been repeatedly decided against the USA - do you know of some more recent WTO or NAFTA decisions supporting the USA's position? I am also unaware of any action on the part of the USA to bring them in compliance with the decision.
I am also unaware of any WTO decisions against Canada or Antigua which have not resulted in changes in their behavior to bring them in line with the WTO decisions.
It was the rental that was stripped. And it was a family feud. And the police are not investigating the matter because it is a family feud.
Sometimes it seems as though the authorities are not aggressive enough with this "domestic matters" - like what should it matter if the person I am ripping off is a relative?
The used Prius market is very tight - very few people seem to be selling them and a lot of people want to buy them, thus the "new car" premium one pays for buying off the lot is not as great for the Prius as for most other cars.
But does it scale? Does it "work" in the sense that a significant fraction of the "waste" is being reprocessed? I suspect that much of the waste in your region is in fact not getting back into the "recycling" loop. Adding a financial incentive to the person with the waste is in my opinion a good idea.
Steve Jobs has publicly stated [apple.com] that the DRM is there only because the record industry demands it, and that if the record industry would allow DRM-free music sales, Apple would remove the DRM from the iTunes Store.
There is at least some content on the iTunes store that need not have the DRM (ie various independent label works), yet it all does. This might indicate that Apple does indeed desire to use DRM wider than Jobs' statement would seem to indicate.
There's also people like me, for whom any computer purchase is a tax deduction, making the phone essentially free.
Unless you have found some magic land I am unaware of, There is no country in the world where increased expenses do not result in less disposable income. If you are in the 40% tax bracket and spend $1000 dollars on some business equipment that is deductible, the result will be a total tax liability decrease of $400, so after the tax man takes his chunk, you are, in effect $600 poorer than if you had not purchased the equipment.
Thus, any purchases made that are deductible are generally equivalent to a discount of the purchase price equal to one's tax rate (or "marginal tax rate").
Of course, if you were going to make the purchase regardless - this can be a pretty significant savings, but to think of it as being "free" you would need to be in a pretty high tax bracket in the first place, so $500 probably doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things.
Mostly I questioned the use of the age "12" - which I could not find as a minimum stated anywhere. I was surprised to see how young one could be.
So, legally, a father can give his daughter to another guy to do with as he pleases.
That means that we're talking about parental consent here. I know personally of people locally that have gotten married with parental consent at 15.
15 is in my mind still pretty darn young, but is significantly different from 12.
I would point out though that you're going to need both parental consent AND consent of the person getting married. So all this really does is avoid statutory rape charges, not actual rape and/or molestation charges which will apply regardless.
In many (most?) of the states listed, not only is parental consent necessary, but someone in the court also has to be convinced that there is sufficient reason for the marriage. I wonder how many actual cases of this type of abuse there might be? I can imagine some family "selling" their 15-year old to some filthy rich 19 year old and getting it slipped past the court ("but your honour - they are in love!"). I would think it would be much more of a challenge to get the judge to buy that argument in the case of a 12 year old and a 38 year old getting hitched.
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There is a difference between "discouraging" and "compelling", and while it is possible that you feel no impetus to discourage various forms of behaviour, I suspect that in actually, there are many actions that you carry out daily that are designed to encourage and/or discourage a variety of behaviours in others.
You might for example, frown at people who talk in movie theaters, or say thank-you to people who bring you your meal in a restaurant. You might agree with some forms of traffic laws, product labeling laws, or a variety of other public safety legislation. You may feel that taxes may be used to encourage some forms of charity, or discourage some types of activities. You might feel that it is an appropriate role of government to inform the general population about the health benefits or dangers of various substances or activities. All of these are, to some extent, discouraging or encouraging certain behaviours.
In light of what we currently know, if tobacco were to have been discovered tomorrow, it would never be able to be sold for the uses it is currently being sold for due to its dangerous side effects - and the majority of our society support the safety barriers that new products need to get past. The only reason it is currently still widely available is due to its historic introduction. My silly proposal would in fact never require anyone to change their behaviour, but only prohibit certain people from starting that behaviour. Of course I have no illusions that it could ever be implemented.
I cannot find the study, but sometime within the past 24 months or so I heard a sound-bite on the CBC about a recently completed study of the effects of smoking in adolescents. According to my memory at least, the researchers found significant physiological effects on 12 year old subjects after only a single cigarette. The subjects seemed to be experiencing physical/chemical withdrawal effects after this one single exposure. This is in contrast with those over 21 who seem to develop chemical addiction to cigarettes much less easily. If my memory is correct, and such findings are in fact valid, this would give further legitimacy to age restrictions on tobacco products. Even if my memory (or the above mentioned study) is not completely valid, there are numerous other studies (I think) linking age of first cigarette with level of addiction, and a variety of studies showing the effectiveness of age limitation laws on tobacco purchase and future addiction levels. Personally I have never encountered anyone (baring those employed in the tobacco industry) who actually is against society as a whole discouraging smoking by anyone - the differences of option are always in how we decide how to do that discouraging. I have always thought that we should implement a law that totally bans the use of tobacco products in those born after the year 1993 (14 year olds), which I don't think anyone could possibly have an argument against. Then every two years, move the tobacco ban up one year - so that in 2009 nobody born in 1994 or later could use tobacco, in 2011 nobody born in 1995 or later could use tobacco, and so on. After twenty years the ban will extend to those who are 24 years old, after forty years it extends to those who are 34 years old, after sixty years it extends to those who are 44 years old. The moving year of prohibition means that we are never taking current (legal) smokers and making their addiction legal, but at the same time we are gradually limiting the number of new smokers that the industry can sell to. It should give those in the industry to find something else to make their money on, while gradually weaning the whole society off of this unhealthy habit, all without ever forcing anyone to give up their lifestyle choices. Should I submit that idea to the Turk to test it out?
"Natural Family Planning", or perhaps more correctly "Fertility Awareness" forms of birth control can, according to the references from wikipedia , "When used correctly and consistently, studies have shown some forms of FA to be 99% effective, the same as oral contraceptives." The "Rhythm Method" is a pretty old and "simple" method of NFP, with correspondingly less effectiveness - I can't recall if the original posting was talking about purely a calendar based system (Rhythm Method) or one of the more effective "Symptothermal" methods.
Of course one can spend a lot of time thinking about how to interpret birth control effectiveness statistics, both user and method rates, but it is clear that for those committed to the methods, they can be used with some degree of confidence. Cruising through the various wikipedia birth control articles, it is surprising how poor both "perfect use" and "typical use" effectiveness rates are for what at first glance I thought were highly effective methods - see for example here.
As dabraun surely would attest in any case, all of these methods are firmly grounded in science - though there might be considerable debate over the precise level of effectiveness, none of them go against widely accepted scientific understanding of infertility and conception
Archive copies are not just kept for historical purposes - it is often nice to have an easily editable copy available for further development. If you want to write a new contract based on the old one, having the old one in ODF might be better than just having it in PDF. Maybe your policy should keep copies of both formats? Note that PDF is not a guarantee that it has not been altered - maybe you need some read-only filesystems?
The quote states that the info would be pulled after a warrant is issued, which does not seem too unreasonable. Of course there is the potential of abuses by the people with access. I wonder what type of warrant they might need if they wanted to data-mine for suspects? Let us imagine a few bodies turn up around town, all having been dumped a few weeks back - will anyone be able to search the database for cars in those parts of town at the appropriate times (assuming the data exists - will anyone be able to ask "do we have data for Main & 23rd on July 12 around noon?" or does that need a warrant? Can we do searches that tell us "there are three cars that match the query" without a warrant if the system doesn't tell us which cars they are?
Certainly it is true that USB ports were available prior the the iMac, however USB devices generally were not. After the introduction of the iMac, USB suddenly became prevalent, largely due to the fact that the fairly large body of iMac owners had no other options for connectivity - the ONLY ports the iMac had were USB and 10/100 Ethernet.
For a while, if you wanted a USB anything, it was invariably coloured "bondi-blue".
I don't know how much Apple's actions drove the market, but it seems fairly clear that the introduction of the iMac had a pretty large influence on adoption industry-wide. Without Apple, it seems quite possible that USB would have languished for a number of year until the number of new systems supporting USB became much much larger. As it was, the iMac provided a market for USB devices that was separate from devices with other ports - suddenly Macintosh hardware companies were forces to support USB, and were able to also sell to non-mac owners who had USB. Before the iMac, every computer had some system other than USB (did you Micron Millenium have ONLY USB?), so it made more sense to support those more widely available connectors.
I thought Neooffice had all sorts of advanced goodness from Novell's ooo-build project such as Excell macros which are not part of OOo running on X on the Mac.
But such a security problem, for a financial institution involved in stock transactions, would seem to be a serious one, and thus of interest to the SEC and the media.
With all that said, I recall seeing that the best rate of return (much higher than stocks, etc.) can be had by investing in a solar water system for your hot water needs. Even in Canada, it is possible to get more than 50% of your hot water needs via solar, and I am sure that most readers here are in places with better numbers than that. These folks claim a return rate of around 15% - and again this is "tax free".
I would never have imagined, but last summer I saw at the fair a place for Deep fried Mars bars! I didn't get a chance to sample one... maybe next visit.
According to wikipedia, patents expire something like 17-20 years after being issued in the US. A 1987 patent should expire this year, shouldn't it?
Personally I have found many of their "high-tech" reviews to be in my opinion misdirected, but I have never doubted their independence or their attempts at accuracy. They may be "wrong" but they do not seem to be maliciously wrong.
I would tend to support this position - I think that modern understanding of genetics and race tend to refute the whole idea of "race" at least as commonly understood - I seem to recall something to the effect that any two non-Africans (for example a Scandinavian and a native Australian) are geneticially more closely related than members of any two separate African tribes (due to the limited number of people in the first migrations that established non-African human populations I believe.) But even with that said, just because current understanding shows no link between "race" and "intelligence", unquestioned acceptance of that understanding is no way to advance our knowledge. Sure, you don't want to devote a tonne of resources on investigating it, but to prohibit any questioning of the current understanding would be shortsighted.
The default formatting for Mac OS X is the journaled version of HFS+.
The arguments (which might not be persuasive in your case, but should at least be understandable) for case-insensitivity are largely based around the idea that from the user's perspective, there really should not be any difference between "README" and "readme" - allowing them to reference distinct files causes more problems than it addresses. From the programer's perspective it it harder to work with case-insensitivity, but it makes the user experience a bit better. Thus HFS+ is case-preserving, but as you state, case-insensitive. I think that Mac OS X server can do some case-sensitive stuff in HFS+ with the flip of a certain checkbox, but I am not completely familiar with the details.
Maybe it wasn't humility - maybe it was all a big typo? That would be more consistent with /. norms.
If the US respected the WTO arbitration process it would just comply with the decisions of that process rather than need to negotiate separate arrangements.
I think it was this series of disputes (linked from your law.pitt.edu reference), most of which have been decided in favour of Canada, many of which have been ignored or misapplied by the US. Yes, some of the decisions have gone against Canada, but most of them seem to have gone against the US.
As far as I can see both the Canadian softwood lumber issue and the Antigua gambling issue have been repeatedly decided against the USA - do you know of some more recent WTO or NAFTA decisions supporting the USA's position? I am also unaware of any action on the part of the USA to bring them in compliance with the decision.
I am also unaware of any WTO decisions against Canada or Antigua which have not resulted in changes in their behavior to bring them in line with the WTO decisions.
Sometimes it seems as though the authorities are not aggressive enough with this "domestic matters" - like what should it matter if the person I am ripping off is a relative?
I was under the impression that the Prius battery pack was completely recyclable - did he know that?
The used Prius market is very tight - very few people seem to be selling them and a lot of people want to buy them, thus the "new car" premium one pays for buying off the lot is not as great for the Prius as for most other cars.
But does it scale? Does it "work" in the sense that a significant fraction of the "waste" is being reprocessed? I suspect that much of the waste in your region is in fact not getting back into the "recycling" loop. Adding a financial incentive to the person with the waste is in my opinion a good idea.
Steve Jobs has publicly stated [apple.com] that the DRM is there only because the record industry demands it, and that if the record industry would allow DRM-free music sales, Apple would remove the DRM from the iTunes Store.
There is at least some content on the iTunes store that need not have the DRM (ie various independent label works), yet it all does. This might indicate that Apple does indeed desire to use DRM wider than Jobs' statement would seem to indicate.Unless you have found some magic land I am unaware of, There is no country in the world where increased expenses do not result in less disposable income. If you are in the 40% tax bracket and spend $1000 dollars on some business equipment that is deductible, the result will be a total tax liability decrease of $400, so after the tax man takes his chunk, you are, in effect $600 poorer than if you had not purchased the equipment.
Thus, any purchases made that are deductible are generally equivalent to a discount of the purchase price equal to one's tax rate (or "marginal tax rate").
Of course, if you were going to make the purchase regardless - this can be a pretty significant savings, but to think of it as being "free" you would need to be in a pretty high tax bracket in the first place, so $500 probably doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things.
Did you even read the post you replied to?
Yes.
Mostly I questioned the use of the age "12" - which I could not find as a minimum stated anywhere. I was surprised to see how young one could be.
So, legally, a father can give his daughter to another guy to do with as he pleases.
That means that we're talking about parental consent here. I know personally of people locally that have gotten married with parental consent at 15.
15 is in my mind still pretty darn young, but is significantly different from 12.
I would point out though that you're going to need both parental consent AND consent of the person getting married. So all this really does is avoid statutory rape charges, not actual rape and/or molestation charges which will apply regardless.
In many (most?) of the states listed, not only is parental consent necessary, but someone in the court also has to be convinced that there is sufficient reason for the marriage. I wonder how many actual cases of this type of abuse there might be? I can imagine some family "selling" their 15-year old to some filthy rich 19 year old and getting it slipped past the court ("but your honour - they are in love!"). I would think it would be much more of a challenge to get the judge to buy that argument in the case of a 12 year old and a 38 year old getting hitched.