Just me just say, Jet Li is an IDIOT. I'd be in the matrix 2&3 for 3 million! I just don't know how I'd raise that much money.
Jet Li's take on it was that the Matrix franchise doesn't really need him, it'll be just as successful without him. He wants (or wanted) to focus on movies where he is the center of attention. And he's right; if the Matrix really needed him they probably would have been willing to pay the $13 million.
On the other hand, I agree with you that my own price for that job would be a bit lower than Jet Li's. In fact I worked in the Matrix 2&3 in exchange for a mere $4 thousand.
Of course, instead of seeing me take on a bad guy, you'll just see me driving a civic in the background of a freeway now and again. Or stopped and gawking out the window at an accident scene, if I'm really lucky.
It was a blast. And Carrie-Anne Moss is really cute, but her stand-in was cuter.
When I first plugged in my digital camera I understood what "It just works" means. [OSX] recognized the camera the first time and with a single mouse click all my photos were downloaded.
As for me, the first time I unplugged my digital camera, OSX crashed. More specifically, I plugged the camera into the USB port, it popped the "do you want to import your pictures?" dialog box but as this box was/behind/ some other windows on the screen I didn't see it. Instead I went to the desktop and double-clicked on the camera's icon, copied the photos I wanted off it, and unplugged the camera from the USB port without dismissing the hidden window or closing the open folder view. Instant freeze. I think I had to actually pull the power and yank the battery to reboot my TiBook.
I think they fixed this issue in one of the later system updates. But if you've never crashed OSX you've been pretty lucky. I've found OSX more reliable than 9.X but not bulletproof.
The original claim was "One percent of America's population holds 40% of the wealth."
Google found me more info on your source here, and it confirmed my suspicion, which is that Wolff defined "wealth" in such a way as to exclude most of the wealth owned by the poor or middle class. He defined wealth as appreciating investments. People who have a lot of wealth invested in depreciating assets such as cars, stereos and clothing, don't get that included in their statistics. Also, the figures are based on wealth owned by households, not by individuals, and the top 1% of households probably contain more than 1% of the individuals. So the "1 percent of the population" part is false, and the "40 percent of the wealth" part is misleading.
Most statistics of that sort boil down to the relatively uninteresting fact that most americans still don't own very much stock. Why don't they base it on to total value of personal property owned by individuals? Because you don't get nearly as impressive-sounding statistics that way.
Here's a relevant quote from the link I gave above:
Wolff's net worth figures represent the current value of all marketable or fungible assets less the current value of debts. Fungible assets include assets that can be readily converted to cash (e.g., owner-occupied housing and other real estate; cash, savings and certificates of deposit; stocks, mutual funds, bonds and other financial securities; the cash surrender value of life insurance plans, IRAs, 401 (k) plans; etc.). Consumer durables such as automobiles, furniture and so on are excluded "since these items are not easily marketed or their resale value typically far understates the value of their consumption services to the household."
One percent of America's population holds 40% of the wealth.
Source, please? How was "wealth" measured - and by whom - to get that number? Also, was that one percent of the people as individuals or one percent of the "households" where different households hold different numbers of people?
I hope you are not suggesting that it is unfair to have that one percent of the population pay 40% of the taxes.
Note also that income taxes are a tax on getting rich not a tax on being rich. So even if we granted your ridiculous claim as to the current wealth distribution, a graduated income tax would make it harder, not easier, for your mythical 99% poor to catch up to the 1% rich.
Already, life expectancy in the developed world is increasing by more than a quarter of a year every year. When life expectancy starts increasing by a full year every year, something like immortality is at hand, at least for those who can afford it.
Er, no. The biggest gains in average life expectancy come from reducing death during infancy and childhood, a change that has no effect on the life expectancy of a 40-year-old and requires no particularly impressive resources to "afford it".
Nobody has ever yet lived to 130. When we're increasing the life expectancy of a 90-year-old by one full year every year I might be willing to believe imortality is at hand, but until then I'm more inclined to think the people making that sort of claim aren't very good at math.
Some companies do the decent thing.
on
Lineo near Death
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· Score: 2
The people in charge know long before all the money runs out that things are in bad shape. It doesn't sound like they notified any of their employees or gave them any warning so that they could look for other jobs. Cripes. People have bills to pay and families to feed. Doesn't anyone have a shred of decency anymore?
Some companies handle this very well. In early 2001 I was working with RJ Mical at a company called Red Jade. We had a decent business model and a good start on a compelling product but launching a new game machine to compete with the GBA is a very expensive and risky proposition. When Ericsson decided to pull the plug and we couldn't find alternate funding due to the dot-com collapse, we had a big company meeting. There was a month's warning before the company officially shut down during which everybody got their expense reports and final paychecks paid and we got severance pay after that in proportion to seniority - I got a month of severance.
Coming back to pick up my check I found RJ had had some shirts made; they said "I joined a startup and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!":-)
It was sad to see the company disappear, but as such things go, it was handled very well.
Sexual anorexics are obsessed with sexual avoidance, and often have other obsessive/compulsive/addictive behavioral problems.
Karl Kraus said it best: "Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work."
Doesn't just about every single volcanic eruption by it self spew far more CO2 in the air than years of human production?
No, it doesn't. Your source on that claim is probably Dixie Lee Ray's book _Trashing the Planet_, or Rush Limbaugh's frequent quoting of it, or somebody else's quoting (or mis-quoting) of Rush. Dixie Lee Ray unfortunately got a few of her facts and calculations wrong, and the resulting misinformation has been bouncing around the net ever since. For a correction, um, try this FAQ. Here's the relevant snippet:
"
Is the recent warming caused by volcanic activity?
Volcanoes have a dual effect on climate. In the short term, they exert a net *cooling* effect due to their emissions of sulphur dioxide. The cooling effect depends on the composition of the volcanic emissions (particularly sulphur content) and on the location of the volcanoes (high latitude volcanoes tend to have a greater effect. The cooling effect of some of the most important recent volcanoes is provided by Volcano World.
Volcanoes do also emit CO2, and massive eruptions in the past have emitted enough CO2 to cause climate change. However, in the recent climatic record, volcanic emissions have been much lower. Gerlach (1991) estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10E12 mol/yr from volcanoes. Man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions overwhelm this estimate by at least 150 times. Analyses of temperature changes over the past 1000 years also show that the rise in temperature this century can't be explained by solar or volcanic activity."
Except that a gun is a tool for KILLING people, nail clippers are a tool for clipping nails.
No, a gun is a tool for self-defense. That is why policemen are issued guns. Not because we want them to kill people, because we want them to defend people. A gun happens to be capable of killing people - as is a nail file, for that matter - but that is not its primary purpose. A gun can and usually does serve its primary purpose without even being fired.
Yeah, 'cause it's really dumb to be afraid of people who can kill you and who have demonstrated that they would rather fight it out at 35000 feet than go through some trivial scans.
No, it's dumb to assume that people who voluntarily choose to carry guns around are untrained, clumsy, fanatical, or otherwise dangerous. That makes no more sense than assuming the same of people who carry nail clippers. A gun is a tool. The rest of the emotional baggage they seem to carry for you is all in your head. So yeah, hoplophobia.
Have you looked at phonotactics for the reason it hasn't caught on? Do.
Is hoplophopia really that much clumsier than, say, achluophobia or nucleomituphobia?
The thought of being in a pressurized can several miles above the earth with an unknown number of untrained, freaked out, trigger happy yahoos with guns freaks me out.
You might want to see someone about that hoplophobia of yours.
I would pay at least $10 more per ticket to fly on an airline that didn't have any airport "security" at all.
I hope you're trolling, but WTF? Did you not notice what happened last September? [...] Please explain.
What made 9/11 possible was that it was unthinkable. The passengers and pilots couldn't believe it would happen, so they allowed it to happen. What stops it from happening again is our new mutual knowledge that it is possible, not those goons at the gate. That's why the last plane didn't hit anything. Sure, by all means allow the airlines take suitable measures to keep their cockpit secure. Arm the pilots, secure the cockpit door, that sort of thing. But this business of piling up an endless string of inconveniences on the passengers is ridiculous. It doesn't add nearly enough security to be worth the cost in time and trouble.
Whenever we purchase a plane ticket each of us has the opportunity to decide whether we think the value of the services being offered to us is worth its cost. What I'm saying is that in my personal utility function this business of lining up to be xrayed and interrogated and searched has no value at all; it only serves to make plane travel take an hour longer than it otherwise would. So just as I might be willing to pay $10 more to save an hour off my travel time by taking a faster flight, I'd be willing pay $10 to save an hour by accepting a faster (but less "secure") check-in process.
Some other/. poster said it best at the time of the event:
No amount of inconvenience will give you the security you desire.
Forcing people to turn on their computers doesn't protect us against smart people with bombs in the spare battery compartment, sending people through a metal detector doesn't protect us against smart people with sharp ceramic or glass or obsidian or plastic objects, and everybody knows this. And I for one am sick of all this nonsense. We should stop pretending that the solution to a failed strategy is more of the same.
Nope, from now on I want to fly the Unfriendly Skies. And if somebody tries to take my plane, we'll all have our own knives and guns aboard to stop them in their tracks. Who's with me?
Do you honestly believe the current over-the-top level of airport security is useful or necessary?
We had too much idiotic airport security before 9/11 and it didn't do a damn thing; what's going on now is a matter of closing the barn doors after the cows have gone. It doesn't make any of us safer against terrorists, it just makes a few people feel better to see that the authorities are "doing something". It's all for show.
I would pay at least $10 more per ticket to fly on an airline that didn't have any airport "security" at all. I would much prefer the security of knowing I could arrive fifteen minutes before the plane leaves and still make my flight to the security of knowing my fellow passengers have been harrassed and annoyed and degraded and forced to wait behind lines and answer useless questions.
Mann is the canary in this coal mine. His experiences should tell us we've gone too far and it's time to let the pendulum swing the other way for a bit. Let's start by getting rid of the "did you pack your bags/has anyone unknown to you" questions and the requirement to show a picture ID...
Wrong "Two Types Of Invention"
on
Patent Nonsense
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· Score: 2
Perhaps there are two types of invention: Those that will occur without protection, and those that won't occur without it.
Those cases do not exhaust the possibility set; one case you left out is "those that won't occur with protection." which is the chief benefit of reforming or removing the current laws.
Leaving out forms of invention that are to some degree indifferent to the legal regime, I would claim the two most interesting categories of invention for purposes of our current discussion are:
(a) those that won't occur without at least the current level of protection, and
(b) those that won't occur with it.
Making protection "too strong" will produce more innovation of type (a) and less of (b); making protection "too weak" will produce more of type (b) and less of (a).
So have it slope up towards the middle?
on
Perpetual Skislope
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· Score: 4, Insightful
[due to the "skating force"] Skiers would be drawn toward the middle of the disk and would have to be constantly turning outward to avoid hitting the spindle at the center of the terrain.
I'm not sure I get the physics involved in this assertion, but it seems like it you could discourage people hitting the spindle by building up the middle of the disk such that you have to ski "uphill" to get to it.
Any company should be allowed to own enough stations to reach 100% of the market. There's nothing magical about the 35% rule that makes competition within a given market more likely. It's arbitrary, like the court said.
A 35% rule doesn't guarantee competition. Rather, it could easily allow total monopoly over news coverage in each region with three oligopolies dividing up the US such that every citizen has access to only one.
A 100% rule doesn't prevent competition. Under a 100% rule we could still have twenty fiercely competitive companies with nationwide coverage. For instance, ABC might be channel 7 across the entire United States, NBC might be channel 11 across the entire United States, and so on for another dozen or more companies. Each network has a potential reach of 100%, but none of them actually does reach all those subscribers except when their programming is sufficiently compelling that viewers choose to watch it.
Open competition is good. Forcing companies to jump through hoops to provide the nationwide coverage their customers want, is bad. The court made the right call.
The Oregon Institute's "petition" is a hoax. The names are largely made-up. I recall Captain Kangeroo being among their number.
The names weren't "largely made up". Rather, once the petition started collecting enough names of real scientists that it was worth taking notice of, environmental activists trying to discredit the petition deliberately submitted a few phony names which have since been removed.
According to this source:
When the Oregon Petition
first circulated, in fact, environmental activists successfully added the names of several fictional characters and celebrities to the list, including John Grisham, Michael J. Fox, Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce (from the TV show M*A*S*H), an individual by the name of "Dr. Red Wine," and Geraldine Halliwell, formerly known as pop singer Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls. Halliwell's field of scientific specialization was listed as "biology." (emphasis added)
It is pretty unlikely that the funny names were put there by people who favored the petition.
Just to be clear: When I characterised a claim as "people carried all the marsupials there", I meant all the marsupials that are native to that region, not all the marsupials in the world. There are four groups of marsupials that are found only in Australia and New Guinea, but there are two other groups found elsewhere.
Oppossums and rat oppossums are found in the americas. (group names: didelphids, caenolestids)
Erm, the "answer" is obvious to me, and I'm not a biblical literalist. After the flood, at some point people made boats and went to Australia. This is obviously true, or there wouldn't have been aborigines. Well, they could have carried the kangaroos and koalas with them, right?
It's a two-part problem. Part one is how did they get there and part two is why didn't they end up anywhere else? So are you claiming that people carried all the marsupials there? That is, somebody tracked down every single kangaroo, every single koala, every single wombat, all the phalangers, dasyurids and bandicoots on the planet, and either killed them or put them on boats to Australia?
Why and how would they do that? Some of the animals we're talking about don't make good food or clothing; some have been captured for zoos but never domesticated or made to do anything useful. How about the logistics: it would either take an ark of biblical proportions to do it in one trip or a heckuva lot of smaller trips, and it's hard to imagine the animals being cooperative. It seems unlikely that people with primitive technology could have tracked down and killed or captured all the remaining members of these species outside of Australia.
No, I'm afraid I prefer my own theory, which is that Noah made several trips.:-)
But if you ask the Biblical creationist to explain "how did Noah fit all those animals on the ark", they accuse you of questioning their religion and refuse to answer.
You haven't been around biblical literalists enough if you really believe that... It's just that the explanations tend to get increasingly bizarre...
I've argued with biblical literalists. My favorite thought-provoker for them has always been "how did the kangaroos and koalas get to Australia?" I mean, assuming that:
(1) marsupials got off the ark at Mt Ararat with everybody else,
(2) kangaroos and koalas can't swim across an ocean,
(3) there wasn't enough continental drift for australia to be accessible by land, and
(4) there's been no significant speciation, evolution or genetic drift,
it's a real stumper as to how these critters got to australia and nowhere else.
Price theory aka "microeconomics" works just fine
on
A Beautiful Mind
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
"economics" is not a real science and nothing they come up with actually works in the real world.
Here are a few predictions founded in economic theory:
(1) if McDonalds decides tomorrow to cut a dollar off the price of a Big Mac and leaves all the other menu items unchanged, they will sell more Big Macs (relative to the other items on the menu) than they do now.
(2) If McDonald's doubles the price of the Big Mac they will sell fewer Big Macs (relative to the other menu items) than they do now.
(3) If McDonald's cuts the price in half their outlets, people will flock to those outlets; the ones with the lower price will get more business (relative to the ones with the higher price) than before the pricing change.
Care to argue with any of those? I thought not.:-)
Getting out of demand management and more into the realm of politics, one thing economists know pretty well is how to create a shortage (legally fix prices below the market level) or a glut (legally fix prices above market). If you tax something you get less of it, if you subsidize something you get more of it. So rent control laws tend to aggravate a shortage of housing (relative to what there would have been), and increases in the minimum wage law tend to increase unemployment (relative to what it would have been). These effects can be measured, and have been, and experience bears out the theory.
I can do everything I need to do with 2000 and it NEVER crashes on me.
This is not meant to be a flame, but you really don't do a lot of heavy lifting with Win2k do you? [...] My PC dual boots Win2k SP2 and Redhat 7.2 and
The original poster isn't dual-booting, and that makes all the difference in the world. Windows doesn't play well with other non-windows OSes. Give W2k a machine all its own and it'll be a lot more reliable. I can't count how many times scandisk interpreted whatever LILO was doing as damage to my boot block that needed to be repaired...
The US at least is [...] a representative democracy; if the people decide to regulate SUVs harshly, so be it. Civil liberties are not at stake. The constitution does not grant people the right to drive at all, much less to drive whatever they want however they want.
Actually, it does. We are a constitutionally limited representative democracy; not all laws the people want are possible to legally enact without a constitutional amendment. In this instance, the Constitution fails to explicitly give the federal government the power to limit the right of the people to travel however they like, so the federal goverment doesn't have that power. Since the power to regulate non-interstate travel isn't in the constitution, that power is reserved "to the states, or to the people".
Congress cannot legally require states to change their laws regarding traffic. But there is a workaround: instead, Congress bribes states to do it. Congress passes a law saying that any state which doesn't enforce a certain law is disqualified from receiving various monies which it would otherwise receive. Eventually most of them cave.
BTW, read in the Sunday paper that Erin Brockovich is on the trail of another suit against PG&E for Chromium 6 in ground water.
Erin Brockovich was wrong; there's no evidence to suggest a link between the problems of Hinkley, CA and Chomium 6.
According to a relevant Wall Street Journal article:
Here's what the EPA's Integrated Risk Information System, updated in 1998, says about chromium 6: "No data were located in the available literature that suggested that it is carcinogenic by the oral route of exposure."
Exhaustive, repeated studies of communities adjacent to landfills packed with chromium 6, including that detectable in residents' urine, have found no ill health effects, cancer or otherwise. A January report from Glasgow, Scotland, found "no increased risk of congenital abnormalities, lung cancer, or a range of other diseases." Earlier, a panel evaluating exposed residents near a New Jersey landfill estimated that "the plausible incremental cancer risk to individuals at residential sites would be substantially less than 1 in 1,000,000."
A study by Mr. Blot and others, just published in The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, evaluated almost 52,000 workers who worked at three PG&E plants over a quarter of a century. One was the Hinkley plant, and another is near Kettleman, Calif., where Ms. Brockovich's firm is rounding up plaintiffs today. The researchers found cancer rates were no higher than in the general California population and death rates significantly lower than expected.
Other studies have shown that rodents dosed at 25 parts per million and dogs dosed at 11.2 parts per million displayed no ill effects. The amount of chromium 6 in Hinkley's water never got higher than 0.58 parts per million. As for miscarriages, the EPA reports that in studies of mice and rats, "the reproductive assessment indicated that administered at 15-400 ppm in the diet [it] is not a reproductive toxicant in either sex."
Given all this, why did PG&E cough up $333 million? For one thing, much of this medical evidence came in after the settlement. Further, Ms. Brockovich's small firm enlisted high-powered trial lawyer Thomas Girardi, a specialist in toxic pollution suits. Slick lawyers and sympathetic witnesses could have cost the company much more at trial or arbitration.
Slashdot Mirror
Would it help if I told you the second one has a really great car chase scene? :-)
Jet Li's take on it was that the Matrix franchise doesn't really need him, it'll be just as successful without him. He wants (or wanted) to focus on movies where he is the center of attention. And he's right; if the Matrix really needed him they probably would have been willing to pay the $13 million.
On the other hand, I agree with you that my own price for that job would be a bit lower than Jet Li's. In fact I worked in the Matrix 2&3 in exchange for a mere $4 thousand.
Of course, instead of seeing me take on a bad guy, you'll just see me driving a civic in the background of a freeway now and again. Or stopped and gawking out the window at an accident scene, if I'm really lucky.
It was a blast. And Carrie-Anne Moss is really cute, but her stand-in was cuter.
As for me, the first time I unplugged my digital camera, OSX crashed. More specifically, I plugged the camera into the USB port, it popped the "do you want to import your pictures?" dialog box but as this box was /behind/ some other windows on the screen I didn't see it. Instead I went to the desktop and double-clicked on the camera's icon, copied the photos I wanted off it, and unplugged the camera from the USB port without dismissing the hidden window or closing the open folder view. Instant freeze. I think I had to actually pull the power and yank the battery to reboot my TiBook.
I think they fixed this issue in one of the later system updates. But if you've never crashed OSX you've been pretty lucky. I've found OSX more reliable than 9.X but not bulletproof.
Google found me more info on your source here, and it confirmed my suspicion, which is that Wolff defined "wealth" in such a way as to exclude most of the wealth owned by the poor or middle class. He defined wealth as appreciating investments. People who have a lot of wealth invested in depreciating assets such as cars, stereos and clothing, don't get that included in their statistics. Also, the figures are based on wealth owned by households, not by individuals, and the top 1% of households probably contain more than 1% of the individuals. So the "1 percent of the population" part is false, and the "40 percent of the wealth" part is misleading. Most statistics of that sort boil down to the relatively uninteresting fact that most americans still don't own very much stock. Why don't they base it on to total value of personal property owned by individuals? Because you don't get nearly as impressive-sounding statistics that way.
Here's a relevant quote from the link I gave above:
Source, please? How was "wealth" measured - and by whom - to get that number? Also, was that one percent of the people as individuals or one percent of the "households" where different households hold different numbers of people?
I hope you are not suggesting that it is unfair to have that one percent of the population pay 40% of the taxes.
Note also that income taxes are a tax on getting rich not a tax on being rich. So even if we granted your ridiculous claim as to the current wealth distribution, a graduated income tax would make it harder, not easier, for your mythical 99% poor to catch up to the 1% rich.
Er, no. The biggest gains in average life expectancy come from reducing death during infancy and childhood, a change that has no effect on the life expectancy of a 40-year-old and requires no particularly impressive resources to "afford it".
Nobody has ever yet lived to 130. When we're increasing the life expectancy of a 90-year-old by one full year every year I might be willing to believe imortality is at hand, but until then I'm more inclined to think the people making that sort of claim aren't very good at math.
Some companies handle this very well. In early 2001 I was working with RJ Mical at a company called Red Jade. We had a decent business model and a good start on a compelling product but launching a new game machine to compete with the GBA is a very expensive and risky proposition. When Ericsson decided to pull the plug and we couldn't find alternate funding due to the dot-com collapse, we had a big company meeting. There was a month's warning before the company officially shut down during which everybody got their expense reports and final paychecks paid and we got severance pay after that in proportion to seniority - I got a month of severance.
Coming back to pick up my check I found RJ had had some shirts made; they said "I joined a startup and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!" :-)
It was sad to see the company disappear, but as such things go, it was handled very well.
Karl Kraus said it best: "Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work."
No, it doesn't. Your source on that claim is probably Dixie Lee Ray's book _Trashing the Planet_, or Rush Limbaugh's frequent quoting of it, or somebody else's quoting (or mis-quoting) of Rush. Dixie Lee Ray unfortunately got a few of her facts and calculations wrong, and the resulting misinformation has been bouncing around the net ever since. For a correction, um, try this FAQ. Here's the relevant snippet:
No, a gun is a tool for self-defense. That is why policemen are issued guns. Not because we want them to kill people, because we want them to defend people. A gun happens to be capable of killing people - as is a nail file, for that matter - but that is not its primary purpose. A gun can and usually does serve its primary purpose without even being fired.
No, it's dumb to assume that people who voluntarily choose to carry guns around are untrained, clumsy, fanatical, or otherwise dangerous. That makes no more sense than assuming the same of people who carry nail clippers. A gun is a tool. The rest of the emotional baggage they seem to carry for you is all in your head. So yeah, hoplophobia.
Have you looked at phonotactics for the reason it hasn't caught on? Do.
Is hoplophopia really that much clumsier than, say, achluophobia or nucleomituphobia?
You might want to see someone about that hoplophobia of yours.
Whenever we purchase a plane ticket each of us has the opportunity to decide whether we think the value of the services being offered to us is worth its cost. What I'm saying is that in my personal utility function this business of lining up to be xrayed and interrogated and searched has no value at all; it only serves to make plane travel take an hour longer than it otherwise would. So just as I might be willing to pay $10 more to save an hour off my travel time by taking a faster flight, I'd be willing pay $10 to save an hour by accepting a faster (but less "secure") check-in process.
Some other /. poster said it best at the time of the event:
No amount of inconvenience will give you the security you desire.
Forcing people to turn on their computers doesn't protect us against smart people with bombs in the spare battery compartment, sending people through a metal detector doesn't protect us against smart people with sharp ceramic or glass or obsidian or plastic objects, and everybody knows this. And I for one am sick of all this nonsense. We should stop pretending that the solution to a failed strategy is more of the same.
Nope, from now on I want to fly the Unfriendly Skies. And if somebody tries to take my plane, we'll all have our own knives and guns aboard to stop them in their tracks. Who's with me?
Why, exactly?
Do you honestly believe the current over-the-top level of airport security is useful or necessary?
We had too much idiotic airport security before 9/11 and it didn't do a damn thing; what's going on now is a matter of closing the barn doors after the cows have gone. It doesn't make any of us safer against terrorists, it just makes a few people feel better to see that the authorities are "doing something". It's all for show.
I would pay at least $10 more per ticket to fly on an airline that didn't have any airport "security" at all. I would much prefer the security of knowing I could arrive fifteen minutes before the plane leaves and still make my flight to the security of knowing my fellow passengers have been harrassed and annoyed and degraded and forced to wait behind lines and answer useless questions.
Mann is the canary in this coal mine. His experiences should tell us we've gone too far and it's time to let the pendulum swing the other way for a bit. Let's start by getting rid of the "did you pack your bags/has anyone unknown to you" questions and the requirement to show a picture ID...
(a) those that won't occur without at least the current level of protection, and
(b) those that won't occur with it.
Making protection "too strong" will produce more innovation of type (a) and less of (b); making protection "too weak" will produce more of type (b) and less of (a).
I'm not sure I get the physics involved in this assertion, but it seems like it you could discourage people hitting the spindle by building up the middle of the disk such that you have to ski "uphill" to get to it.
A 35% rule doesn't guarantee competition. Rather, it could easily allow total monopoly over news coverage in each region with three oligopolies dividing up the US such that every citizen has access to only one.
A 100% rule doesn't prevent competition. Under a 100% rule we could still have twenty fiercely competitive companies with nationwide coverage. For instance, ABC might be channel 7 across the entire United States, NBC might be channel 11 across the entire United States, and so on for another dozen or more companies. Each network has a potential reach of 100%, but none of them actually does reach all those subscribers except when their programming is sufficiently compelling that viewers choose to watch it.
Open competition is good. Forcing companies to jump through hoops to provide the nationwide coverage their customers want, is bad. The court made the right call.
The names weren't "largely made up". Rather, once the petition started collecting enough names of real scientists that it was worth taking notice of, environmental activists trying to discredit the petition deliberately submitted a few phony names which have since been removed. According to this source:
It is pretty unlikely that the funny names were put there by people who favored the petition.
Oppossums and rat oppossums are found in the americas. (group names: didelphids, caenolestids)
It's a two-part problem. Part one is how did they get there and part two is why didn't they end up anywhere else? So are you claiming that people carried all the marsupials there? That is, somebody tracked down every single kangaroo, every single koala, every single wombat, all the phalangers, dasyurids and bandicoots on the planet, and either killed them or put them on boats to Australia?
Why and how would they do that? Some of the animals we're talking about don't make good food or clothing; some have been captured for zoos but never domesticated or made to do anything useful. How about the logistics: it would either take an ark of biblical proportions to do it in one trip or a heckuva lot of smaller trips, and it's hard to imagine the animals being cooperative. It seems unlikely that people with primitive technology could have tracked down and killed or captured all the remaining members of these species outside of Australia.
No, I'm afraid I prefer my own theory, which is that Noah made several trips. :-)
(1) marsupials got off the ark at Mt Ararat with everybody else,
(2) kangaroos and koalas can't swim across an ocean,
(3) there wasn't enough continental drift for australia to be accessible by land, and
(4) there's been no significant speciation, evolution or genetic drift,
it's a real stumper as to how these critters got to australia and nowhere else.
(1) if McDonalds decides tomorrow to cut a dollar off the price of a Big Mac and leaves all the other menu items unchanged, they will sell more Big Macs (relative to the other items on the menu) than they do now.
(2) If McDonald's doubles the price of the Big Mac they will sell fewer Big Macs (relative to the other menu items) than they do now.
(3) If McDonald's cuts the price in half their outlets, people will flock to those outlets; the ones with the lower price will get more business (relative to the ones with the higher price) than before the pricing change.
Care to argue with any of those? I thought not. :-)
Getting out of demand management and more into the realm of politics, one thing economists know pretty well is how to create a shortage (legally fix prices below the market level) or a glut (legally fix prices above market). If you tax something you get less of it, if you subsidize something you get more of it. So rent control laws tend to aggravate a shortage of housing (relative to what there would have been), and increases in the minimum wage law tend to increase unemployment (relative to what it would have been). These effects can be measured, and have been, and experience bears out the theory.
Economics is a real science.
The original poster isn't dual-booting, and that makes all the difference in the world. Windows doesn't play well with other non-windows OSes. Give W2k a machine all its own and it'll be a lot more reliable. I can't count how many times scandisk interpreted whatever LILO was doing as damage to my boot block that needed to be repaired...