... are quite common. We call them "stocks", which are in principle supposed to function in perpetuity, and on the timescales of most investing humans (begin investing at age of majority or shortly thereafter, begin selldown at age of retirement), a suprising number of them are. (Companies older than 80 years old are not terribly uncommon. If you count all the various mergers, divestures, and restructurings that didn't result in common stock investors taking a total bath, there are probably more companies around today that "remember" commitments made in 1899 than there are living people who were alive in that year.)
This is largely just a pointy headed clarification: interstellar trade would be impossible for a host of other reasons. We'll start with "There is nobody to trade with, and finding somebody to trade with would require the 12th century Catholic Church making a deal with Microsoft on behalf of the 28th century Catholic church, without of course knowing that Microsoft exists, what form it takes, or what it values."
"We should do the next project in Rails." "Nonsense, we only have one engineer who knows Rails and would need ten." "Hire them." "Nonsense, they make 20% more than you do." "I guess I should be doing Rails elsewhere, then."
Take a look at the photos of the hospital El Presidente calls "one of the most modern and best ones in the capital". The evidence is plain to anyone who cares to look that Cuba is just lying outright, like the USSR before it, and their official statistics (and the UN and NGO reports which are based, ultimately, on the Cuban government statistics) are just a fiction, buttressed by non-representative sampling of a few good clinics they make available to health tourists who can pay in hard currency.
Point me to a listing of top downloaded songs, videos, or games which contains *one* work created prior to 1997. Go on, I'll wait.
The mass entertainment industry produces disposable culture and markets to create a perpetual demand for the new culture. That is what the pirates pirate, because that is what the pirates (and essentially everybody else) wants.
Top Songs of 2007 1. Shop Boyz, "Party Like A Rock Star" 2. Akon, "I Wanna Luv U" 3. Sean Kingston, "Beautiful Girls" 4. Mims, "This Is Why I'm Hot" 5. Akon, "Don't Matter" 6. T-Pain, "Bartender" 7. Soulja Boy, "Crank Dat Soulja Boy" 8. Justin Timberlake, "My Love" 9. DJ Unk, "Walk It Out" 10. Jim Jones, "We Fly High"
A shocker! Long copyrights cause piracy of songs out less than one year! Clearly the public domain is being impoverished by being denied the heartrending artistic stylings of Justni Timberlake, forever locked up by the evil copyright lawyers!
If you look at movies, you'll find the same thing: piracy is very much a recent-blockbuster phenomenon.
Top Movies of 2007 1. Resident Evil: Extinction 2. Pirates of The Caribbean: At World's End 3. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry 4. Ratatouille 5. Superbad 6. Beowulf 7. Transformers 8. American Gangster 9. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix 10. Stardust
Look at all the published download numbers -- they aren't lead by art house flicks and niche bands, they're the same mass-market entertainment that the studios/labels spend millions marketing and that the *public wants to consume*. Its all Oops I Did It To Die Hard Again.*
If you want to watch it, pay for it. If it is too crappy for you to watch it, don't watch it. This is not a difficult concept. The studios don't owe you their crappy content for free when you, in actual fact, seek out the crappy content.
If you go to one of the local 100-yen stores, you can find this nice little blindfold thingee. With one of those you can sleep in until 3 PM if you want to. I have two -- one is the standard elastic-headband contraption and the other is just a black anime-esque cat which sits on your face all night. More for the novelty value than anything.
Now, while the USD has been falling against the yen recently, I'm going to wager that 100 yen is still less than $8.6 million.
Unlike Discworld, on Mars, its rocks, all the way down. The ones studied by Soujourner are among the most expensive rocks in history. The ones studied in that 30 minutes would BE the most expensive rocks in history. But they'd still be rocks!
Humans to do dishwashing, like humans normally do. Humans to do laundry, like humans normally do. Humans to build fires, like humans normally do. Humans to connect phone calls, like humans normally do. Humans to review every credit card charge being made and check for fraud in real time, like humans normally do. Humans to lift construction materials to the 35th floor of buildings, like humans normally do. Humans to drive in rail spikes, like humans normally do. OK, I lied, I have heard that one. The human in question died -- its supposed to be inspiring, for some reason.
Possible conflict of interest watch: I used to work at a Japanese tech incubator which did robotics research. From my perspective, a robot which is used to help an old lady get dressed in the morning because touching her toes is difficult in her old age is just another technological advancement. It makes her life easier, fuller, and more dignified than having to having a nurse do it. Why force her to disrobe in the presence of a stranger every day for the rest of her life? She's quite possibly old enough to remember washing clothes by hand in running streamwater with a washboard, but we're not going to ask her to do that out of a misplaced desire to build moral fiber!
(P.S. There are many causes of Japan's low birth rate. Not all of them are amenable to easy fixing -- how do you tell ladies "OK, I get it, marrying the average Japanese guy is kind of a lousy deal and you'd rather spend your late 20s working on your career, but you need to suck it up and get pregnant so that your mother's generation has sufficient nurses"? How do you say "OK, we'd sort of appreciate you to raise a family of 4 or 5 in an apartment that is smaller than many American dorm doubles?")
One BlendTec blender, with blades replaced with sodium. One bag of Mentos, reduced to a fine powder with said BlendTec blender. One bottle of coke. One Chuck Norris action figure. And a VERY, VERY long stick to turn the blender on with.
(What do you need the Chuck Norris for? Oh, the question you should be asking is, what does he need you for. And the answer is, he doesn't need you for anything, so you'd better get running while you still can.)
>> For example, while aluminum sheets are made of microscopic crystals, there is little danger of breathing significant amounts of aluminum unless you spend a lot of work processing it into a fine powder first. >>
Step one: reduce the aluminium sheets until they fit in a BlendTec blender. Step two: turn blender on. Step three: dump out on table, being careful to avoid aluminium nanosmoke. Step four: play annoying end of video sound.
Unless you guys have significantly improved the card catalog system in the time since I've been in fifth grade, I'm guessing a reference librarian using a library of choice will find a picture of a sheep facing left at sunset no faster than a fifth grader using Google. One of these search methodologies apparently requires a masters degree. Go figure.
P.S. [sheep sunset] gets four results on the first page of Google image search which fit the criteria you want.
It boggles my mind that folks think they can come up with any system of copyright law in which your generic starving artist will be treated as equitably as Disney is. Disney has the multi-billion dollar warchest to make sure any process you require, any form you mandate, any hoop you establish, will be accomplished exactly as the law dictates. They will happily offer to write the law to make this easier. Your generic starving artist is likely too busy waiting tables to remember to file his IP13-I in a timely fashion on the 37th week in the 14th monsoon season after the IP creation. ("Darn, I was sure if we made it that hard, Disney would forget to file their form for Mickey!")
All you'll do is create a very inegalitarian world: one in which those with the most access to the techniques of *manipulating the copyright system* end up with IP, and one in which no other creators end up with anything. It will have absolutely nothing to do with importance of the created works, skill or effort involved in creating them, or any subject of social concern except to the extent that those immediately translated into money to be burned to satisfy the regulatory gods. (And you non-creators will get to freeload a bit, yay. Not on Windows or Mickey, though -- you'll be freeloading on the backs of the little guy. Microsoft and Disney will also happily freeload off the backs of the little guy, when the little guy actually comes up with something worth stealing, which will be about as seldom as it is in the status quo. They'll use your new copyright tax like Pfizer used New London's power of eminent domain -- to accomplish theft under the color of law.)
The current copyright regime has its issues, granted. However, it has some nice features: you know how many bureacracies I had to ask for permission to write software and start selling it? None. I wrote it, I put it up on the Internet, money started coming in, the following April I sent an extra large check to the IRS. This system protects the incentive for me to actually write the software. Without me writing it my customers would still be stuck with the grossly inferior solutions they had to use before. Folks who aren't my customers might not benefit as much as they would if you could requisition the fruits my labor for nothing but, hey, it was a boring program to write and I wouldn't have written it without the prospect of compensation.
(P.S. The software, which I sold about ~$10k worth of last year, makes educational bingo cards. It is about 2k lines of code. If the very notion of this offends you, there is an OSS project on Sourceforge called bingo-cards which is my direct competitor. It is currently broken -- doesn't run on Windows, can't actually print cards, etc.
I'm sure many Slashdotters think that, in a world without copyright to protect profits, there would still be a socially optimum level of IP creation. Well, it seems to me that the socially optimum level of IP creation includes some way for teachers to print bigno cards. If you think software copyrights are invidious, I think you probably owe society a patch to bingo-cards. It can't be that hard. Let me know how it goes.)
Repeat after me: you don't have to declare the "true value of your assets", which is an entirely imaginary notion, except in the tax year when you have *realized* capital gains *by selling the asset*. Lets say that four friends and I get together to form the Pasty-Faced White Guy Boy Band. We write our single "I Cheated On You But Now I'm Sorry Please Take Me Back". It costs us nothing to write, so the cost basis on that song's copyright and associated IP is zero. We perform it for a while, and release it to the Internets, to the adoration of millions of spurned women everywhere. I receive an offer from Big Record Company to purchase the rights to the song, in perpetuity, for $1 million dollars. I reject it.
Where do I put the million dollars on my tax return? Nowhere. No income means no income tax.
Now, had I accepted the offer, I would have realized capital gains of $1 million (probably split five ways), less the $0 cost basis in ICOYBNISPTMB. That would require me paying taxes -- likely at the long term capital gains rate, not as income, in the most plausible reading of my imaginary scenario.
Now, let's say that I reject the $1 million offer, and then subsequently sell to Timmy The Two Bit for $50,000 to prevent the bank from kicking me out of my house. In this case, despite the fact that you might feel my song is still worth $1 million, I would be assessed taxes on only $50,000 of capital gains. Even if the song made me a million in sales in the month before the sale, it would still be *fairly valued* at $50,000 after the sale actually takes place, assuming I am not engaging in tax fraud outside the scope of this hypothetical (for example, by doing a transaction which is not at "arms length" -- perhaps selling to a confederate with the promise to buy back in the next tax year and benefit somehow from a stepped up cost basis).
...can be tagged by your outsourced team of Indian/Chinese/Russian capcha breakers for $100. Now breaking your CAPTCHA involves "Pick the word 'kitten' out of the following set of five words: kitten, dog, giraffe, puppy, cow."
You can add more photos? No problem, I can add more employees. My business model scales to infinity, yours does not.
Blood to blood contact (fairly rare, thankfully -- mostly of a concern to medical workers) Parasitic infection (mosquito is carrier of malaria, mosquito bites you, etc) Pathogen touches skin (thankfully, we're pretty robust against this, but it worths for some pathogens and for folks with weakened immune systems. You might be familiar with planter's warts, athlete's foot, etc.) Pathogen enters through compromise in skin (nick finger, open floodgates) etc, etc
Basically, all you need for an infection is to get a pathogen inside a cell it can infect. A vector can be anything that compromises your body's numerous and insanely effective defenses against that happening. (Oh sure, we get sick fairly frequently from our point of view, but we're walking around in a lethal organic soup for every minute of our lives. That tabletop you just disinfected makes the.ru namespace look like a threat-free Eden.)
Who cares about the hookup to your face -- you type much, much more explicitly informative things every day, and then send it over the tubes. Granted, most of the emotions are of the sophomoric variety, but people have been leaking their emotional state over IM for the last few decades, and with some fairly trivial text processing you could discover it. (Start with just searching for smilies and emotional words, then level up to training Bayes-based classifiers -- if it works for telling what mails are spam, I bet it will tell you which Livejournals are emo.)
Yeah, I'm not suggesting we should shut our eyes when unmarried Irish women decide to take a sudden vacation in Israel, which should be a WTF in any security screening known to man. We'd have more time to look for inconsistencies of that nature (although you don't really have to look so much as just keep your eyes open) if we weren't closely scrutizing every four ounce bottle of perfume being carried by 16 year old black girls on the trip from Chicago to Baltimore.
Suspicious objects are pretty common, since practically anything either a) can be used to kill you or b) resembles something which can be used to kill you. (The metal in my glasses might be sodium. 1 ounce of that, plus that glass of water the flight attendant will give me, is enough for me to depressurize a cabin.) People who are trying to kill you or closely resemble people trying to kill you are pretty rare. If we want security and efficiency, we should look for exceptions and rare things, not look for exceptions among common things. (The human brain is really, really poorly optimized for the second task, incidentally.)
Speaking of which, you can read an account of the security screening of that woman here:
... but 99% of the people who will ever try to blow up or hijack an airplane with themselves on it are in about one half of one percent of the flying population. Do I need to paint you a picture of how you can cut 99.5% of the wasted time?
Currently, we search "randomly" to make sure the numbers balance out at the end of the day, because we can't admit that we've got no individualized suspicion about the Syrian in C-6 or any of the other passengers on the plane, but we know to almost a certainty that if the plane blows up due to foul play, the bomb was in C-6. This is a great inconvenience to everyone, and leads to security theatre like searching 5 year olds or 80 year old war vets who are sitting Congressmen when we could be giving a quick, professional, and *thorough* screening to a much smaller group of people. Like, say, El Al does. They deal with a much, much more hostile security environment than the US does, and they have a near-perfect security record. (The only incident I recall off the top of my head was someone taking a gun into the LAX airport and shooting at their ticketing terminal. He killed two and was shot to death by the armed guard they had posted. You get exactly one guess on the race and religion of the shooter.)
The publication of this policy would also probably make flying easier, not harder, for the.5% subject to it, as there would be less desire by civilians to harass them to double-check that the security officials had actually done their jobs.
Incidentally, if there is a sudden rash of the IRA attempting to blow up or hijack US or Japanese aircraft, feel free to pull me out of the line. I've got no more desire to be blown up by idiots who happen to look a little bit like me than anyone else does.
I wrote a custom filter for Eclipse which inserts tabs in place of any whitespace. Except when it doesn't, because we all know variety is the spice of life. It also replaces as many characters in 1iteral strings as possible with Unicode which looks the same but is different, which will teach that lazy bastard in the next cubicle why we do not use string literals as hash keys. For the finale, it rewraps long lines so that anyone editing the file and then using Eclipse's auto-format will see every long line shifted one character or token to the right, which borks diff something fierce.
I also considered replacing all ls used in literals with 1 but even I'm not that evil.
1) Squirrels are poor sources of meat, buffalos are great sources of meat, deer and bears do in a pinch. 3) Dysentery, whatever that is, sucks. 4) I don't care how cold it is or how low the food stores are -- you do NOT attempt to caulk the wagon and float across the river, or ford anywhere where the water is deeper than the ankles on the dystentery-afflicted squirrl you have allowed to tag along with you.
counterintelligence realized most people do not flip when crossing the street.
No, I'm joking. Seriously though, one of the things the military does in Iraq when looking for the foreign jihadis is they watch for wrong turns off main thoroughfares. It is apparently pretty effective at sorting out people who aren't from around here -- if you know Main Street less well than the Americans, you just might be from out of town!
Slashdot Mirror
... are quite common. We call them "stocks", which are in principle supposed to function in perpetuity, and on the timescales of most investing humans (begin investing at age of majority or shortly thereafter, begin selldown at age of retirement), a suprising number of them are. (Companies older than 80 years old are not terribly uncommon. If you count all the various mergers, divestures, and restructurings that didn't result in common stock investors taking a total bath, there are probably more companies around today that "remember" commitments made in 1899 than there are living people who were alive in that year.)
This is largely just a pointy headed clarification: interstellar trade would be impossible for a host of other reasons. We'll start with "There is nobody to trade with, and finding somebody to trade with would require the 12th century Catholic Church making a deal with Microsoft on behalf of the 28th century Catholic church, without of course knowing that Microsoft exists, what form it takes, or what it values."
In Soviet Russia, the casino games YOU!
They could just nuke us now and be done with it.
"We should do the next project in Rails."
"Nonsense, we only have one engineer who knows Rails and would need ten."
"Hire them."
"Nonsense, they make 20% more than you do."
"I guess I should be doing Rails elsewhere, then."
When you've got roaches on the floor of your hospital, you just might not have world class medical care:
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/004070.php
Take a look at the photos of the hospital El Presidente calls "one of the most modern and best ones in the capital". The evidence is plain to anyone who cares to look that Cuba is just lying outright, like the USSR before it, and their official statistics (and the UN and NGO reports which are based, ultimately, on the Cuban government statistics) are just a fiction, buttressed by non-representative sampling of a few good clinics they make available to health tourists who can pay in hard currency.
Point me to a listing of top downloaded songs, videos, or games which contains *one* work created prior to 1997. Go on, I'll wait.
The mass entertainment industry produces disposable culture and markets to create a perpetual demand for the new culture. That is what the pirates pirate, because that is what the pirates (and essentially everybody else) wants.
Let's look at the data:
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2007/12/YE_best_of_p2p
Top Songs of 2007
1. Shop Boyz, "Party Like A Rock Star"
2. Akon, "I Wanna Luv U"
3. Sean Kingston, "Beautiful Girls"
4. Mims, "This Is Why I'm Hot"
5. Akon, "Don't Matter"
6. T-Pain, "Bartender"
7. Soulja Boy, "Crank Dat Soulja Boy"
8. Justin Timberlake, "My Love"
9. DJ Unk, "Walk It Out"
10. Jim Jones, "We Fly High"
A shocker! Long copyrights cause piracy of songs out less than one year! Clearly the public domain is being impoverished by being denied the heartrending artistic stylings of Justni Timberlake, forever locked up by the evil copyright lawyers!
If you look at movies, you'll find the same thing: piracy is very much a recent-blockbuster phenomenon.
Top Movies of 2007
1. Resident Evil: Extinction
2. Pirates of The Caribbean: At World's End
3. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
4. Ratatouille
5. Superbad
6. Beowulf
7. Transformers
8. American Gangster
9. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
10. Stardust
Look at all the published download numbers -- they aren't lead by art house flicks and niche bands, they're the same mass-market entertainment that the studios/labels spend millions marketing and that the *public wants to consume*. Its all Oops I Did It To Die Hard Again.*
If you want to watch it, pay for it. If it is too crappy for you to watch it, don't watch it. This is not a difficult concept. The studios don't owe you their crappy content for free when you, in actual fact, seek out the crappy content.
* OK, that was unfair. I liked Die Hard.
Ahh, you appear to be reading the Hobbit. Turn the page for an unobtrusive text message beamed directly into your optic nerve.
If you go to one of the local 100-yen stores, you can find this nice little blindfold thingee. With one of those you can sleep in until 3 PM if you want to. I have two -- one is the standard elastic-headband contraption and the other is just a black anime-esque cat which sits on your face all night. More for the novelty value than anything.
Now, while the USD has been falling against the yen recently, I'm going to wager that 100 yen is still less than $8.6 million.
More rocks.
Unlike Discworld, on Mars, its rocks, all the way down. The ones studied by Soujourner are among the most expensive rocks in history. The ones studied in that 30 minutes would BE the most expensive rocks in history. But they'd still be rocks!
Humans to do dishwashing, like humans normally do.
Humans to do laundry, like humans normally do.
Humans to build fires, like humans normally do.
Humans to connect phone calls, like humans normally do.
Humans to review every credit card charge being made and check for fraud in real time, like humans normally do.
Humans to lift construction materials to the 35th floor of buildings, like humans normally do.
Humans to drive in rail spikes, like humans normally do. OK, I lied, I have heard that one. The human in question died -- its supposed to be inspiring, for some reason.
Possible conflict of interest watch: I used to work at a Japanese tech incubator which did robotics research. From my perspective, a robot which is used to help an old lady get dressed in the morning because touching her toes is difficult in her old age is just another technological advancement. It makes her life easier, fuller, and more dignified than having to having a nurse do it. Why force her to disrobe in the presence of a stranger every day for the rest of her life? She's quite possibly old enough to remember washing clothes by hand in running streamwater with a washboard, but we're not going to ask her to do that out of a misplaced desire to build moral fiber!
(P.S. There are many causes of Japan's low birth rate. Not all of them are amenable to easy fixing -- how do you tell ladies "OK, I get it, marrying the average Japanese guy is kind of a lousy deal and you'd rather spend your late 20s working on your career, but you need to suck it up and get pregnant so that your mother's generation has sufficient nurses"? How do you say "OK, we'd sort of appreciate you to raise a family of 4 or 5 in an apartment that is smaller than many American dorm doubles?")
One BlendTec blender, with blades replaced with sodium. One bag of Mentos, reduced to a fine powder with said BlendTec blender. One bottle of coke. One Chuck Norris action figure. And a VERY, VERY long stick to turn the blender on with.
(What do you need the Chuck Norris for? Oh, the question you should be asking is, what does he need you for. And the answer is, he doesn't need you for anything, so you'd better get running while you still can.)
>>
For example, while aluminum sheets are made of microscopic crystals, there is little danger of breathing significant amounts of aluminum unless you spend a lot of work processing it into a fine powder first.
>>
Step one: reduce the aluminium sheets until they fit in a BlendTec blender.
Step two: turn blender on.
Step three: dump out on table, being careful to avoid aluminium nanosmoke.
Step four: play annoying end of video sound.
Unless you guys have significantly improved the card catalog system in the time since I've been in fifth grade, I'm guessing a reference librarian using a library of choice will find a picture of a sheep facing left at sunset no faster than a fifth grader using Google. One of these search methodologies apparently requires a masters degree. Go figure.
P.S. [sheep sunset] gets four results on the first page of Google image search which fit the criteria you want.
http://images.jupiterimages.com/common/detail/01/88/22578801.jpg
It boggles my mind that folks think they can come up with any system of copyright law in which your generic starving artist will be treated as equitably as Disney is. Disney has the multi-billion dollar warchest to make sure any process you require, any form you mandate, any hoop you establish, will be accomplished exactly as the law dictates. They will happily offer to write the law to make this easier. Your generic starving artist is likely too busy waiting tables to remember to file his IP13-I in a timely fashion on the 37th week in the 14th monsoon season after the IP creation. ("Darn, I was sure if we made it that hard, Disney would forget to file their form for Mickey!")
All you'll do is create a very inegalitarian world: one in which those with the most access to the techniques of *manipulating the copyright system* end up with IP, and one in which no other creators end up with anything. It will have absolutely nothing to do with importance of the created works, skill or effort involved in creating them, or any subject of social concern except to the extent that those immediately translated into money to be burned to satisfy the regulatory gods. (And you non-creators will get to freeload a bit, yay. Not on Windows or Mickey, though -- you'll be freeloading on the backs of the little guy. Microsoft and Disney will also happily freeload off the backs of the little guy, when the little guy actually comes up with something worth stealing, which will be about as seldom as it is in the status quo. They'll use your new copyright tax like Pfizer used New London's power of eminent domain -- to accomplish theft under the color of law.)
The current copyright regime has its issues, granted. However, it has some nice features: you know how many bureacracies I had to ask for permission to write software and start selling it? None. I wrote it, I put it up on the Internet, money started coming in, the following April I sent an extra large check to the IRS. This system protects the incentive for me to actually write the software. Without me writing it my customers would still be stuck with the grossly inferior solutions they had to use before. Folks who aren't my customers might not benefit as much as they would if you could requisition the fruits my labor for nothing but, hey, it was a boring program to write and I wouldn't have written it without the prospect of compensation.
(P.S. The software, which I sold about ~$10k worth of last year, makes educational bingo cards. It is about 2k lines of code. If the very notion of this offends you, there is an OSS project on Sourceforge called bingo-cards which is my direct competitor. It is currently broken -- doesn't run on Windows, can't actually print cards, etc.
I'm sure many Slashdotters think that, in a world without copyright to protect profits, there would still be a socially optimum level of IP creation. Well, it seems to me that the socially optimum level of IP creation includes some way for teachers to print bigno cards. If you think software copyrights are invidious, I think you probably owe society a patch to bingo-cards. It can't be that hard. Let me know how it goes.)
Repeat after me: you don't have to declare the "true value of your assets", which is an entirely imaginary notion, except in the tax year when you have *realized* capital gains *by selling the asset*. Lets say that four friends and I get together to form the Pasty-Faced White Guy Boy Band. We write our single "I Cheated On You But Now I'm Sorry Please Take Me Back". It costs us nothing to write, so the cost basis on that song's copyright and associated IP is zero. We perform it for a while, and release it to the Internets, to the adoration of millions of spurned women everywhere. I receive an offer from Big Record Company to purchase the rights to the song, in perpetuity, for $1 million dollars. I reject it.
Where do I put the million dollars on my tax return? Nowhere. No income means no income tax.
Now, had I accepted the offer, I would have realized capital gains of $1 million (probably split five ways), less the $0 cost basis in ICOYBNISPTMB. That would require me paying taxes -- likely at the long term capital gains rate, not as income, in the most plausible reading of my imaginary scenario.
Now, let's say that I reject the $1 million offer, and then subsequently sell to Timmy The Two Bit for $50,000 to prevent the bank from kicking me out of my house. In this case, despite the fact that you might feel my song is still worth $1 million, I would be assessed taxes on only $50,000 of capital gains. Even if the song made me a million in sales in the month before the sale, it would still be *fairly valued* at $50,000 after the sale actually takes place, assuming I am not engaging in tax fraud outside the scope of this hypothetical (for example, by doing a transaction which is not at "arms length" -- perhaps selling to a confederate with the promise to buy back in the next tax year and benefit somehow from a stepped up cost basis).
...can be tagged by your outsourced team of Indian/Chinese/Russian capcha breakers for $100. Now breaking your CAPTCHA involves "Pick the word 'kitten' out of the following set of five words: kitten, dog, giraffe, puppy, cow."
You can add more photos? No problem, I can add more employees. My business model scales to infinity, yours does not.
Blood to blood contact (fairly rare, thankfully -- mostly of a concern to medical workers)
.ru namespace look like a threat-free Eden.)
Parasitic infection (mosquito is carrier of malaria, mosquito bites you, etc)
Pathogen touches skin (thankfully, we're pretty robust against this, but it worths for some pathogens and for folks with weakened immune systems. You might be familiar with planter's warts, athlete's foot, etc.)
Pathogen enters through compromise in skin (nick finger, open floodgates)
etc, etc
Basically, all you need for an infection is to get a pathogen inside a cell it can infect. A vector can be anything that compromises your body's numerous and insanely effective defenses against that happening. (Oh sure, we get sick fairly frequently from our point of view, but we're walking around in a lethal organic soup for every minute of our lives. That tabletop you just disinfected makes the
Who cares about the hookup to your face -- you type much, much more explicitly informative things every day, and then send it over the tubes. Granted, most of the emotions are of the sophomoric variety, but people have been leaking their emotional state over IM for the last few decades, and with some fairly trivial text processing you could discover it. (Start with just searching for smilies and emotional words, then level up to training Bayes-based classifiers -- if it works for telling what mails are spam, I bet it will tell you which Livejournals are emo.)
Stub implementation:
LiveJournal#isEmo() { return true;}
See, 99% accurate with a single line of code.
Yeah, I'm not suggesting we should shut our eyes when unmarried Irish women decide to take a sudden vacation in Israel, which should be a WTF in any security screening known to man. We'd have more time to look for inconsistencies of that nature (although you don't really have to look so much as just keep your eyes open) if we weren't closely scrutizing every four ounce bottle of perfume being carried by 16 year old black girls on the trip from Chicago to Baltimore.
Suspicious objects are pretty common, since practically anything either a) can be used to kill you or b) resembles something which can be used to kill you. (The metal in my glasses might be sodium. 1 ounce of that, plus that glass of water the flight attendant will give me, is enough for me to depressurize a cabin.) People who are trying to kill you or closely resemble people trying to kill you are pretty rare. If we want security and efficiency, we should look for exceptions and rare things, not look for exceptions among common things. (The human brain is really, really poorly optimized for the second task, incidentally.)
Speaking of which, you can read an account of the security screening of that woman here:
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1064
... but 99% of the people who will ever try to blow up or hijack an airplane with themselves on it are in about one half of one percent of the flying population. Do I need to paint you a picture of how you can cut 99.5% of the wasted time?
.5% subject to it, as there would be less desire by civilians to harass them to double-check that the security officials had actually done their jobs.
Currently, we search "randomly" to make sure the numbers balance out at the end of the day, because we can't admit that we've got no individualized suspicion about the Syrian in C-6 or any of the other passengers on the plane, but we know to almost a certainty that if the plane blows up due to foul play, the bomb was in C-6. This is a great inconvenience to everyone, and leads to security theatre like searching 5 year olds or 80 year old war vets who are sitting Congressmen when we could be giving a quick, professional, and *thorough* screening to a much smaller group of people. Like, say, El Al does. They deal with a much, much more hostile security environment than the US does, and they have a near-perfect security record. (The only incident I recall off the top of my head was someone taking a gun into the LAX airport and shooting at their ticketing terminal. He killed two and was shot to death by the armed guard they had posted. You get exactly one guess on the race and religion of the shooter.)
The publication of this policy would also probably make flying easier, not harder, for the
Incidentally, if there is a sudden rash of the IRA attempting to blow up or hijack US or Japanese aircraft, feel free to pull me out of the line. I've got no more desire to be blown up by idiots who happen to look a little bit like me than anyone else does.
I wrote a custom filter for Eclipse which inserts tabs in place of any whitespace. Except when it doesn't, because we all know variety is the spice of life. It also replaces as many characters in 1iteral strings as possible with Unicode which looks the same but is different, which will teach that lazy bastard in the next cubicle why we do not use string literals as hash keys. For the finale, it rewraps long lines so that anyone editing the file and then using Eclipse's auto-format will see every long line shifted one character or token to the right, which borks diff something fierce.
I also considered replacing all ls used in literals with 1 but even I'm not that evil.
Signed,
That Guy
P.S. Who caught the 1? Yeah, like I said, evil.
1) Squirrels are poor sources of meat, buffalos are great sources of meat, deer and bears do in a pinch.
3) Dysentery, whatever that is, sucks.
4) I don't care how cold it is or how low the food stores are -- you do NOT attempt to caulk the wagon and float across the river, or ford anywhere where the water is deeper than the ankles on the dystentery-afflicted squirrl you have allowed to tag along with you.
counterintelligence realized most people do not flip when crossing the street.
No, I'm joking. Seriously though, one of the things the military does in Iraq when looking for the foreign jihadis is they watch for wrong turns off main thoroughfares. It is apparently pretty effective at sorting out people who aren't from around here -- if you know Main Street less well than the Americans, you just might be from out of town!
I had been looking for a name for my race. Now I have one. Thanks.