In Australia we now have laws that make this decision mostly irrelevant. A product must last for a reasonable amount of time, among other things. Apple are not going to argue that it's reasonable to expect that an iphone wouldn't last at least 3 years so taking out any extra warranty is a waste of money. Ditto for any brand name laptop. For phones, the "reasonable amount of time" thing also has a lower limit of the length of the contract, so if your phone breaks while still under contract the retailer must make it good again. This ends the situation where your phone might break after 15 months and you are stuck paying out the remainder of the 2 year contract.
Most of this was already the case but it's now clearly spelled out and easier to argue the point with ignorant retailers
I think it's starting to make a bit of difference to the products shops are willing to sell, on the basis that if they buy some cheap import and the supplier disappears they are stuck with the warranty, but maybe that's my imagination...
Depends... if the place warms up enough before it starts cooling down, too much of the oceans will evaporate, and water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas so it will just keep getting hotter.
As water vapor becomes more prevalent it will begin to reflect more than it traps, so the net effect of massive cloud cover is going to be cooling, not runaway heating...
If the temperature increases then the air can support a larger amount of water vapor without the humidity increasing, so it doesn't necessarily follow that there will be an increase in cloud cover.
Thats a bit egotistical. The co2 being pumped out will only continue until a massive dieoff because the weather becomes too hot for human food crops and nature will right itself in 10 or 20 thousand years with a lot less people on it. Overpopulation and global warming solved...the hard way.
Depends... if the place warms up enough before it starts cooling down, too much of the oceans will evaporate, and water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas so it will just keep getting hotter.
Why does everything have to serve a purpose by believing in God? If we are endowed with free will and if our choices affect our salvation or lack of it that implies two things:
1) we are 100% responsible and accountable for our own actions. Is it not easier and more convenient to believe you are NOT accountable to anyone except yourself? I would argue that it is natural for people to believe in a higher power and the people who are afraid are in fact the atheists because they much prefer to go it alone. The alternative would force them to look beyond themselves.
2) there will be randomness. Bad things can and will happen by chance not because God is feeling peevish in that moment. This is hard for some people to accept and is representative of the more foolish of the believers who accept God (and the atheist who deny God because of this) but don't accept first item. Put simply you cannot have free will without allowing for the possibility of humans making a mess of things and the possibility that some things are no one's fault, not even God. Yes, God could prevent it, but then again most of the time so could we. We choose not to.
I'm always amazed at atheism because it completely ignores the overwhelming proof that there must be something eternal out there who directly or indirectly created all of this marvelous thing we call life. Life is ridiculously complex and to use a technological analogy--I could throw a bunch of copper and plastic and silicone in a pile and let it sit for a trillion years and I won't get so much a transistor out of it much less a working computer. Not saying evolution doesn't happen, just saying WE could never make it happen and neither could random change.
I'm always amazed at athiests who are just as sure that there is no god as christians are just as sure that there is a god. The best science can ever do is prove that the universe doesn't _need_ a god to have come into existence. A god who set the initial parameters of the big bang and left it at that isn't outside my system of possible beliefs, but having said that such a god is irrelevent to this universe once the big bang started.
the problem I have with your "must be something eternal out there" argument is that if something eternal created our universe, what created the "something eternal's" universe? And if you argue that it was always there, why can't our universe have always been there? We can deduce from the fact that everything is moving away from a central point that there was probably a big bang that created everything we can see, but that could still exist inside a universe that was always there. the big bang could just a blip in the eternal timespan of a universe we can't directly observe. Such a thing isn't any more unbelievable than "god did it".
Another way would be when you create an account somewhere, that the website tries logging in to google, facebook, myspace (does that still exist?), pinterest, etc using the same credentials, and warns the user that they have used the same password in multiple places. Some wording in the EULA that this will happen will cover you, in theory.
Most of the time bad things happen because people make bad choices. Sometimes it is because other people make bad choices including bad choices made by ancestors. Nothing happens without a reason but we don't always know or believe the reason. In the biblical record we are told that the first humans were given the choice whether to believe God or not. That is still the basic choice at all humans have. Because of that choice not to believe God by the first humans, death and suffering came into a perfect world. The promise of God is that one day that will end forever. Of course you don't have to believe that either, but you may if you want to. No true Christian will do jihad on you if you don't believe.
And that's what I like about your "true Christians". They'll love you whether you believe in their God or not, and I respect that. To put it in terms they understand if a Christian tells me i'm going to hell for not believing, I tell them that if they preach hate they are doing the devils work.
That said, it doesn't happen that often. Once when I was a kid I had a girl burst into tears when I told her I didn't believe that God existed, and I've seen a few more get more than just a little upset when confronted with a non believer (maybe trying to guilt them into believing?). I've seen a lot more athiests get very angry when they found out that someone believed in god though....
Makes sense, at least in my point of view. I'm a atheist, and I have got into depressions regarding the meaning of life, the un/fairness behind it, a lot of trascendental questions, also a fear of death, which people that believes in a god, with fervor, may not feel, since they may believe there is a life after death, there is a meaning behind everything, that there is a god that loves you, etc.
I'm an athiest too - but I would find the concept of a God who lets bad things happen to good people just to serve his mysterious higher purpose even more depressing than the idea that nothing happens for a reason.
That's what people crave. They can't live with the possibility that life might have no meaning at all, that we're just here and should make the best of it.
That's my take on it too. I read somewhere that "12 step" programs like AA work best with a belief in a higher power... not necessarily god but some higher purpose to give their life meaning and provide the illusion of support.
but whatever floats your boat. As long as a religious person doesn't push their beliefs onto others then it's all good
That article says there is no scientific basis for women making noises during sex. Another article I read says that the female bonobo makes noises during sex which attracts the attention of nearby males so they can join in... just sayin'.
Wow. It's a big leap from 'I disagree with gun ownership' to 'I hope gun owners are killed or seriously injured.'
I don't actually disagree with a blanket ban on gun ownership. I do disagree with the mentality "i want a gun because i have a right to own a gun", and definitely disagree with the ease at which you can get a gun in some countries.
The part of me that likes the idea of a gun exploding in the face of the person holding it is the part of me afraid that one day some loony will be pointing a gun at me and there will be nothing I can do about the result of them pulling the trigger (apart from hoping it explodes in their face)
If the barrel and/or the slide is made of even the best plastic, I wouldn't trust it to take the 35ksi of a normal 9mm round even once. That application requires properly heat treated 4130 or 4140 steel (or 316 stainless).
I don't really see a problem. It just needs a label like "Warning: This item is not a weapon and is for novelty purposes only. Aim away from face".
Part of me likes the idea of a handgun that only lasts 3 shots and on any of those 3 shots may explode and remove the face of the person holding it.
Yea, not being able to afford an upgrade is not an excuse. That's like a truck driver saying he can't afford to buy new tires. At some point he's going to have to or he's not going to be driving his truck.
I wonder how dentists will raise the money to purchase new software...
Frankly though, something like practice management and medical records software should be on a subscription. If I wrote such software that's how i'd sell it. You pay me money each month/year/whatever or you can't use the software anymore. In return, i'll support it, keep security up to date, keep supporting current platforms, escrow the code in the event of something happening to my company, and make sure the data backend is open enough for you to easily migrate to another package if your needs are no longer being met by my software.
The alternative is that users get shitty with me because software they bought 10 years ago doesn't run on current OS's.
> A recent letter signed by 15 companies and trade groups — including TechAmerica, which represents Google,
LOL. Google with the same Eric Schmidt who wants Drones banned because he's worried about the invasion of privacy when they fly over your mansion estate?
""You're having a dispute with your neighbour," he hypothesised. "How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their back yard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?"
Gee I don't know Eric. About the same way I feel when you run your fingers through my hair. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/21/drones-google-eric-schmidt
That's different though. The drones issue is about _his_ privacy, not yours.
And I stand by my previous statement concerning drones. I'm happy for it to be legal for my neighbor or government to fly a drone over my property, if it's also legal for me to disable it and then take possession of it when it crashes onto my property, and for my neighbor/government to be responsible for anything it breaks when it crashes.
get your stomachs ready, because that's a lot of Jar Jar Binks
You're suggesting we eat him?
Actually that would make an awesome movie... one of the various alien races in the Star Wars universe accidentally discovers that Gungans are extraordinarily tasty and hunts them to extinction. McDonalds could do a "McJarJar" as a promotional burger (at a guess they probably taste like Chicken). Fun for the whole family.
No-one said anything about locking people up. But they could keep tabs on him in many legal ways.
The problem I have with this is that every time something like this happens, the authorities change the definition of "legal ways". The bombing was a tragedy, but no worse (and in fact in terms of body count, only 1/30th as bad) as the number of people killed on the roads that day (statistically). The idea of terrorist activities is to make us afraid and to change our way of life, don't let this happen
It's easy to rationalise the "keeping tabs" retrospectively because he turned out to be guilty, but it is a mistake to do so.
Concern is not that he was let go. Consern is that for whatever reason he was not in a database afterwards. Apparently FBI not sure how that happened.
Suppose you had mouthed off about your government once upon a time (say, September 12, 2001) and someone reported you to the FBI. The FBI interviews you and discovers nothing other than the regular run-of-the-mill anti government sentiment. But they add you to the database. Then someone lets some bombs off and kills a few people at a marathon. You're in the database, and you just happened to be in the area because your friend/sister/cousin/whatever was runner. The government comes and finds you and starts asking a bunch of questions. They also question your family, and maybe some of your workmates. Nothing comes of it in the end, because you are innocent, but your workmates will always wonder...
Seems like you've given up some of your freedom to secure a little temporary safety.
CBS reported that few years back Russians warned FBI about older brother being radicalized. So FBI asked him, he said "nope", they said "ok" and let him go. And they totally forgot about it - he wasn't on the list of suspects...
That's "cooperation" alright...
Maybe you would have been happier about 60 years ago in a time when they could lock you away because your neighbor said you might be a communist. The world was a much safer place back then with all those commies being locked away without a trial.
Isn't it pretty obvious when him and his brother just happen to have pressure cooker bombs to throw at the cops, right after they are identified as suspects in the bombings? They are either the guys, or the unluckiest home cooking aficionados ever.
Well the media has never misreported stuff before, ever, so yes lets skip the trial and go straight to the lynching.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but based on the actual information we have (as given by the news media to date), this "monster" may be involved to the degree of anywhere between "mastermind of terrorist bombing operation, detonated the bombs, shot various innocent people in the process" to "forced by actual terrorist brother to hang around him for the time period in question".
I'd like a little more detail (that is, any) as to specific charges and evidence before making such a characterization.
Couldn't agree more. Sharpen the points on your pitchforks, but don't actually start waving them around yet.
causing plants to germinate more quickly and grow larger
So all we need to do is figure out a few genes to make h2s, splice them into a few rainforest trees, and let natural selection do the rest. Rainforest depletion problem solved.
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In Australia we now have laws that make this decision mostly irrelevant. A product must last for a reasonable amount of time, among other things. Apple are not going to argue that it's reasonable to expect that an iphone wouldn't last at least 3 years so taking out any extra warranty is a waste of money. Ditto for any brand name laptop. For phones, the "reasonable amount of time" thing also has a lower limit of the length of the contract, so if your phone breaks while still under contract the retailer must make it good again. This ends the situation where your phone might break after 15 months and you are stuck paying out the remainder of the 2 year contract.
Most of this was already the case but it's now clearly spelled out and easier to argue the point with ignorant retailers
I think it's starting to make a bit of difference to the products shops are willing to sell, on the basis that if they buy some cheap import and the supplier disappears they are stuck with the warranty, but maybe that's my imagination...
Depends... if the place warms up enough before it starts cooling down, too much of the oceans will evaporate, and water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas so it will just keep getting hotter.
As water vapor becomes more prevalent it will begin to reflect more than it traps, so the net effect of massive cloud cover is going to be cooling, not runaway heating...
Source: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Clouds/ "The overall effect of all clouds together is that the Earth's surface is cooler than it would be if the atmosphere had no clouds."
If the temperature increases then the air can support a larger amount of water vapor without the humidity increasing, so it doesn't necessarily follow that there will be an increase in cloud cover.
Thats a bit egotistical. The co2 being pumped out will only continue until a massive dieoff because the weather becomes too hot for human food crops and nature will right itself in 10 or 20 thousand years with a lot less people on it. Overpopulation and global warming solved...the hard way.
Depends... if the place warms up enough before it starts cooling down, too much of the oceans will evaporate, and water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas so it will just keep getting hotter.
Why does everything have to serve a purpose by believing in God? If we are endowed with free will and if our choices affect our salvation or lack of it that implies two things:
1) we are 100% responsible and accountable for our own actions. Is it not easier and more convenient to believe you are NOT accountable to anyone except yourself? I would argue that it is natural for people to believe in a higher power and the people who are afraid are in fact the atheists because they much prefer to go it alone. The alternative would force them to look beyond themselves.
2) there will be randomness. Bad things can and will happen by chance not because God is feeling peevish in that moment. This is hard for some people to accept and is representative of the more foolish of the believers who accept God (and the atheist who deny God because of this) but don't accept first item. Put simply you cannot have free will without allowing for the possibility of humans making a mess of things and the possibility that some things are no one's fault, not even God. Yes, God could prevent it, but then again most of the time so could we. We choose not to.
I'm always amazed at atheism because it completely ignores the overwhelming proof that there must be something eternal out there who directly or indirectly created all of this marvelous thing we call life. Life is ridiculously complex and to use a technological analogy--I could throw a bunch of copper and plastic and silicone in a pile and let it sit for a trillion years and I won't get so much a transistor out of it much less a working computer. Not saying evolution doesn't happen, just saying WE could never make it happen and neither could random change.
I'm always amazed at athiests who are just as sure that there is no god as christians are just as sure that there is a god. The best science can ever do is prove that the universe doesn't _need_ a god to have come into existence. A god who set the initial parameters of the big bang and left it at that isn't outside my system of possible beliefs, but having said that such a god is irrelevent to this universe once the big bang started.
the problem I have with your "must be something eternal out there" argument is that if something eternal created our universe, what created the "something eternal's" universe? And if you argue that it was always there, why can't our universe have always been there? We can deduce from the fact that everything is moving away from a central point that there was probably a big bang that created everything we can see, but that could still exist inside a universe that was always there. the big bang could just a blip in the eternal timespan of a universe we can't directly observe. Such a thing isn't any more unbelievable than "god did it".
Another way would be when you create an account somewhere, that the website tries logging in to google, facebook, myspace (does that still exist?), pinterest, etc using the same credentials, and warns the user that they have used the same password in multiple places. Some wording in the EULA that this will happen will cover you, in theory.
Most of the time bad things happen because people make bad choices. Sometimes it is because other people make bad choices including bad choices made by ancestors. Nothing happens without a reason but we don't always know or believe the reason. In the biblical record we are told that the first humans were given the choice whether to believe God or not. That is still the basic choice at all humans have. Because of that choice not to believe God by the first humans, death and suffering came into a perfect world. The promise of God is that one day that will end forever. Of course you don't have to believe that either, but you may if you want to. No true Christian will do jihad on you if you don't believe.
And that's what I like about your "true Christians". They'll love you whether you believe in their God or not, and I respect that. To put it in terms they understand if a Christian tells me i'm going to hell for not believing, I tell them that if they preach hate they are doing the devils work.
That said, it doesn't happen that often. Once when I was a kid I had a girl burst into tears when I told her I didn't believe that God existed, and I've seen a few more get more than just a little upset when confronted with a non believer (maybe trying to guilt them into believing?). I've seen a lot more athiests get very angry when they found out that someone believed in god though....
Makes sense, at least in my point of view. I'm a atheist, and I have got into depressions regarding the meaning of life, the un/fairness behind it, a lot of trascendental questions, also a fear of death, which people that believes in a god, with fervor, may not feel, since they may believe there is a life after death, there is a meaning behind everything, that there is a god that loves you, etc.
I'm an athiest too - but I would find the concept of a God who lets bad things happen to good people just to serve his mysterious higher purpose even more depressing than the idea that nothing happens for a reason.
That's what people crave. They can't live with the possibility that life might have no meaning at all, that we're just here and should make the best of it.
That's my take on it too. I read somewhere that "12 step" programs like AA work best with a belief in a higher power... not necessarily god but some higher purpose to give their life meaning and provide the illusion of support.
but whatever floats your boat. As long as a religious person doesn't push their beliefs onto others then it's all good
That article says there is no scientific basis for women making noises during sex. Another article I read says that the female bonobo makes noises during sex which attracts the attention of nearby males so they can join in... just sayin'.
Wow. It's a big leap from 'I disagree with gun ownership' to 'I hope gun owners are killed or seriously injured.'
I don't actually disagree with a blanket ban on gun ownership. I do disagree with the mentality "i want a gun because i have a right to own a gun", and definitely disagree with the ease at which you can get a gun in some countries.
The part of me that likes the idea of a gun exploding in the face of the person holding it is the part of me afraid that one day some loony will be pointing a gun at me and there will be nothing I can do about the result of them pulling the trigger (apart from hoping it explodes in their face)
If the barrel and/or the slide is made of even the best plastic, I wouldn't trust it to take the 35ksi of a normal 9mm round even once. That application requires properly heat treated 4130 or 4140 steel (or 316 stainless).
I don't really see a problem. It just needs a label like "Warning: This item is not a weapon and is for novelty purposes only. Aim away from face".
Part of me likes the idea of a handgun that only lasts 3 shots and on any of those 3 shots may explode and remove the face of the person holding it.
no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left...
... alive.
Yea, not being able to afford an upgrade is not an excuse. That's like a truck driver saying he can't afford to buy new tires. At some point he's going to have to or he's not going to be driving his truck.
I wonder how dentists will raise the money to purchase new software...
Frankly though, something like practice management and medical records software should be on a subscription. If I wrote such software that's how i'd sell it. You pay me money each month/year/whatever or you can't use the software anymore. In return, i'll support it, keep security up to date, keep supporting current platforms, escrow the code in the event of something happening to my company, and make sure the data backend is open enough for you to easily migrate to another package if your needs are no longer being met by my software.
The alternative is that users get shitty with me because software they bought 10 years ago doesn't run on current OS's.
> A recent letter signed by 15 companies and trade groups — including TechAmerica, which represents Google, LOL. Google with the same Eric Schmidt who wants Drones banned because he's worried about the invasion of privacy when they fly over your mansion estate? ""You're having a dispute with your neighbour," he hypothesised. "How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their back yard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?" Gee I don't know Eric. About the same way I feel when you run your fingers through my hair. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/21/drones-google-eric-schmidt
That's different though. The drones issue is about _his_ privacy, not yours.
And I stand by my previous statement concerning drones. I'm happy for it to be legal for my neighbor or government to fly a drone over my property, if it's also legal for me to disable it and then take possession of it when it crashes onto my property, and for my neighbor/government to be responsible for anything it breaks when it crashes.
get your stomachs ready, because that's a lot of Jar Jar Binks
You're suggesting we eat him? Actually that would make an awesome movie... one of the various alien races in the Star Wars universe accidentally discovers that Gungans are extraordinarily tasty and hunts them to extinction. McDonalds could do a "McJarJar" as a promotional burger (at a guess they probably taste like Chicken). Fun for the whole family.
No-one said anything about locking people up. But they could keep tabs on him in many legal ways.
The problem I have with this is that every time something like this happens, the authorities change the definition of "legal ways". The bombing was a tragedy, but no worse (and in fact in terms of body count, only 1/30th as bad) as the number of people killed on the roads that day (statistically). The idea of terrorist activities is to make us afraid and to change our way of life, don't let this happen
It's easy to rationalise the "keeping tabs" retrospectively because he turned out to be guilty, but it is a mistake to do so.
Concern is not that he was let go. Consern is that for whatever reason he was not in a database afterwards. Apparently FBI not sure how that happened.
Suppose you had mouthed off about your government once upon a time (say, September 12, 2001) and someone reported you to the FBI. The FBI interviews you and discovers nothing other than the regular run-of-the-mill anti government sentiment. But they add you to the database. Then someone lets some bombs off and kills a few people at a marathon. You're in the database, and you just happened to be in the area because your friend/sister/cousin/whatever was runner. The government comes and finds you and starts asking a bunch of questions. They also question your family, and maybe some of your workmates. Nothing comes of it in the end, because you are innocent, but your workmates will always wonder...
Seems like you've given up some of your freedom to secure a little temporary safety.
CBS reported that few years back Russians warned FBI about older brother being radicalized. So FBI asked him, he said "nope", they said "ok" and let him go. And they totally forgot about it - he wasn't on the list of suspects... That's "cooperation" alright...
Maybe you would have been happier about 60 years ago in a time when they could lock you away because your neighbor said you might be a communist. The world was a much safer place back then with all those commies being locked away without a trial.
Isn't it pretty obvious when him and his brother just happen to have pressure cooker bombs to throw at the cops, right after they are identified as suspects in the bombings? They are either the guys, or the unluckiest home cooking aficionados ever.
Well the media has never misreported stuff before, ever, so yes lets skip the trial and go straight to the lynching.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but based on the actual information we have (as given by the news media to date), this "monster" may be involved to the degree of anywhere between "mastermind of terrorist bombing operation, detonated the bombs, shot various innocent people in the process" to "forced by actual terrorist brother to hang around him for the time period in question".
I'd like a little more detail (that is, any) as to specific charges and evidence before making such a characterization.
Couldn't agree more. Sharpen the points on your pitchforks, but don't actually start waving them around yet.
Iraq wanted us out, so it's their fucking problem now.
You say "Iraq" like it's one thing with a unified want... I think you might be mistaken about that.
I have friends who are already looking into this for cannabis production. Brace yourself for a lot of dead stoners...
But you just know there will be a mutation that turns people who smoke it into zombies and you'll have a lot of stoned deadies!
If you don't have the picture expanded, he looks a lot like Bieber. Please let it be Bieber...
If it is, the pre-teen copycat campaign will wipe out most of the population of the US...
causing plants to germinate more quickly and grow larger
So all we need to do is figure out a few genes to make h2s, splice them into a few rainforest trees, and let natural selection do the rest. Rainforest depletion problem solved.
As usual I wikipedia something like "dark lightning" that i've never heard of before. Nothing found, but wikipedia search is pretty crap.
Anyway the best I could find was Relativistic-runaway-electron avalanche