I am glad for the work done by unions in the past (and to a smaller extent the present) but holy crap. I am so glad I live in a right to work state and work for an employer that treats their employees correctly. I have a pretty crappy job, but I'm still given leeway to make my own decisions about how to actually do my job. I can't imagine how I would feel if I had to work at a place with a rulebook other than "be professional and do you job." Bathroom time written in the contract? Give me a break.
If my manager thought what someone was wearing was improper, they would tell them to stop. If they didn't, they would be fired. As simple as that. It's a shame that organizations have to grow beyond the level that trusting basic human decency and personal relationships stops working.
It's not his fault Yahoo overpaid. I think it's a pretty good sign of his business sense that he is one of the few.com billionaires that has kept and expanded his wealth. Since he sold broadcast.com he's been a successful investor, most famously creating the HDNet TV channel and turning around the Dallas Mavericks.
What have you done to make anybody trust *your* opinions? You won't even publicly post your opinions under your own name. At the very least, treat him like another blogger and criticize his opinions, rather than the business that he sold ten years ago.
Is it just me or is slashdot asshattery getting worse than normal? I can't believe how many completely substanceless posts such as this are modded up in this discussion. How is this possibly considered informative? Show a little restraint people.
You and a lot of slashdot, maybe. But rule #1 about marketing is that most people don't behave rationally, particularly with something like a car. Just look at SUV's. Most people that buy (bought?) them are actually experiencing a downgrade in functionality and an increase in price, but they do it anyway. People often buy cars that perform poorly or are functionally crippled for what they need just because of some strange perception of what the car *represents*.
I know the 99.5% was just pulled out of your ass, but I would like to emphasize how terribly wrong that number is. 20% of the US live in rural areas. For them, a trip to "the city" happens maybe once a month more or less. Assuming the 200 mile range, that would be be maybe 80 miles there and back plus more for running around town. Also take into consideration that most small towns don't even have a car rental place, so the feasibility of owning this in a rural town is pretty small.
Then you think of people that regularly travel that kind of distance for business, trips to see family, friends, etc. and you are probably talking about 30-40% of the population that simply won't accept a 200 mile limit under any circumstances. If you add in the people who *rationally* would be in the market for electric, but who won't buy it simply because of the inconvenience of renting a car when they have to go further than 200 miles (which I believe would be a *much* larger percentage of the population than you expect), I'd say that the majority of the population would not buy an electric car with that small of a range.
I know that Tesla hasn't really targeted the common consumer yet, but this is a very real problem that becomes even more important as they move down the chain into economy cars.
The car was unprofitable ten years ago, sure. But to run a successful business you have to, you know, *invest* in some things that are unprofitable for awhile. One of the reasons the Japanese and European companies are killing American car companies is because they actually use their R&D money to make a better product.
GM was doing pretty well in the late 90s and early 00s and definitely could have afforded to put money in developing electric cars. They just didn't see the point. But if they had, they certainly would've had a car that would be profitable and in high demand for the current market. They just didn't have the foresight. They were too busy rolling in beds of money made by selling cheap-to-produce SUV's with fat profit margins, ignoring everything else.
But being selfish sometimes makes you more likely to pass on your genes as well. So while we are social creatures, that doesn't mean people aren't looking for an opportunity for personal gratification at the expense of others. We all intuitively know this. I mean you've seen people, right? It's not like assholes don't have kids.
Most remixes are done with the finished recordings (that's how the culture started), but it's much easier if you have the masters or at least the instrumental/a capella tracks. Most hip hop singles and a lot of other stuff is released on 12" vinyl with instrumental and a capella versions of the songs. There are also certain dark corners of the internet where you can find these things. I imagine most "professional" recordings use the actual master tracks, but I guess it would depend on who controlled the recordings.
As for copyright issues, most remixes, mashups, dubs, samplings, etc. are not officially legal. Most stuff slips below the radar or is just let alone because even record company lawyers don't have enough time to go after every little infraction. You can probably pull a break from an old soul song and be fine, but if you use the Beatles a la Danger Mouse's Grey Album you'll be asking for some trouble.
Pretty much all commercial remixes have the rights cleared, but people are constantly being sued or having their records pulled because they didn't get samples cleared.
Because people are inherently honest. Dishonesty is an abnormality.
That's true to a certain extent, but I would add a large caveat. People are honest when they know obeying the social norms will be rewarded, and there is a real chance of being caught or punished for their dishonesty. Most people don't steal, but if a situation like the article describes occurred in meatspace, people would be stealing like crazy.
The trust can't co-exist without strict societal rules that reward cooperation and discourage selfishness. That's why in game theory problems like the prisoner's dilemma, people will try to help themselves at the detriment to their partner, even though the optimal solution is to cooperate.
Rape fantasy is actually pretty common. Percentage-wise it's probably a very small portion of porn, but I wouldn't say it's any more extreme than BSDM, snuff films, hentai, or other niche movies that most people find weird and/or disturbing.
Nobody from your "side" has addressed the point. You keep calling them rapists, but if they were rapists why weren't they charged with rape?
If the girl was raped, don't you think the government would go after that (extremely serious) crime before charging them with the relatively minor crime of distributing obscenity?
Yeah, that's actually what the law states w.r.t. obscenity in the US. There is a pretty famous court case against a porn distributor where a lawyer subpoenaed pay-per-view records from hotels in the area, which proved that watching porn was very common in the community.
Yes, laws against porn exist. Basically, its only 'obscene' porn that the laws target.
No, there are a lot of old-fashioned porn laws still in effect around the country. Here in Utah, for example, there are so many regulations about where and how you can sell porn, that it's close to impossible to buy explicit porn from a physical store. There are also laws on the books that make it illegal to receive porn through the mail and I'm pretty sure it's illegal to view porn online, but since those are such small crimes and impossible to enforce they're never prosecuted.
I'm pretty sure there are other places across the country where the situation is similar.
The US is the only thing resembling an exception to this rule and our population would also be in decline without illegal immigration.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The US actually has slight natural growth, which AFAIK is unique among wealthy nations. With legal immigration we have large population growth, and with illegal immigration even larger.
If all of us can take off our shoes etc. every time we fly to see grandma or get on a ferry, ranchers and meat packers can sure has hell do what it takes to make sure no one else dies of Mad Cow disease and the like in the US.
"No one else" implies that someone has died. We've barely even had mad cow disease, let alone had anyone die from it.
In other words, apart from the reader there would be no net change of cost.
You're forgetting added training (usually farmers/ranchers aren't too great with computers), added bookkeeping, added regulatory costs (somebody has to compile and send that data to the government). It would take longer to load and unload cattle, so efficiency would go down and labor costs would go up. At the very least you would have to hire an additional person to do the tagging/scanning. Loading and moving cattle now is pretty straight forward, you may need to redesign how the cattle load and unload from trucks to account for the extra complications of monitoring the RFID's.
Most ranchers work extremely long hours and are getting by on the slimmest of margins as is. Simply put, you don't know what you are talking about.
According to the wikipedia article, the Anna Creek Station only has 3000 head as of last year and is trying to get rid of all their cattle, so that's a pretty poor example.
The situation for small-scale cattle ranchers in the US is quite different than in Australia. Due to the fact that most of Australia is extreme desert and completely or nearly uninhabited, the amount of land under grazing is significantly less than in the United States. The *entire Western United States* is a patchwork of very small rural communities based on cattle ranching.
I don't know the figures, but I imagine that they produce a much larger amount of beef than small-scale ranchers in Australia however you choose to measure it. The simple fact is that there is not very much land in Australia that a) has enough water to allow grazing and b) is not productive enough to be taken over by large-scale agribusiness.
Now I don't know the feasibility of implementing this proposal, as I don't know specifically how much it would cost each rancher. But just because it works somewhere else doesn't mean it would work in the US. Conditions are very different even from state to state in the US, let alone halfway across the world.
No, you don't have cattle stations larger than Texas. Texas is about 700,000 square kilometers, which is a little smaller than the size of New South Wales.
Please shut up if you don't know what you are talking about.
As principal of a public school, he is a public figure. As such his actions outside the hours of employment can very justifiably be considered in appraising his job. What he did was probably illegal, and at the very least showed a poor grasp of ethics. I believe that is an important thing to consider, and the school board would be justified in firing him over the matter.
You didn't even have to wait that long for the Democrats to show their true colors. Other than a few notable Congressmen who stood against, most of the others didn't even read the goddamn thing before voting on it. Once they realized their constituents were up in arms about it, they made public statements about how bad it was, and then quickly proceeded to renew even the contentious articles when they were up for reauthorization in 2005. Now that they have complete control of the federal government, don't expect the PATRIOT Act to *ever* expire.
It's people like you who make legitimate critics of the American government look like loonies. You are honestly going to say that the PATRIOT Act did more to damage to US freedoms than the Reichstag decree did to Germany? Seriously? The PATRIOT Act is bad, but when has it been used as justification to violently crackdown on peaceable assembly across the nation? When has it been used to arrest tens of thousands of American citizens and hold them indefinitely, or murder tens of thousands?
And comparing Guantanamo to Dachau? All of the people that are imprisoned there were captured as enemy combatants. Some of them were captured unjustly, and even if they weren't there is no justification for holding them indefinitely with no trial, but NOBODY HAS EVEN BEEN KILLED THERE YOU ASSHOLE!
You want to talk about timelines? Three weeks after the Reichstag decree, The Enabling Act was passed, effectively turning Germany into a dictatorship. Where's the analagous act in the US? Your analogy falls apart at the first sight of rational thought.
There are legitimate criticisms to be made about the PATRIOT Act and the decline of US freedoms in general over the last ~10 years, yet you seem to be unable to make such criticisms without comparing it the most oppressive and vile government in Western history.
The US is not Nazi Germany. Show a little imagination.
You find the same thing in men. I've found most women don't give a rat's ass about the size of a man's biceps or whether he has a 22-pack, but for some reason that's what most men strive for when they workout.
Nearly everybody thinks that fit is sexy, but people also seem incapable of judging what is "too far." They try to go for the woman in the fashion show or the guy at the bodybuilding competition, even though members of the opposite sex don't find those people very attractive.
And how does one know that said doctor or dietitian is not suffering a similar confusion?
Any good doctor or dietitian will give you resources to follow up so you can find the information yourself. But even if you just trust them, they are likely to give a more nuanced explanation than "new study says salt raises risk of heart disease."
In this specific example, do you think the doctor would have disagreed with the patient's desire for less salt?
Maybe not, but he could have given him *specific* reasons and examples of what salt can do to your body, rather than the blanket statement of "salt is bad for you."
Slashdot Mirror
I am glad for the work done by unions in the past (and to a smaller extent the present) but holy crap. I am so glad I live in a right to work state and work for an employer that treats their employees correctly. I have a pretty crappy job, but I'm still given leeway to make my own decisions about how to actually do my job. I can't imagine how I would feel if I had to work at a place with a rulebook other than "be professional and do you job." Bathroom time written in the contract? Give me a break.
If my manager thought what someone was wearing was improper, they would tell them to stop. If they didn't, they would be fired. As simple as that. It's a shame that organizations have to grow beyond the level that trusting basic human decency and personal relationships stops working.
It's not his fault Yahoo overpaid. I think it's a pretty good sign of his business sense that he is one of the few .com billionaires that has kept and expanded his wealth. Since he sold broadcast.com he's been a successful investor, most famously creating the HDNet TV channel and turning around the Dallas Mavericks.
What have you done to make anybody trust *your* opinions? You won't even publicly post your opinions under your own name. At the very least, treat him like another blogger and criticize his opinions, rather than the business that he sold ten years ago.
Is it just me or is slashdot asshattery getting worse than normal? I can't believe how many completely substanceless posts such as this are modded up in this discussion. How is this possibly considered informative? Show a little restraint people.
Isle of Man isn't part of the UK or Great Britain. And since the island's only about 35 km long it would make for a very boring drive at > 200 kph.
For you, maybe. But thankfully for the rest of us who enjoy Neuromancer you don't get to decide what science fiction is supposed to be :)
You and a lot of slashdot, maybe. But rule #1 about marketing is that most people don't behave rationally, particularly with something like a car. Just look at SUV's. Most people that buy (bought?) them are actually experiencing a downgrade in functionality and an increase in price, but they do it anyway. People often buy cars that perform poorly or are functionally crippled for what they need just because of some strange perception of what the car *represents*.
I know the 99.5% was just pulled out of your ass, but I would like to emphasize how terribly wrong that number is. 20% of the US live in rural areas. For them, a trip to "the city" happens maybe once a month more or less. Assuming the 200 mile range, that would be be maybe 80 miles there and back plus more for running around town. Also take into consideration that most small towns don't even have a car rental place, so the feasibility of owning this in a rural town is pretty small.
Then you think of people that regularly travel that kind of distance for business, trips to see family, friends, etc. and you are probably talking about 30-40% of the population that simply won't accept a 200 mile limit under any circumstances. If you add in the people who *rationally* would be in the market for electric, but who won't buy it simply because of the inconvenience of renting a car when they have to go further than 200 miles (which I believe would be a *much* larger percentage of the population than you expect), I'd say that the majority of the population would not buy an electric car with that small of a range.
I know that Tesla hasn't really targeted the common consumer yet, but this is a very real problem that becomes even more important as they move down the chain into economy cars.
The car was unprofitable ten years ago, sure. But to run a successful business you have to, you know, *invest* in some things that are unprofitable for awhile. One of the reasons the Japanese and European companies are killing American car companies is because they actually use their R&D money to make a better product.
GM was doing pretty well in the late 90s and early 00s and definitely could have afforded to put money in developing electric cars. They just didn't see the point. But if they had, they certainly would've had a car that would be profitable and in high demand for the current market. They just didn't have the foresight. They were too busy rolling in beds of money made by selling cheap-to-produce SUV's with fat profit margins, ignoring everything else.
But being selfish sometimes makes you more likely to pass on your genes as well. So while we are social creatures, that doesn't mean people aren't looking for an opportunity for personal gratification at the expense of others. We all intuitively know this. I mean you've seen people, right? It's not like assholes don't have kids.
Most remixes are done with the finished recordings (that's how the culture started), but it's much easier if you have the masters or at least the instrumental/a capella tracks. Most hip hop singles and a lot of other stuff is released on 12" vinyl with instrumental and a capella versions of the songs. There are also certain dark corners of the internet where you can find these things. I imagine most "professional" recordings use the actual master tracks, but I guess it would depend on who controlled the recordings.
As for copyright issues, most remixes, mashups, dubs, samplings, etc. are not officially legal. Most stuff slips below the radar or is just let alone because even record company lawyers don't have enough time to go after every little infraction. You can probably pull a break from an old soul song and be fine, but if you use the Beatles a la Danger Mouse's Grey Album you'll be asking for some trouble.
Pretty much all commercial remixes have the rights cleared, but people are constantly being sued or having their records pulled because they didn't get samples cleared.
That's true to a certain extent, but I would add a large caveat. People are honest when they know obeying the social norms will be rewarded, and there is a real chance of being caught or punished for their dishonesty. Most people don't steal, but if a situation like the article describes occurred in meatspace, people would be stealing like crazy.
The trust can't co-exist without strict societal rules that reward cooperation and discourage selfishness. That's why in game theory problems like the prisoner's dilemma, people will try to help themselves at the detriment to their partner, even though the optimal solution is to cooperate.
Rape fantasy is actually pretty common. Percentage-wise it's probably a very small portion of porn, but I wouldn't say it's any more extreme than BSDM, snuff films, hentai, or other niche movies that most people find weird and/or disturbing.
Nobody from your "side" has addressed the point. You keep calling them rapists, but if they were rapists why weren't they charged with rape?
If the girl was raped, don't you think the government would go after that (extremely serious) crime before charging them with the relatively minor crime of distributing obscenity?
Yeah, that's actually what the law states w.r.t. obscenity in the US. There is a pretty famous court case against a porn distributor where a lawyer subpoenaed pay-per-view records from hotels in the area, which proved that watching porn was very common in the community.
No, there are a lot of old-fashioned porn laws still in effect around the country. Here in Utah, for example, there are so many regulations about where and how you can sell porn, that it's close to impossible to buy explicit porn from a physical store. There are also laws on the books that make it illegal to receive porn through the mail and I'm pretty sure it's illegal to view porn online, but since those are such small crimes and impossible to enforce they're never prosecuted.
I'm pretty sure there are other places across the country where the situation is similar.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The US actually has slight natural growth, which AFAIK is unique among wealthy nations. With legal immigration we have large population growth, and with illegal immigration even larger.
Assuming that the product is the same, how exactly is that unscrupulous?
"No one else" implies that someone has died. We've barely even had mad cow disease, let alone had anyone die from it.
You're forgetting added training (usually farmers/ranchers aren't too great with computers), added bookkeeping, added regulatory costs (somebody has to compile and send that data to the government). It would take longer to load and unload cattle, so efficiency would go down and labor costs would go up. At the very least you would have to hire an additional person to do the tagging/scanning. Loading and moving cattle now is pretty straight forward, you may need to redesign how the cattle load and unload from trucks to account for the extra complications of monitoring the RFID's.
Most ranchers work extremely long hours and are getting by on the slimmest of margins as is. Simply put, you don't know what you are talking about.
According to the wikipedia article, the Anna Creek Station only has 3000 head as of last year and is trying to get rid of all their cattle, so that's a pretty poor example.
The situation for small-scale cattle ranchers in the US is quite different than in Australia. Due to the fact that most of Australia is extreme desert and completely or nearly uninhabited, the amount of land under grazing is significantly less than in the United States. The *entire Western United States* is a patchwork of very small rural communities based on cattle ranching.
I don't know the figures, but I imagine that they produce a much larger amount of beef than small-scale ranchers in Australia however you choose to measure it. The simple fact is that there is not very much land in Australia that a) has enough water to allow grazing and b) is not productive enough to be taken over by large-scale agribusiness.
Now I don't know the feasibility of implementing this proposal, as I don't know specifically how much it would cost each rancher. But just because it works somewhere else doesn't mean it would work in the US. Conditions are very different even from state to state in the US, let alone halfway across the world.
No, you don't have cattle stations larger than Texas. Texas is about 700,000 square kilometers, which is a little smaller than the size of New South Wales.
Please shut up if you don't know what you are talking about.
As principal of a public school, he is a public figure. As such his actions outside the hours of employment can very justifiably be considered in appraising his job. What he did was probably illegal, and at the very least showed a poor grasp of ethics. I believe that is an important thing to consider, and the school board would be justified in firing him over the matter.
You didn't even have to wait that long for the Democrats to show their true colors. Other than a few notable Congressmen who stood against, most of the others didn't even read the goddamn thing before voting on it. Once they realized their constituents were up in arms about it, they made public statements about how bad it was, and then quickly proceeded to renew even the contentious articles when they were up for reauthorization in 2005. Now that they have complete control of the federal government, don't expect the PATRIOT Act to *ever* expire.
It's people like you who make legitimate critics of the American government look like loonies. You are honestly going to say that the PATRIOT Act did more to damage to US freedoms than the Reichstag decree did to Germany? Seriously? The PATRIOT Act is bad, but when has it been used as justification to violently crackdown on peaceable assembly across the nation? When has it been used to arrest tens of thousands of American citizens and hold them indefinitely, or murder tens of thousands?
And comparing Guantanamo to Dachau? All of the people that are imprisoned there were captured as enemy combatants. Some of them were captured unjustly, and even if they weren't there is no justification for holding them indefinitely with no trial, but NOBODY HAS EVEN BEEN KILLED THERE YOU ASSHOLE!
You want to talk about timelines? Three weeks after the Reichstag decree, The Enabling Act was passed, effectively turning Germany into a dictatorship. Where's the analagous act in the US? Your analogy falls apart at the first sight of rational thought.
There are legitimate criticisms to be made about the PATRIOT Act and the decline of US freedoms in general over the last ~10 years, yet you seem to be unable to make such criticisms without comparing it the most oppressive and vile government in Western history.
The US is not Nazi Germany. Show a little imagination.
You find the same thing in men. I've found most women don't give a rat's ass about the size of a man's biceps or whether he has a 22-pack, but for some reason that's what most men strive for when they workout.
Nearly everybody thinks that fit is sexy, but people also seem incapable of judging what is "too far." They try to go for the woman in the fashion show or the guy at the bodybuilding competition, even though members of the opposite sex don't find those people very attractive.
Any good doctor or dietitian will give you resources to follow up so you can find the information yourself. But even if you just trust them, they are likely to give a more nuanced explanation than "new study says salt raises risk of heart disease."
Maybe not, but he could have given him *specific* reasons and examples of what salt can do to your body, rather than the blanket statement of "salt is bad for you."