No obligation, but if you could forward me a copy of the letter and his reply (if he replied) then I can at least put it online for other people to see - and either make his reply embarrassing or get him to reply if he hasn't.
No obligation, but if you could forward me a copy of the letter and his reply (if he replied) then I can at least put it online for other people to see - and if his reply is as bad as you make out, get a few hundred letters to him and make this embarrassing.
As soon as this happens, I'll stop paying for the Internet, it's free in a lot of places already so there isn't any real need on my part to have it in the house.
Don't let it get that far. The bill is not law. It is going to enter committee stage in about a week - this is our best chance to get it changed to be fair for consumers before it gets to the House of Commons and gets even more politicised than it is now. Write to your MP, write to a Lord and explain to them why this is a terrible and unfair bill. Information on the disconnection clauses in the bill and some Lords to write to are available at http://www.digitalwrong.org/?page_id=28 - I've taken over the site and I'll have information on the rest of the bill plus other Lords and letters/replies as soon as possible.
Please, don't give up on this - it's important. Join the campaign, sign the petition, write to your Lord and help stop this before it becomes a law. And above all - tell your friends and family what it means. I'll have a non-technical breakdown up tomorrow for you to show people why this is such a bad bill.
(Oh, and if you drop me a line, either at my email address shown here or on the site, I would be happy to put your letter on the site. Putting the letters in one place makes the opposition to the bill more obvious)
Forgive the spirited response to what may not have been a serious comment, but this is a serious issue and I want to make sure everyone knows that there is something we can do about it as long as we work together.
The internet tends to encourage knee-jerk, poorly thought-out responses, and that makes it much easier for politicians to dismiss the objections to their copyright bills as the delusions of immature online pirates. The discussion of the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Lords over here has been dominated by reference to the "online reaction" - specifically the 23 pages of comments on the original BBC report, characterised by the idea that all media should be free to download and the media companies "aren't losing any money anyway". This has lead some well-intentioned members of the House to believe that the objection is not based on an objection to the law itself, but rather on selfishness and greed, which undermines the argument against the law.
If you're in the UK, can I encourage you to write to your MP and a Lord to explain this? If not - or even if you are - if you could throw me a link to http://digitalwrong.org/ I'm taking over the running of the site from now(ish) onwards and hope to explain what the bill really is and that there is a reasonable objection to it.
Sadly. And the fact that the content industry generates taxes that are badly needed by our nearly-broke governments won't help improve the situation. In an economy that is so reliant on commercializing (and taxing!) imaginary "goods", I have no hope to see those copyright excesses be repelled anytime soon.
I think we might be coming at this from different points of view. I don't see anything wrong with an economy that is reliant on commercializing "imaginary 'goods'" - in fact I don't really see how we could have anything else. Aside from the content industries, the insurance industry, the stock market, futures trading and any number of other sectors work by commercialising something other than physical goods. And while it may not strictly speaking be stealing, making use of these services without paying does harm the industry and does, undoubtedly, have serious consequences for its future. When talking about the content industry this means illegal file sharing, which is and should be punished.
Where I object is when we lose perspective and abandon the very principles of our justice system in order to pander to the content industry - that is what is happening now in the UK, in France, in America and probably in many other countries, and it is against this that we should be protesting. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but people calling for the abandoning of copyright and legitimization of file sharing cause a problem for those people opposing the laws currently being passed, since they make it easy to characterise the opponents of the law as selfish, short-sighted "pirates".
Since Lord Mandy went on holiday and "bumped into" into Mr Geffen - the recommendations of the digital communications report and the concerns of ISPs were completely ignored. It appears the "3-stikes" legislation is to go ahead after all.
I think you're absolutely right to be worried. I'm going to talk about the UK situation since that's what I know about, but the situation EU-wide is largely as you describe: governments are caving to copyright owners.
Before saying anything else, it's worth making clear that the "3 strikes" legislation contains nothing to do with three strikes. It is totally silent on the specifics of the chances that have to be given to internet users before they can be cut off and leaves the question entirely to a "code" that has not yet been written and so cannot be reviewed before the bill becomes law. You can read more about this at the link I gave above. The "new" bill pays lip-service to the Government's "commitment to human rights", and seems to be relying on this "code" to avoid the criticism of the EU. However, as the link above makes clear, it gives the Secretary of State a get-out clause to get past the code if he wants to, with little to no oversight or controls.
There's a lot of confusion, even on Slashdot, about the content of the bill. To break down the sections on Copyright infringement (taken from http://www.digitalwrong.org/?page_id=6), the new process in case of alleged infringement is:
The rightsholder for example a record company determines that the user is infringing. The bill does not set out how this is to be done; the company is in effect free to determine guilt any way they see fit. As has been shown by the cases that have gone to court, this determination is often made on the back of weak or non-existant evidence.
The rightsholder sends a letter to your ISP
Your ISP sends you a warning letter. This will contain information of the time of the infringement and the IP address of the computer that committed it. It will also contain information on securing your network.
If the rights holder judges that infringement has continued after a period of time (not defined in the bill) they may require your ISP to throttle your connection, prevent you from accessing certain resources, or disconnect you completely.
If you believe this was done in error, you can appeal. This appeal would not go to a court, but to a First-Tier tribunal. This would be your first chance to deny the accusations, and could come after the punitive measures had been taken.
This goes absolutely against the presumption of innocence that is such an important part of a modern democracy.
If this all sounds a bit worrying, there is some good news. The bill is entering its committee stage on the 6th of January, and this is the best chance to change it before it reaches the House of Commons, at which point its progress will be faster and more subject to the party whip. So please, write to a Lord and explain to them why the measure is bad, either morally or because - as has even been admitted by the impact assessment - network security means the wrong people will be punished, and what they can do to change it - i.e. go to the open committee session starting on the 6th and change the bill.
Things are advancing very quickly, and I appreciate that not everyone has time to read the 300+ pages of the bill, the debates, the notes and the impact assessment, so if anyone has any questions on their contents please ask and I will answer them. Otherwise, please write in before it's too late, and spread the word - either online or offline - about the travesty that is the Digital Economy Bill.
Unfortunately it appears that you're right on this one.
I couldn't find much information on what this bill actually means, so for anyone else in this situation, I've found a breakdown of what the bill means and what it doesn't here. They did have a load of posts on its passage through parliament etc but they seem to have disappeared - hopefully they'll get everything back up and running soon.
You cant publicly scorn someone for doing Unlawful Deed A and not for B, C and D.
Why not? The arrest is a public record. I, for one, look forward to the day that police put their arrest archives online, in an easily searchable format, with mugshots. Information wants to be free.
Information doesn't want to be anything. You want this information to be freely available online - why?
If police were perfect we wouldn't need judges or juries. Being arrested means that someone has made a mistake - but not necessarily the person who has been arrested. Making it easy to check if someone has been arrested would encourage people to use it as a criterion when interviewing someone, which would appear to go against the presumption of innocence. You need a pretty strong reason to rebut that - and "information wants to be free" isn't a reason, it's a soundbite.
Firstly, the image files can't be static if you're using the salt, since the gravatar backend would have to remove it and look up the gravatar_id; this would increase running costs for gravatar by a considerable amount. Second, if you're using a gravatar_id why bother with the encryption? As long as there's no way for the gravatar ID to be resolved back to an email address it doesn't matter if people know it, especially since knowing the encrypted version would necessarily be functionally identical.
A nicer solution - still with the problem of no longer being static image files - would be -User inputs email address -Site connects to the gravatar server, using the unique encryption key it was given by gravatar to authenticate itself and send the email address (much like how reCaptcha works) -gravatar service sends back a link to a static image associated with that user. This link can be stored for future use.
This puts less strain on the gravatar servers, since the repeated image-serving is static, and also avoids there being any way to link images back to email addresses.
Still doesn't answer the question, though, of whether there's any point trying to brute-force gravatar when the addresses in your dictionary are already part of your indiscriminate mailings.
Vice taxes don't deter vices. They just cause more problems down the line. So now a particular subset of the population not only is addicted, but also is poor and perhaps driven to crime. Taxes are simply a means of revenue in this case, since the demand is inelastic due to addiction.
Do you have any source for this or is this one of the unsourced, uninformed pronouncements that Slashdot is so brilliant at inciting?
Vice taxes don't deter vices.
That seems pretty unlikely; in essence you're arguing that vices are for some reason excluded from the normal laws of supply and demand. You're claiming that increasing the price of something does not discourage its use, simply because the thing is bad? And not only that, but the CDC disagrees with you:
Research shows that tax increases on tobacco products are an effective policy intervention designed to prevent initiation of adolescents and young adults, reduce cigarette consumption, and increase the number of smokers who quit. A 10% increase in the price of cigarettes is estimated to reduce consumption by 4%.
As does the data from the Bureau of Labour, which shows that levels of demand for beer, wine and spirits are all sensitive to price variation. [See Chaloupka, Grossman and Saffer, The effects of price on alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems, published 2002].
They just cause more problems down the line. So now a particular subset of the population not only is addicted, but also is poor and perhaps driven to crime.
I think you're conflating taxed vices and more serious addictions. There are very few vices out there so expensive that they would force you to crime if you're gainfully employed. The country is not under threat from hordes of middle-managers robbing banks for cigarette money. The addicts that turn to crime to fund their habit do so not because they are the victim of crippling government taxation - to believe this would be to wilfully ignore reality. They do so because their addiction prevents them from holding down a job, and so crime is the only way they can get the money to feed their addiction.
Taxes are simply a means of revenue in this case, since the demand is inelastic due to addiction.
Another blanket pronouncement with no evidence or explanation.
We've already seen two accounts of the fact that vice taxes do reduce demand and that demand is, in fact, elastic. It's also worth pointing out that vice taxes don't only target the addicted. They can act to deter addiction. They can also act to fund the later health-care implications of your choice, as is the case with tax on cigarettes in Britain. There is scope for some philosophical debate here, which I would be happy to enter into if you want, but the point is clear: the taxes are not necessarily simply a source of revenue.
Err... you DO know what first takes control of the computer when you turn it on right?
That would be a firmware interface. BIOS is one example of a firmware interface - and is the defacto standard on a PC - but it isn't the only one. You can indeed run all recent versions of Windows without a BIOS.
What most creative types don't seem to get is there's no reason for them to exist. There's so muc recorded music already if there were no more new artists we'd still have mroe music available than any of us can listen to in a lifetime.
Yes - but this is only relevant insofar as quantity is the important factor in the enjoyment of art. We could have stopped writing books in the 1970s, for example, but we'd have missed out on styles of literature that never existed before; the same is true of music, painting, films - you name it. There's already more of everything than one person could ever get through - but letting that stop us would be incredibly stupid.
You could be right - once you get outside contact sports, strength is less of a determiner. You'd still need to be careful though, since a quick Google suggests that mens' ski records are a fair distance ahead of womens' - having never skiied, I have no idea why, but a change that just "locks women out" of competition wouldn't be a great one!
For the original sport mentioned, though - boxing - getting rid of the men/women division would be ludicrous. Firstly because women would have no chance - brute strength can make up for a considerable difference in skill, so if skill is equal at the very top, the women will be demolished. Secondly because women fight with slightly different rules in a lot of combat sports, for example wearing breast protectors. Unless you want to outfit men in chest-armour as well this poses a problem!
It doesn't work to distinguish between men and women, just to keep the playing field relatively level within those groups. I can tell you from experience that fighting a lightweight woman is far, far easier than fighting a lightweight man, just because of the near-automatic strength advantage from fighting a woman.
You do have to remember, though, that Saudi Arabia has the world's largest oil reserves, and by far the world's largest production capacity, and the US provides the troops and equipment to defend them. Unless the Saudis want to risk going up against other Middle Eastern countries without that help, they aren't going to stop selling to the USA.
Also, Russia, which is thought to have the second largest reserves (the actual size is a state secret, so it's all guesses) has a history of ignoring embargos and quotas set by the OPEC countries, so some supply would still likely be available.
That's all you need to say. They work for us. Period.
Not 24/7 they don't. If your justification for surveillance is that we're writing their paychecks then the surveillance shouldn't extend any further than the paycheck does.
That's a very naive example, since it ignores the part of web programming that is genuinely problematic cross-browser. The majority of javascript programming, for example, is extremely simplistic, and for that sort of thing a good developer should get it working in every major browser. But when you move onto more complex cases, things aren't so easy. For example, the major three browsers all allocate memory differently when dealing with tables with very large numbers of dynamically-altered rows; I discovered this building a search application that loaded result sets as the user scrolls down. Firefox handles it nicely, for the most part. IE 7 has trouble freeing memory when destroying rows, and you have to code around it or the memory usage explodes and render speed plummets. IE6 is even worse; my theory is that it draws every single blank row in the table on page load, even though none of them are onscreen, meaning that if you have a lot of blank rows the browser can become unusably slow. Opera can be the worst of all; when changing table rows its stack can be exhausted, causing the browser to lock up.
My point is that when the project gets more complicated, the differences in how the browsers handle things start to stack up. Something that makes no difference for a small site becomes a sticking point when you have thousands of items on the page. At this point, if Opera only represents a tiny proportion of your target demographic it might not be worth the hours to get it working.
This is actually totally normal. When you don't eat enough to meet your calorie needs, your body reacts to stop you starving; your leptin levels will drop dramatically, causing your metabolism to plummet and, crucially, shifting from burning fat to burning muscle, holding onto the fat for the times ahead, when it might be necessary to keep you alive. To get your body back to burning fat, you need to sometimes give yourself extra calories - preferably from carbohydrate - which will boost the leptin levels and give you a few days of optimum fat burning.
Obviously there's more to it than this - you still need to eat healthily - but it's much more effective than just restricting your intake every day. To prove that the pure calorie-counting approach isn't great, you only really need to take a look at Weight Watchers; even with all their expertise, support and 'easy-to-follow' calorie-restricted plans, the average member loses less than 5lb a year.
If you want to lose weight in a hurry, I'd suggest checking out the diet tips bodybuilders follow. You probably don't want to do anything as drastic as them, but as you might expect, the guys that make their money by being thin know what they're doing.
Rather brilliantly, by having this card you didn't reduce the security checks at the airport - you just got to skip to the front of the queue. This does mean that security wasn't compromised in the slightest - but it also raises the question of why the company kept doing expensive background checks that served no purpose since the card didn't get you through security!
i mean i have a great opinion for you on the proper engine to use in race cars. but i don't actually race cars.
Amusingly, that attitude is exactly the one you'll find in the professional racing world. The guy that makes design decisions for Ferrari isn't an F1 driver - he doesn't have anything like the skill to drive like that. He's still an expert in engines, the fact that he doesn't use the end product doesn't stop him knowing about it.
Not quite - you're subtracting the money he spends on electricity in the "no solar panels" case, but not the money he spends on solar panels in the "solar-panels" case. More accurate is to say:
If he buys the solar panels - $38,000 for the panels + $3,000 per year for the electricity saved, reinvested at 5% giving $47,751.38 total: $9,751.38
If he doesn't buy them: + $38,000 invested at 5% gives $68,242 - $3,000 per year in electricity giving - $36,000 total: $32,242
You can't count the 36k for the electricity but not the 38k for the panels.
Of course, there are plenty of other factors that could make this a good investment; changes to the resale value of the house, inflation or increases in electricity price for example, although it's worth remembering that things could potentially swing against him as well.
Slashdot Mirror
No obligation, but if you could forward me a copy of the letter and his reply (if he replied) then I can at least put it online for other people to see - and either make his reply embarrassing or get him to reply if he hasn't.
No obligation, but if you could forward me a copy of the letter and his reply (if he replied) then I can at least put it online for other people to see - and if his reply is as bad as you make out, get a few hundred letters to him and make this embarrassing.
As soon as this happens, I'll stop paying for the Internet, it's free in a lot of places already so there isn't any real need on my part to have it in the house.
Don't let it get that far. The bill is not law. It is going to enter committee stage in about a week - this is our best chance to get it changed to be fair for consumers before it gets to the House of Commons and gets even more politicised than it is now. Write to your MP, write to a Lord and explain to them why this is a terrible and unfair bill. Information on the disconnection clauses in the bill and some Lords to write to are available at http://www.digitalwrong.org/?page_id=28 - I've taken over the site and I'll have information on the rest of the bill plus other Lords and letters/replies as soon as possible.
Please, don't give up on this - it's important. Join the campaign, sign the petition, write to your Lord and help stop this before it becomes a law. And above all - tell your friends and family what it means. I'll have a non-technical breakdown up tomorrow for you to show people why this is such a bad bill.
(Oh, and if you drop me a line, either at my email address shown here or on the site, I would be happy to put your letter on the site. Putting the letters in one place makes the opposition to the bill more obvious)
Forgive the spirited response to what may not have been a serious comment, but this is a serious issue and I want to make sure everyone knows that there is something we can do about it as long as we work together.
Thank you!
The internet tends to encourage knee-jerk, poorly thought-out responses, and that makes it much easier for politicians to dismiss the objections to their copyright bills as the delusions of immature online pirates. The discussion of the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Lords over here has been dominated by reference to the "online reaction" - specifically the 23 pages of comments on the original BBC report, characterised by the idea that all media should be free to download and the media companies "aren't losing any money anyway". This has lead some well-intentioned members of the House to believe that the objection is not based on an objection to the law itself, but rather on selfishness and greed, which undermines the argument against the law.
If you're in the UK, can I encourage you to write to your MP and a Lord to explain this? If not - or even if you are - if you could throw me a link to http://digitalwrong.org/ I'm taking over the running of the site from now(ish) onwards and hope to explain what the bill really is and that there is a reasonable objection to it.
Sadly. And the fact that the content industry generates taxes that are badly needed by our nearly-broke governments won't help improve the situation. In an economy that is so reliant on commercializing (and taxing!) imaginary "goods", I have no hope to see those copyright excesses be repelled anytime soon.
I think we might be coming at this from different points of view. I don't see anything wrong with an economy that is reliant on commercializing "imaginary 'goods'" - in fact I don't really see how we could have anything else. Aside from the content industries, the insurance industry, the stock market, futures trading and any number of other sectors work by commercialising something other than physical goods. And while it may not strictly speaking be stealing, making use of these services without paying does harm the industry and does, undoubtedly, have serious consequences for its future. When talking about the content industry this means illegal file sharing, which is and should be punished.
Where I object is when we lose perspective and abandon the very principles of our justice system in order to pander to the content industry - that is what is happening now in the UK, in France, in America and probably in many other countries, and it is against this that we should be protesting. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but people calling for the abandoning of copyright and legitimization of file sharing cause a problem for those people opposing the laws currently being passed, since they make it easy to characterise the opponents of the law as selfish, short-sighted "pirates".
Since Lord Mandy went on holiday and "bumped into" into Mr Geffen - the recommendations of the digital communications report and the concerns of ISPs were completely ignored. It appears the "3-stikes" legislation is to go ahead after all.
I think you're absolutely right to be worried. I'm going to talk about the UK situation since that's what I know about, but the situation EU-wide is largely as you describe: governments are caving to copyright owners.
Before saying anything else, it's worth making clear that the "3 strikes" legislation contains nothing to do with three strikes. It is totally silent on the specifics of the chances that have to be given to internet users before they can be cut off and leaves the question entirely to a "code" that has not yet been written and so cannot be reviewed before the bill becomes law. You can read more about this at the link I gave above. The "new" bill pays lip-service to the Government's "commitment to human rights", and seems to be relying on this "code" to avoid the criticism of the EU. However, as the link above makes clear, it gives the Secretary of State a get-out clause to get past the code if he wants to, with little to no oversight or controls.
There's a lot of confusion, even on Slashdot, about the content of the bill. To break down the sections on Copyright infringement (taken from http://www.digitalwrong.org/?page_id=6), the new process in case of alleged infringement is:
This goes absolutely against the presumption of innocence that is such an important part of a modern democracy.
If this all sounds a bit worrying, there is some good news. The bill is entering its committee stage on the 6th of January, and this is the best chance to change it before it reaches the House of Commons, at which point its progress will be faster and more subject to the party whip. So please, write to a Lord and explain to them why the measure is bad, either morally or because - as has even been admitted by the impact assessment - network security means the wrong people will be punished, and what they can do to change it - i.e. go to the open committee session starting on the 6th and change the bill.
Things are advancing very quickly, and I appreciate that not everyone has time to read the 300+ pages of the bill, the debates, the notes and the impact assessment, so if anyone has any questions on their contents please ask and I will answer them. Otherwise, please write in before it's too late, and spread the word - either online or offline - about the travesty that is the Digital Economy Bill.
Unfortunately it appears that you're right on this one.
I couldn't find much information on what this bill actually means, so for anyone else in this situation, I've found a breakdown of what the bill means and what it doesn't here. They did have a load of posts on its passage through parliament etc but they seem to have disappeared - hopefully they'll get everything back up and running soon.
You cant publicly scorn someone for doing Unlawful Deed A and not for B, C and D.
Why not? The arrest is a public record.
I, for one, look forward to the day that police put their arrest archives online, in an easily searchable format, with mugshots.
Information wants to be free.
Information doesn't want to be anything. You want this information to be freely available online - why?
If police were perfect we wouldn't need judges or juries. Being arrested means that someone has made a mistake - but not necessarily the person who has been arrested. Making it easy to check if someone has been arrested would encourage people to use it as a criterion when interviewing someone, which would appear to go against the presumption of innocence. You need a pretty strong reason to rebut that - and "information wants to be free" isn't a reason, it's a soundbite.
Two points.
Firstly, the image files can't be static if you're using the salt, since the gravatar backend would have to remove it and look up the gravatar_id; this would increase running costs for gravatar by a considerable amount. Second, if you're using a gravatar_id why bother with the encryption? As long as there's no way for the gravatar ID to be resolved back to an email address it doesn't matter if people know it, especially since knowing the encrypted version would necessarily be functionally identical.
A nicer solution - still with the problem of no longer being static image files - would be
-User inputs email address
-Site connects to the gravatar server, using the unique encryption key it was given by gravatar to authenticate itself and send the email address (much like how reCaptcha works)
-gravatar service sends back a link to a static image associated with that user. This link can be stored for future use.
This puts less strain on the gravatar servers, since the repeated image-serving is static, and also avoids there being any way to link images back to email addresses.
Still doesn't answer the question, though, of whether there's any point trying to brute-force gravatar when the addresses in your dictionary are already part of your indiscriminate mailings.
Vice taxes don't deter vices. They just cause more problems down the line. So now a particular subset of the population not only is addicted, but also is poor and perhaps driven to crime. Taxes are simply a means of revenue in this case, since the demand is inelastic due to addiction.
Do you have any source for this or is this one of the unsourced, uninformed pronouncements that Slashdot is so brilliant at inciting?
Vice taxes don't deter vices.
That seems pretty unlikely; in essence you're arguing that vices are for some reason excluded from the normal laws of supply and demand. You're claiming that increasing the price of something does not discourage its use, simply because the thing is bad? And not only that, but the CDC disagrees with you:
Research shows that tax increases on tobacco products are an effective policy intervention designed to prevent initiation of adolescents and young adults, reduce cigarette consumption, and increase the number of smokers who quit. A 10% increase in the price of cigarettes is estimated to reduce consumption by 4%.
As does the data from the Bureau of Labour, which shows that levels of demand for beer, wine and spirits are all sensitive to price variation. [See Chaloupka, Grossman and Saffer, The effects of price on alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems, published 2002].
They just cause more problems down the line. So now a particular subset of the population not only is addicted, but also is poor and perhaps driven to crime.
I think you're conflating taxed vices and more serious addictions. There are very few vices out there so expensive that they would force you to crime if you're gainfully employed. The country is not under threat from hordes of middle-managers robbing banks for cigarette money. The addicts that turn to crime to fund their habit do so not because they are the victim of crippling government taxation - to believe this would be to wilfully ignore reality. They do so because their addiction prevents them from holding down a job, and so crime is the only way they can get the money to feed their addiction.
Taxes are simply a means of revenue in this case, since the demand is inelastic due to addiction.
Another blanket pronouncement with no evidence or explanation.
We've already seen two accounts of the fact that vice taxes do reduce demand and that demand is, in fact, elastic. It's also worth pointing out that vice taxes don't only target the addicted. They can act to deter addiction. They can also act to fund the later health-care implications of your choice, as is the case with tax on cigarettes in Britain. There is scope for some philosophical debate here, which I would be happy to enter into if you want, but the point is clear: the taxes are not necessarily simply a source of revenue.
Am I reading that right? When you're on call you can have to work 40 additional hours a week, in chunks up to 24 hours long, for $300/week?
Surely not?
Err... you DO know what first takes control of the computer when you turn it on right?
That would be a firmware interface. BIOS is one example of a firmware interface - and is the defacto standard on a PC - but it isn't the only one. You can indeed run all recent versions of Windows without a BIOS.
OT I know, but what's the connection with the healthcare package?
What most creative types don't seem to get is there's no reason for them to exist. There's so muc recorded music already if there were no more new artists we'd still have mroe music available than any of us can listen to in a lifetime.
Yes - but this is only relevant insofar as quantity is the important factor in the enjoyment of art. We could have stopped writing books in the 1970s, for example, but we'd have missed out on styles of literature that never existed before; the same is true of music, painting, films - you name it. There's already more of everything than one person could ever get through - but letting that stop us would be incredibly stupid.
IAMFWDWR (I am a meteorologist familiar with Doppler weather radar)
IAASRWDUTPIWAITRAEAI (I am a Slashdot reader who doesn't understand the point in writing an initialism that requires an explanation after it.)
You could be right - once you get outside contact sports, strength is less of a determiner. You'd still need to be careful though, since a quick Google suggests that mens' ski records are a fair distance ahead of womens' - having never skiied, I have no idea why, but a change that just "locks women out" of competition wouldn't be a great one!
For the original sport mentioned, though - boxing - getting rid of the men/women division would be ludicrous. Firstly because women would have no chance - brute strength can make up for a considerable difference in skill, so if skill is equal at the very top, the women will be demolished. Secondly because women fight with slightly different rules in a lot of combat sports, for example wearing breast protectors. Unless you want to outfit men in chest-armour as well this poses a problem!
It doesn't work to distinguish between men and women, just to keep the playing field relatively level within those groups. I can tell you from experience that fighting a lightweight woman is far, far easier than fighting a lightweight man, just because of the near-automatic strength advantage from fighting a woman.
Obesity is huge down here.
Obesity is always huge.
You do have to remember, though, that Saudi Arabia has the world's largest oil reserves, and by far the world's largest production capacity, and the US provides the troops and equipment to defend them. Unless the Saudis want to risk going up against other Middle Eastern countries without that help, they aren't going to stop selling to the USA. Also, Russia, which is thought to have the second largest reserves (the actual size is a state secret, so it's all guesses) has a history of ignoring embargos and quotas set by the OPEC countries, so some supply would still likely be available.
The police, as public servants
That's all you need to say. They work for us. Period.
Not 24/7 they don't. If your justification for surveillance is that we're writing their paychecks then the surveillance shouldn't extend any further than the paycheck does.
That's a very naive example, since it ignores the part of web programming that is genuinely problematic cross-browser. The majority of javascript programming, for example, is extremely simplistic, and for that sort of thing a good developer should get it working in every major browser. But when you move onto more complex cases, things aren't so easy. For example, the major three browsers all allocate memory differently when dealing with tables with very large numbers of dynamically-altered rows; I discovered this building a search application that loaded result sets as the user scrolls down. Firefox handles it nicely, for the most part. IE 7 has trouble freeing memory when destroying rows, and you have to code around it or the memory usage explodes and render speed plummets. IE6 is even worse; my theory is that it draws every single blank row in the table on page load, even though none of them are onscreen, meaning that if you have a lot of blank rows the browser can become unusably slow. Opera can be the worst of all; when changing table rows its stack can be exhausted, causing the browser to lock up. My point is that when the project gets more complicated, the differences in how the browsers handle things start to stack up. Something that makes no difference for a small site becomes a sticking point when you have thousands of items on the page. At this point, if Opera only represents a tiny proportion of your target demographic it might not be worth the hours to get it working.
This is actually totally normal. When you don't eat enough to meet your calorie needs, your body reacts to stop you starving; your leptin levels will drop dramatically, causing your metabolism to plummet and, crucially, shifting from burning fat to burning muscle, holding onto the fat for the times ahead, when it might be necessary to keep you alive. To get your body back to burning fat, you need to sometimes give yourself extra calories - preferably from carbohydrate - which will boost the leptin levels and give you a few days of optimum fat burning.
Obviously there's more to it than this - you still need to eat healthily - but it's much more effective than just restricting your intake every day. To prove that the pure calorie-counting approach isn't great, you only really need to take a look at Weight Watchers; even with all their expertise, support and 'easy-to-follow' calorie-restricted plans, the average member loses less than 5lb a year.
If you want to lose weight in a hurry, I'd suggest checking out the diet tips bodybuilders follow. You probably don't want to do anything as drastic as them, but as you might expect, the guys that make their money by being thin know what they're doing.
Rather brilliantly, by having this card you didn't reduce the security checks at the airport - you just got to skip to the front of the queue. This does mean that security wasn't compromised in the slightest - but it also raises the question of why the company kept doing expensive background checks that served no purpose since the card didn't get you through security!
i mean i have a great opinion for you on the proper engine to use in race cars. but i don't actually race cars.
Amusingly, that attitude is exactly the one you'll find in the professional racing world. The guy that makes design decisions for Ferrari isn't an F1 driver - he doesn't have anything like the skill to drive like that. He's still an expert in engines, the fact that he doesn't use the end product doesn't stop him knowing about it.
Not quite - you're subtracting the money he spends on electricity in the "no solar panels" case, but not the money he spends on solar panels in the "solar-panels" case. More accurate is to say:
If he buys the solar panels
- $38,000 for the panels
+ $3,000 per year for the electricity saved, reinvested at 5% giving $47,751.38
total: $9,751.38
If he doesn't buy them:
+ $38,000 invested at 5% gives $68,242
- $3,000 per year in electricity giving - $36,000
total: $32,242
You can't count the 36k for the electricity but not the 38k for the panels.
Of course, there are plenty of other factors that could make this a good investment; changes to the resale value of the house, inflation or increases in electricity price for example, although it's worth remembering that things could potentially swing against him as well.