Well, as an MBA you might want to brush up on international trade laws like NAFTA and understand that manufacturers and especially publishers greatly reduce the price of their materials to target third world markets and to provide people the ability purchase the same books we do. You do understand that there are distribution channels and contracts that prevent someone in, say New Delhi, from noticing that their Addison Wesley book on Modern Evolution sells exceptionally well in the states so they are just going to set up an online store, right? I mean, you have to acknowledge that the publishers are asking different rates from Americans versus Mexicans on their books because -- let's face it -- the standard of living is different. The fact that the American publisher chooses hardcover over softcover is purely just internal marketing in the United States, not an attempt to:
foist the high-grade materials on everyone especially at the college level where the book will never be used again - that is, unless it's meant to be fit for resale.
Discount sellers like Costco and Target and Internet giants eBay and Amazon help form an estimated $63 billion annual market for goods that are purchased abroad, then imported and resold without the permission of the manufacturer.
As someone who once foolishly bought a robotics book used on Amazon ($8) that was supposed to be the real thing ($80) and instead received an Indian release version, I must say that I do not see the parallels here. First off, the Costco case applied to goods made inside the US -- not goods made outside the US like this case. These are two mutually exclusive sets of products so it's quite different in that the big retailers re-import goods made here. I find this to be a painfully important discrepancy since, especially in this case, books and other copyrighted material have very strict distribution channels. I'm not saying its right. I'm not saying it's how things should be. I'm just telling you it's how they are. And these publishers enter contracts with affiliates in other nations. A book's value is mostly determined by its content and when you're marking that down in a foreign country through a foreign distributor, it's massively different than marking down a BMW in Mexico or a wristwatch in Switzerland. The watch and car are tangible goods that may have some intrinsic value and copyright but more importantly provide a functionality. This is not the case with the textbook. I would guess in the case of college textbooks, this guy was breaking many more laws than in the case of the watch -- especially given the United States' ridiculous laws governing copyright. In the case of my purchased textbooks, the quality of the book was horrid. A paperback binding that fell apart almost instantly and seemed to be held together with potato paste with graphs I could not read since the ink was so shoddy compared to glossy thick hardcover American release. Still, the words were the same words... and I passed the course.
Oracle doesn't care about that stuff. They will say just about anything so that Larry Ellison can buy another yacht.
Uhhh well, they should. I mean Oracle's PL/SQL is an extension of SQL which, would be copyrighted by someone from the long long ago. And if that person wanted to, they could basically say "Yeah, you know that language that your bread and butter runs on? It's infringing on my copyrights so you owe me... gosh I don't know... a hundred billion trillion dollars?"
And, like every other language, PL/SQL has to be turned into machine language at some point...
Except that the title of this article clearly says "copyright" and the 20 year limit is what patents are in the states (although extensions and whatnot make that mean jack anyway). Enjoy your "one generation" graph.
If they were copyrighted, wouldn't the assembly and machine language folks get the last laugh? I mean, copyright lasts nearly forever now in the United States and the first guy who thought up what to call registers or how to represent them in a language or what shift left should look like or even the people who came up with RISC, CISC, etc would be laughing all the way to the bank... right? I mean, even though it might just be a handful of instructions that interact with hardware, wouldn't this position make it just as copyrighted as the higher level languages which, in the end, depend on this stuff to interact with the hardware?
The 49-person letter was organized by Leighton Steward, chairman of Plants Need CO2, a non-profit with ties to the coal industry.
To this site and promptly commit suicide? From that site:
Earth and its inhabitants need more, not less, CO2.
More CO2 means:
More Plant Growth
Plants need less water
More food per acre
More robust habitats and ecosystems
CO2 is Earth's greatest airborne fertilizer. Without it - No Life On Earth!
A site with a banner that says "Warmer is better than colder." and "CO2 is Green." and "Climate Change is the Norm." really just makes my head hurt. The arguments presented on this site seem to imply that policy is to completely remove all CO2 from Earth. That is not true. It also grasps at hilarious straws:
In addition to increasing the quantity of food available for human consumption, the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is also increasing the quality of the foods we eat. It significantly increases the quantity and potency of the many beneficial substances found in their tissues (such as the vitamin C concentration of citrus fruit), which ultimately make their way onto our dinner tables and into many of the medicines we take, improving our health and helping us better contend with the multitude of diseases and other maladies that regularly afflict us. In just one species of spider lily, for example, enriching the air with CO2 has led to the production of higher concentrations of several substances that have been demonstrated to be effective in fighting a number of human maladies, including leukemia, ovary sarcoma, melanoma, and brain, colon, lung and renal cancers, as well as Japanese encephalitis and yellow, dengue, Punta Tora and Rift Valley fevers.
Climate warming increases the quality of your food! Burn all the shit you want, folks! Hey, if CFCs make the planet warmer and this site says "warmer is better than colder" shouldn't we be purposefully releasing those things up into the ozone?
March 28, 2012
The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr.
NASA Administrator
NASA Headquarters
Washington, D.C. 20546-0001
Dear Charlie,
We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.
The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA's history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.
As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA's advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA's current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.
For additional information regarding the science behind our concern, we recommend that you contact Harrison Schmitt or Walter Cunningham, or others they can recommend to you.
Thank you for considering this request.
Sincerely,
(Attached signatures)
CC: Mr. John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator for Science
CC: Ass Mr. Chris Scolese, Director, Goddard Space Flight Center
Ref: Letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, dated 3-26-12, regarding a request for NASA to refrain from making unsubstantiated claims that human produced CO2 is having a catastrophic impact on climate change.
/s/ Jack Barneburg, Jack - JSC, Space Shuttle Structures, Engineering Directorate, 34 years /s/ Larry Bell - JSC, Mgr. Crew Systems Div., Engineering Directorate, 32 years /s/ Dr. Donald Bogard - JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 41 years /s/ Jerry C. Bostick - JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 23 years /s/ Dr. Phillip K. Chapman - JSC, Scientist - astronaut, 5 years /s/ Michael F. Collins, JSC, Chief, Flight Design and Dynamics Division, MOD, 41 years /s/ Dr. Kenneth Cox - JSC, Chief Flight Dynamics Div., Engr. Directorate, 40 years /s/ Walter Cunningham - JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 7, 8 years /s/ Dr. Donald M. Curry - JSC, Mgr. Shuttle Leading Edge, Thermal Protection Sys., Engr. Dir., 44 years /s/ Leroy Day - Hdq. Deputy Director, Space Shuttle Program, 19 years /s/ Dr. Henry P. Decell, Jr. - JSC, Chief, Theory & Analysis Office, 5 years /s/Charles F. Deiterich - JSC, Mgr., Flight Operations Integration, MOD, 30 years /s/ Dr. Harold Doiron - JSC, Chairman, Shuttle Pogo Prevention Panel, 16 years /s/ Charles Duke - JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 16, 10 years /s/ Anita Gale /s/ Grace Germany - JSC, Program Analyst, 35 years /s/ Ed Gibson - JSC, Astronaut Skylab 4, 14 years /s/ Richard Gordon - JSC, Astronaut, Gemini Xi
The operator sells the phone for $99.99 with a two-year contract.
Emphasis mine. Why don't you 'buy' that phone and then break your contract? I think you'll find out how 'free' those phones that come with two year contracts really are...
Alright, to start, full disclaimer is that I don't see anyway how I will get around mentioning projects I've kickstarted so I'll try to stick to ones that are done and no longer able to hit.
But the simple answer to me is "What do these people have to lose if they meet their goal and don't deliver? And would it be worth 'cashing' out all of your good faith with the community at that price?" I've never kickstarted something that costs more than a million dollars and if I kickstarted something over a hundred dollars, it had a company's name and site associated with it that was already in the business and would be smeared with mud if they decided to fleece a bunch of people trying to help them out. Using this guidance, I haven't had many poor experiences -- although a lot of my experiences are funding musicians to record albums or video. That's something that's pretty hard to fail at although, they're musicians, so I'm still waiting on a movie that was started filming over a year or more ago ("Flood Tide"). I kickstarted a book on programming ("The Nature of Code Book") and this dude has been sending me links to PDFs left and right and I'll probably review the book here on Slashdot when he has it finalized. So far we're talking $25 donations to each of these projects. But I did dump a couple hundred into the NASA space MMO and I sort of expect to be waiting 2-3 years on that one because it's a team of 20 developers making an MMO and I want them to make a nice product. But also, they have a reputation at stake and I know they'll put out something.
Anyway, keep your donations at levels you can afford to lose -- don't ever think you're "buying" something on kickstarter. And look at the reputation of the individuals involved with your project. Also keep in mind it takes a long time to go through all stages of development and you'll find projects at all stages. It looks like ZionEyez started at concept. Do you know how long it takes to go from concept to hardware product? Large companies with massive budgets who are in those businesses take a longtime, I would imagine smaller teams would take even longer. You might get your ZionEyez in 4-5 years and, like a lot of vaporware, maybe never. ZionEyez looks like they were offering you $50 off MSRP to kickstart them and you got some "limited edition" run of them. So... I'd pretty much pass on this one and just buy them when they're out.
As for criticism, if this is a scam, they're sure committed to it with updates from yesterday. Hell, their site looks like it would cost 10-20k to develop so they're spending their money somewhere. These guys sound like they'll probably come through, they just don't understand FCC testing, engineering problems, etc. So I'd expect your ZionEyez 4 years from now when some Chinese manufacturer already has some knockoff out there. But it's a bad idea to kickstart a lot of money to these guys as I don't see them at risk of losing any reputation, just losing a really good idea (people are obsessed with putting their boring personal status updates online, think about them putting their mundane day-to-day video up).
So about 8 years ago I moved from Minnesota to Northern Virginia for work. And one of the aspects of culture shock was that I was now living with, befriending and enjoying my time with folks from all over the country who had moved to the DC area for work. Many friends from Texas and Pennsylvania specifically. I even roomed with several of them and one thing really bothered me: they did not recycle. So I kept doing my own recycling and trying to help them out to no avail. This was quite different from Minnesota where it was stressed when we were young that it was important. You might call it common sense or indoctrination or nanny state or whatever your political views tell you to but that's just the way it was largely. And the reason was that the Earth is a precious resource.
So, being an avid Slashdotter, I was fairly in tune with the Global Warming debate and would often talk to my new friends about it. Every single one of them either didn't want to hear it or thought I was an idiot. They seemed to only listen when I would bring up news items lending credibility to the absence of climate change. Then they asserted there was climate change but it is natural and so on and so forth. To this day, my friend from Texas does not recycle in his home. His Korean wife has asked me not to discuss global warming around her and continually asserts it was proven wrong years ago. My friend from Texas, being quite a bit smarter now likes to talk about what we can do about it without him having to alter his lifestyle at all. The reason for it is unimportant to him, now he just accepts that it's happening for some reason and how can we put something in space that can block the sun partially while maintaining a synchronous orbit around the sun between it and Earth. It's not that that is a simpler solution than reducing your personal carbon footprint but instead it's one that doesn't require government intervention (which he views as the ultimate evil) and doesn't require him to change.
So what do you do when you read news about this, do you whip out your biggest "I told you so" font and e-mail it out to your friends until they get tired of it? I mean, I can't even politely offer to collect the cans and bottles from one of my friend's parties and take them to the local recycling center. He's almost proud of his freedom to be able to send it to the dump. So I have two options. One is silence and apathy and the other is not having any friends in this area. Silence and apathy it is.
Sometime this month, the Legacy patch is landing and in there you'll be able to construct a family tree. Well, all my characters are dudes because I hate pretending to be a chick in a game and I hate when people flirt with me. So anyway a feature of this new patch is going to be that you can construct family trees with your characters and their children will inherit traits from the parents that they have learned. I'm guessing you can have two parents of the same sex. And, honestly, if you have two level 50 male characters and only those you're probably going to marry them to give the kid better learned traits (unless you can only inherit one trait). There's not a lot more details than that but I haven't seen information one way or the other if same sex marriage will be possible.
Um, in Star Wars Galaxies ten years ago you could have same-sex marriage and inter-species marriage. Where was the outcry then?
You know with all the families that deal with neglect, abuse and other problems you'd think Florida Family Association and the Family Research Council would have other topics to tackle that are just a tiny bit more important than whether or not a parent is too shitty to talk to their child about homosexuality in media. For crying out loud, people, really?
You know, you have a right to be homophobic, I can't tell you how to raise your children. But don't fuck up my kid while you're at it. "Mommy, why was I able to marry my best friend in the SWTOR?" "Because some people are homosexuals and we believe that's wrong so don't ever do it in real life." There, was that so hard? Please let the rest of us move forward while your ignorance dies with you, okay?
That's it. That's the truth and that's how 99% of ask Slashdot answers start and end. It's good advice. Everything that follows hereafter is my own, uneducated, horseshit assumptions on how things (should) be.
It wouldn't hurt for you first to read up all that legalese you agreed to when you first entered into a "business contract" with these guys. I'll bet that they say somewhere in there that they are not liable for any illegal or unauthorized access/control/etc of your domains and property. And by clicking a checkbox at the end of this fifteen million word tome, you agree not to hold them liable.
Go ahead, I bet it's in there and I've never even read one of these things myself. Which, don't lose heart if it is, a lawyer can probably sacrifice a few kittens, babysit the judge's nephew for free and come out with some sort of "unreasonable burden" to parse that whole thing upon completion of the transaction. I don't know, I know that people are slowly starting to become more reasonable about massive ToS documents.
Lawyers cost money, I have no idea how much money this lost you but sometimes it's not worth fronting $5,000 for a lawyer when $500 is at stake. What I would do is send them another message saying you find their consolation gift unacceptable and you're moving all your business away from them. Then I would do that. Then, I would simply write up a detailed account of these events with a tl;dr of "got F'ed in the A by XYZ Inc" and just go out and drop that on every single forum and review site you can find for domain names and hosting. Why not hit the Better Business Bureau while you're at it? Then I'd let those ferment and field questions in my free time because, hey, revenge releases a special kind of endorphin, right? Then you could be done with it or you could just send them endless requests for reimbursement with the fallout being more zero star reviews and a possible visit from your non-existent lawyer. And why not? They deserve the reputation they have exhibited to you.
And whenever I go off and do something like this and I get sick of the effort, I justify everything by imagining that if I don't do this they'll just screw over god knows how many other customers. So you're doing a public service.
I guess you live in one of those real gated communities (i.e. rich white suburbs too far from the bus stop for the lower class to get to) that never has to worry about burglaries. There is a reason why Zimmerman was a neighborhood watchman - their neighborhood had been suffering many break-ins and was a high crime area. If you live in a high crime area and notice someone that doesn't live there is walking around from house to house in the daytime you'd be suspicious too.
Tragedy struck today as a little girl was killed while looking for her lost dog that had gotten scared from thunder and run off at night. "It was raining and she was just walking around, looking about," said shooter George Zimmerman.
Tragedy struck today as hundreds of occupy wall street protesters were shot dead in the town square under cloud cover and light rain. "It was raining and they were just walking around, looking about," said shooter George Zimmerman.
Tragedy struck today as George Zimmerman committed suicide in the rain. His dying words: "It was raining and I was just walking around, looking about."
Tragedy struck today as Gene Kelly was shot dead while singin' in the rain. "It was raining and he was just walking around, looking about," said shooter George Zimmerman.
It's raining and he's just walking around, looking about.
Guilty guilty GUILTY! A thousand counts of guilty for... um... being bored in public? "I demanded he present his papers and pointed out that any self-respecting member of the proletariat would not lethargically meander about and instead optimize his steps in an effort to better serve his comrades."
And NBC? Why, they were giving you the best news money can buy. You wanted George Zimmerman to be super guilty, super racist and super scumbag and that's what they kindly provided you. Your eyeballs and mouse clicks lead NBC to place money over justice or facts (the true Capitalists that we all are). SO either stop watching them or just forgive them for entertaining you a little too well. A young man was killed by some power-tripping neighborhood watch? We can easily incite a race war with our reporting, you say? NBC sees dollar signs! Just a touch of editing and... look at those servers cook!
Normally I would feel unqualified to make any comments on this case unfortunately it's unclear if this will ever be brought before an actual court so this might end up being the only thing done -- mock trials in the worst format of all: the 24 hour news cycle.
The food was modified by the owner (corporation) to produce the pesticide internally.
False. These are water soluble pesticides that are included in the watering of plants and are easily translocated into the plant tissue as it grows. Alternatively they are applied to the soil or doused on seeds.
This is not the same as "roundup ready plants" which are GM plants that are resistant to roundup. You sound confused and appear to be bent on spreading fear about harm to humans who consume these plants.
Considering the importance of bees to agriculture, I think the potential of any link between pesticides and colony collapses warrants both extreme concern and funding.
Well, I don't think you read the article. There's a complicated situation here. It's not that the toxin is killing the bees directly but:
“So far, they mostly require manufacturers to ensure that doses encountered on the field do not kill bees, but they basically ignore the consequences of doses that do not kill them but may cause behavioral difficulties,”
So we have this situation where we believe a non-lethal dosage of this pesticide ruins the bee's ability to navigate back home which is a very serious problem. The real issue is that there's no way to quantify this and study it prior to releasing or approving a pesticide. So you have this situation where these folks are saying "we want to use technology to better our productivity in agriculture" and then you are levying unfathomable responsibility on the corporate giants who are developing said technologies. It's not as black and white as you make it out to be. I mean, how do you know that the pesticide doesn't make the bee a murderous backstabber in the colony years down the road?
Still it makes great press. It gives people who an agenda leverage. Most important it allows some groups to extort money from others while ignoring those groups who would tell them to bugger off.
It's a 594 page report with 220 authors from 62 nations leaving 18,611 review comments published by the United Nations. And that's what your professional assessment of this effort? Great press? Extortion?
Yes there is climate change. Is that bad? Depends on where you are and what change you experience. We do know it has been hotter before.
So I have two things here, I have a six hundred page report with many many many citations from peer reviewed journals. And I have your two or three sentences of cheap rhetoric -- you don't live on the coasts so you say "depends on where you are and what change you experience." And we should just all turtle inwards and say "fuck commerce and 90% of the world population"? You say that we know it's been hotter than before yet you don't explain how the temperature slowly got to that point, slower than a hundred years, slow enough for it not to totally destroy a key link in the food chain. Nobody's depending on polar bears, but what happens when the fisheries in the ocean start coming up drastically short or we get another dust bowl? This report, it's not worried about Earth, animals, plants, etc. It's worried about humans. We depend on those other things but the reason to worry is not FUD and your idiotic assertions aren't doing anything to calm anybody. So please shut the hell up until you have something meaningful to contribute.
Nonsense. The reals reason is that Google maintains a very complex evil portfolio that they need to offset with good assets by the end of the fiscal year. Capitalism and the free market has turned their "do no evil" slogan into "do no net evil." As a result, Google Voice generates rare and coveted benidons that are traded on the moral exchange. One benidon offsets one hedon as a base unit at the end of the year. While Microsoft and Apple executives Scrooge McDuck in their massive hedon reserves and show them off to investors, every year Google struggles more and more to finish in the white.
I can't find any details on the specifics of the proposal so I can't help but wonder if this is one of those things where everyone is guilty and now the government can arrest and detain whoever they want? So a scenario is a terrorist uses Yahoo Mail or Twitter to send messages, the French catch it and shut it down. Years later, I'm using twitter or yahoo! Now, if they arrest me or confiscate my laptop, they have the choice to hold me on the grounds that I was visiting terrorist websites. If they are forced to say which websites, they might just cross reference my browsing history base URLs with their database and pick the least well-known site (maybe Reddit or Slashdot even?) that they claim to have detected terrorist activity on? Ideally (for the government), I'm sure they would get away without even ever naming the sites on national security grounds or something.
The politicians justify this by thinking they're good people and these laws where anyone could be arrested will not be abused. The people justify this because it happens infrequently enough that they can dismiss cases as outliers. But once a jerk is elected and these laws still exist, people start to notice because they'll use them against anyone -- even political enemies.
"I don't like this guy. Go arrest him and make sure to get his computer. We don't have anything on him but we will."
This is the problem when journalists with political agendas pretend to be statisticians.
From the report:
This chart, produced by John Grego of the University of South Carolina, shows no apparent correlation between changes in gasoline production and changes in gas price at the pump.
This analysis, performed by economist Phil Hanser at the energy consulting firm The Brattle Group, confirmed the AP's findings -- that production does not correlate with the adjusted price of unleaded gasoline.
Political agenda or not, they got a third party confirmation. Of course this doesn't account for "production in other areas" because you can't control production in other areas! This report is to examine if, historically, domestic drilling has lowered domestic prices on the assumption that domestic drilling is the only thing we control.
Drilling domestically might not lower the price of gasoline, but perhaps it creates a buffer in case worldwide oil flows are disrupted. That is, if all oil is imported and there is a boycott against the U. S., we are back to 1973, waiting in gas lines. If a local industry had to begin from scratch, prices would presumably be high for quite a while.
You're right but I would like to point out two things. One is that you seemingly forgot to mention the Strategic Petroleum Reserves that were created after that boycott. Despite what pure capitalists say about its influence on the market, this reserve still exists and has come in handy for taking "loans" out of during catastrophes. This would help us transition from foreign dependence to massive drilling at home.
The other thing is that we actually do a lot of our own oil refining (especially in Texas). So, it's not like we're missing that huge part of the infrastructure, we import the crude and refine it on our soil. So really what we're missing is just the crude pipeline. The "local industry" you speak of is actually mostly already here to support us, all that's missing is the source and transportation of the crude (since it would probably flip from cargo ships to trucks initially?). What it comes down to is how long would it take a company to drill and lay pipeline? Probably not very long... they have crazy revenues.
you now have glowing articles in the state-controlled Associated Press shilling for the administration
Really? Did you catch this part of the article:
Politicians - especially those in the party that's not occupying the White House - have long harped on high gas prices when expedient. Then-Sen. Barack Obama said in 2008, when he was running for president, that "here in Ohio, you're paying nearly $3.70 a gallon for gas, 2-1/2 times what it cost when George Bush took office."
But Obama, who has seen gas prices go up 73 percent since he took office, was singing a different tune last week in his weekly radio address: "The truth is: The price of gas depends on a lot of factors that are often beyond our control. Unrest in the Middle East can tighten global oil supply. Growing nations like China or India adding cars to the road increases demand. But one thing we should control is fraud and manipulation that can cause prices to spike even further."
Sort of makes him sound like a two-faced idiot to me. On the campaign trail he promised to fix all this and now he's in the same spot as Bush with the same damned effect on gas prices!
And the idiocy of calling the AP "state owned" is really funny considering you just said they ripped on Bush and Cheney about a conspiracy. Hello! For 8 years, Bush and Cheney were president and vice president. If the AP was state owned and if they ruled for 8 years, why didn't they just dissolve it after publishing all those "conspiracy theories" you stated? The AP is a Not-for-profit cooperative that has been around since May of 1846 -- 15 years before the start of the American Civil War!
Minnesota Public Radio pulls some choice quotes...
Submitter here, my mistake on that above source. When I read this in my news feed yesterday, I didn't see the AP markings all around this story. All of it appears to be completely and solely Associated Press sourced. I apologize if that confused anyone.
Noticed that when I was looking to see if anyone had come up with a sufficient rebuttal to this empirical link but aside from a few insane pundits, I didn't find much. The remaining arguments for "drill here, drill now" probably rests on "job creation" (waiting on that fact check) and, according to Thomas McClanahan from the Kansas City Star, it "means fewer dollars going to nasty, unstable regimes and more revenue for the Treasury, especially if the drilling is on public lands." He might be right about lowering the trade deficit but I think there are other things we could stop doing to prevent unstable regimes.
Slashdot Mirror
foist the high-grade materials on everyone especially at the college level where the book will never be used again - that is, unless it's meant to be fit for resale.
I'm no MBA but this is pretty clear to even me.
Discount sellers like Costco and Target and Internet giants eBay and Amazon help form an estimated $63 billion annual market for goods that are purchased abroad, then imported and resold without the permission of the manufacturer.
As someone who once foolishly bought a robotics book used on Amazon ($8) that was supposed to be the real thing ($80) and instead received an Indian release version, I must say that I do not see the parallels here. First off, the Costco case applied to goods made inside the US -- not goods made outside the US like this case. These are two mutually exclusive sets of products so it's quite different in that the big retailers re-import goods made here. I find this to be a painfully important discrepancy since, especially in this case, books and other copyrighted material have very strict distribution channels. I'm not saying its right. I'm not saying it's how things should be. I'm just telling you it's how they are. And these publishers enter contracts with affiliates in other nations. A book's value is mostly determined by its content and when you're marking that down in a foreign country through a foreign distributor, it's massively different than marking down a BMW in Mexico or a wristwatch in Switzerland. The watch and car are tangible goods that may have some intrinsic value and copyright but more importantly provide a functionality. This is not the case with the textbook. I would guess in the case of college textbooks, this guy was breaking many more laws than in the case of the watch -- especially given the United States' ridiculous laws governing copyright. In the case of my purchased textbooks, the quality of the book was horrid. A paperback binding that fell apart almost instantly and seemed to be held together with potato paste with graphs I could not read since the ink was so shoddy compared to glossy thick hardcover American release. Still, the words were the same words ... and I passed the course.
Oracle doesn't care about that stuff. They will say just about anything so that Larry Ellison can buy another yacht.
Uhhh well, they should. I mean Oracle's PL/SQL is an extension of SQL which, would be copyrighted by someone from the long long ago. And if that person wanted to, they could basically say "Yeah, you know that language that your bread and butter runs on? It's infringing on my copyrights so you owe me ... gosh I don't know ... a hundred billion trillion dollars?"
...
And, like every other language, PL/SQL has to be turned into machine language at some point
Except that the title of this article clearly says "copyright" and the 20 year limit is what patents are in the states (although extensions and whatnot make that mean jack anyway). Enjoy your "one generation" graph.
If they were copyrighted, wouldn't the assembly and machine language folks get the last laugh? I mean, copyright lasts nearly forever now in the United States and the first guy who thought up what to call registers or how to represent them in a language or what shift left should look like or even the people who came up with RISC, CISC, etc would be laughing all the way to the bank ... right? I mean, even though it might just be a handful of instructions that interact with hardware, wouldn't this position make it just as copyrighted as the higher level languages which, in the end, depend on this stuff to interact with the hardware?
A little bit of googling led me to a PDF of the full published paper if anyone's interested.
The 49-person letter was organized by Leighton Steward, chairman of Plants Need CO2, a non-profit with ties to the coal industry.
To this site and promptly commit suicide? From that site:
Earth and its inhabitants need more, not less, CO2.
More CO2 means:
More Plant Growth
Plants need less water
More food per acre
More robust habitats and ecosystems
CO2 is Earth's greatest airborne fertilizer. Without it - No Life On Earth!
A site with a banner that says "Warmer is better than colder." and "CO2 is Green." and "Climate Change is the Norm." really just makes my head hurt. The arguments presented on this site seem to imply that policy is to completely remove all CO2 from Earth. That is not true. It also grasps at hilarious straws:
In addition to increasing the quantity of food available for human consumption, the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is also increasing the quality of the foods we eat. It significantly increases the quantity and potency of the many beneficial substances found in their tissues (such as the vitamin C concentration of citrus fruit), which ultimately make their way onto our dinner tables and into many of the medicines we take, improving our health and helping us better contend with the multitude of diseases and other maladies that regularly afflict us. In just one species of spider lily, for example, enriching the air with CO2 has led to the production of higher concentrations of several substances that have been demonstrated to be effective in fighting a number of human maladies, including leukemia, ovary sarcoma, melanoma, and brain, colon, lung and renal cancers, as well as Japanese encephalitis and yellow, dengue, Punta Tora and Rift Valley fevers.
Climate warming increases the quality of your food! Burn all the shit you want, folks! Hey, if CFCs make the planet warmer and this site says "warmer is better than colder" shouldn't we be purposefully releasing those things up into the ozone?
Is the claim in this letter opinion or fact?
Well, from the letter itself:
March 28, 2012
/s/ Jack Barneburg, Jack - JSC, Space Shuttle Structures, Engineering Directorate, 34 years
/s/ Larry Bell - JSC, Mgr. Crew Systems Div., Engineering Directorate, 32 years
/s/ Dr. Donald Bogard - JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 41 years
/s/ Jerry C. Bostick - JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 23 years
/s/ Dr. Phillip K. Chapman - JSC, Scientist - astronaut, 5 years
/s/ Michael F. Collins, JSC, Chief, Flight Design and Dynamics Division, MOD, 41 years
/s/ Dr. Kenneth Cox - JSC, Chief Flight Dynamics Div., Engr. Directorate, 40 years
/s/ Walter Cunningham - JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 7, 8 years
/s/ Dr. Donald M. Curry - JSC, Mgr. Shuttle Leading Edge, Thermal Protection Sys., Engr. Dir., 44 years
/s/ Leroy Day - Hdq. Deputy Director, Space Shuttle Program, 19 years
/s/ Dr. Henry P. Decell, Jr. - JSC, Chief, Theory & Analysis Office, 5 years
/s/Charles F. Deiterich - JSC, Mgr., Flight Operations Integration, MOD, 30 years
/s/ Dr. Harold Doiron - JSC, Chairman, Shuttle Pogo Prevention Panel, 16 years
/s/ Charles Duke - JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 16, 10 years
/s/ Anita Gale
/s/ Grace Germany - JSC, Program Analyst, 35 years
/s/ Ed Gibson - JSC, Astronaut Skylab 4, 14 years
/s/ Richard Gordon - JSC, Astronaut, Gemini Xi
The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr.
NASA Administrator
NASA Headquarters
Washington, D.C. 20546-0001
Dear Charlie,
We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.
The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA's history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.
As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA's advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA's current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.
For additional information regarding the science behind our concern, we recommend that you contact Harrison Schmitt or Walter Cunningham, or others they can recommend to you.
Thank you for considering this request.
Sincerely,
(Attached signatures)
CC: Mr. John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator for Science
CC: Ass Mr. Chris Scolese, Director, Goddard Space Flight Center
Ref: Letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, dated 3-26-12, regarding a request for NASA to refrain from making unsubstantiated claims that human produced CO2 is having a catastrophic impact on climate change.
The operator sells the phone for $99.99 with a two-year contract.
Emphasis mine. Why don't you 'buy' that phone and then break your contract? I think you'll find out how 'free' those phones that come with two year contracts really are ...
Alright, to start, full disclaimer is that I don't see anyway how I will get around mentioning projects I've kickstarted so I'll try to stick to ones that are done and no longer able to hit.
... I'd pretty much pass on this one and just buy them when they're out.
But the simple answer to me is "What do these people have to lose if they meet their goal and don't deliver? And would it be worth 'cashing' out all of your good faith with the community at that price?" I've never kickstarted something that costs more than a million dollars and if I kickstarted something over a hundred dollars, it had a company's name and site associated with it that was already in the business and would be smeared with mud if they decided to fleece a bunch of people trying to help them out. Using this guidance, I haven't had many poor experiences -- although a lot of my experiences are funding musicians to record albums or video. That's something that's pretty hard to fail at although, they're musicians, so I'm still waiting on a movie that was started filming over a year or more ago ("Flood Tide"). I kickstarted a book on programming ("The Nature of Code Book") and this dude has been sending me links to PDFs left and right and I'll probably review the book here on Slashdot when he has it finalized. So far we're talking $25 donations to each of these projects. But I did dump a couple hundred into the NASA space MMO and I sort of expect to be waiting 2-3 years on that one because it's a team of 20 developers making an MMO and I want them to make a nice product. But also, they have a reputation at stake and I know they'll put out something.
Anyway, keep your donations at levels you can afford to lose -- don't ever think you're "buying" something on kickstarter. And look at the reputation of the individuals involved with your project. Also keep in mind it takes a long time to go through all stages of development and you'll find projects at all stages. It looks like ZionEyez started at concept. Do you know how long it takes to go from concept to hardware product? Large companies with massive budgets who are in those businesses take a longtime, I would imagine smaller teams would take even longer. You might get your ZionEyez in 4-5 years and, like a lot of vaporware, maybe never. ZionEyez looks like they were offering you $50 off MSRP to kickstart them and you got some "limited edition" run of them. So
As for criticism, if this is a scam, they're sure committed to it with updates from yesterday. Hell, their site looks like it would cost 10-20k to develop so they're spending their money somewhere. These guys sound like they'll probably come through, they just don't understand FCC testing, engineering problems, etc. So I'd expect your ZionEyez 4 years from now when some Chinese manufacturer already has some knockoff out there. But it's a bad idea to kickstart a lot of money to these guys as I don't see them at risk of losing any reputation, just losing a really good idea (people are obsessed with putting their boring personal status updates online, think about them putting their mundane day-to-day video up).
So about 8 years ago I moved from Minnesota to Northern Virginia for work. And one of the aspects of culture shock was that I was now living with, befriending and enjoying my time with folks from all over the country who had moved to the DC area for work. Many friends from Texas and Pennsylvania specifically. I even roomed with several of them and one thing really bothered me: they did not recycle. So I kept doing my own recycling and trying to help them out to no avail. This was quite different from Minnesota where it was stressed when we were young that it was important. You might call it common sense or indoctrination or nanny state or whatever your political views tell you to but that's just the way it was largely. And the reason was that the Earth is a precious resource.
So, being an avid Slashdotter, I was fairly in tune with the Global Warming debate and would often talk to my new friends about it. Every single one of them either didn't want to hear it or thought I was an idiot. They seemed to only listen when I would bring up news items lending credibility to the absence of climate change. Then they asserted there was climate change but it is natural and so on and so forth. To this day, my friend from Texas does not recycle in his home. His Korean wife has asked me not to discuss global warming around her and continually asserts it was proven wrong years ago. My friend from Texas, being quite a bit smarter now likes to talk about what we can do about it without him having to alter his lifestyle at all. The reason for it is unimportant to him, now he just accepts that it's happening for some reason and how can we put something in space that can block the sun partially while maintaining a synchronous orbit around the sun between it and Earth. It's not that that is a simpler solution than reducing your personal carbon footprint but instead it's one that doesn't require government intervention (which he views as the ultimate evil) and doesn't require him to change.
So what do you do when you read news about this, do you whip out your biggest "I told you so" font and e-mail it out to your friends until they get tired of it? I mean, I can't even politely offer to collect the cans and bottles from one of my friend's parties and take them to the local recycling center. He's almost proud of his freedom to be able to send it to the dump. So I have two options. One is silence and apathy and the other is not having any friends in this area. Silence and apathy it is.
Sometime this month, the Legacy patch is landing and in there you'll be able to construct a family tree. Well, all my characters are dudes because I hate pretending to be a chick in a game and I hate when people flirt with me. So anyway a feature of this new patch is going to be that you can construct family trees with your characters and their children will inherit traits from the parents that they have learned. I'm guessing you can have two parents of the same sex. And, honestly, if you have two level 50 male characters and only those you're probably going to marry them to give the kid better learned traits (unless you can only inherit one trait). There's not a lot more details than that but I haven't seen information one way or the other if same sex marriage will be possible.
Um, in Star Wars Galaxies ten years ago you could have same-sex marriage and inter-species marriage. Where was the outcry then?
You know with all the families that deal with neglect, abuse and other problems you'd think Florida Family Association and the Family Research Council would have other topics to tackle that are just a tiny bit more important than whether or not a parent is too shitty to talk to their child about homosexuality in media. For crying out loud, people, really?
You know, you have a right to be homophobic, I can't tell you how to raise your children. But don't fuck up my kid while you're at it. "Mommy, why was I able to marry my best friend in the SWTOR?" "Because some people are homosexuals and we believe that's wrong so don't ever do it in real life." There, was that so hard? Please let the rest of us move forward while your ignorance dies with you, okay?
That's it. That's the truth and that's how 99% of ask Slashdot answers start and end. It's good advice. Everything that follows hereafter is my own, uneducated, horseshit assumptions on how things (should) be.
It wouldn't hurt for you first to read up all that legalese you agreed to when you first entered into a "business contract" with these guys. I'll bet that they say somewhere in there that they are not liable for any illegal or unauthorized access/control/etc of your domains and property. And by clicking a checkbox at the end of this fifteen million word tome, you agree not to hold them liable.
Go ahead, I bet it's in there and I've never even read one of these things myself. Which, don't lose heart if it is, a lawyer can probably sacrifice a few kittens, babysit the judge's nephew for free and come out with some sort of "unreasonable burden" to parse that whole thing upon completion of the transaction. I don't know, I know that people are slowly starting to become more reasonable about massive ToS documents.
Lawyers cost money, I have no idea how much money this lost you but sometimes it's not worth fronting $5,000 for a lawyer when $500 is at stake. What I would do is send them another message saying you find their consolation gift unacceptable and you're moving all your business away from them. Then I would do that. Then, I would simply write up a detailed account of these events with a tl;dr of "got F'ed in the A by XYZ Inc" and just go out and drop that on every single forum and review site you can find for domain names and hosting. Why not hit the Better Business Bureau while you're at it? Then I'd let those ferment and field questions in my free time because, hey, revenge releases a special kind of endorphin, right? Then you could be done with it or you could just send them endless requests for reimbursement with the fallout being more zero star reviews and a possible visit from your non-existent lawyer. And why not? They deserve the reputation they have exhibited to you.
And whenever I go off and do something like this and I get sick of the effort, I justify everything by imagining that if I don't do this they'll just screw over god knows how many other customers. So you're doing a public service.
I guess you live in one of those real gated communities (i.e. rich white suburbs too far from the bus stop for the lower class to get to) that never has to worry about burglaries. There is a reason why Zimmerman was a neighborhood watchman - their neighborhood had been suffering many break-ins and was a high crime area. If you live in a high crime area and notice someone that doesn't live there is walking around from house to house in the daytime you'd be suspicious too.
Tragedy struck today as a little girl was killed while looking for her lost dog that had gotten scared from thunder and run off at night. "It was raining and she was just walking around, looking about," said shooter George Zimmerman.
Tragedy struck today as hundreds of occupy wall street protesters were shot dead in the town square under cloud cover and light rain. "It was raining and they were just walking around, looking about," said shooter George Zimmerman.
Tragedy struck today as George Zimmerman committed suicide in the rain. His dying words: "It was raining and I was just walking around, looking about."
Tragedy struck today as Gene Kelly was shot dead while singin' in the rain. "It was raining and he was just walking around, looking about," said shooter George Zimmerman.
Do you need more?
It's raining and he's just walking around, looking about.
Guilty guilty GUILTY! A thousand counts of guilty for ... um ... being bored in public? "I demanded he present his papers and pointed out that any self-respecting member of the proletariat would not lethargically meander about and instead optimize his steps in an effort to better serve his comrades."
... look at those servers cook!
And NBC? Why, they were giving you the best news money can buy. You wanted George Zimmerman to be super guilty, super racist and super scumbag and that's what they kindly provided you. Your eyeballs and mouse clicks lead NBC to place money over justice or facts (the true Capitalists that we all are). SO either stop watching them or just forgive them for entertaining you a little too well. A young man was killed by some power-tripping neighborhood watch? We can easily incite a race war with our reporting, you say? NBC sees dollar signs! Just a touch of editing and
Normally I would feel unqualified to make any comments on this case unfortunately it's unclear if this will ever be brought before an actual court so this might end up being the only thing done -- mock trials in the worst format of all: the 24 hour news cycle.
The food was modified by the owner (corporation) to produce the pesticide internally.
False. These are water soluble pesticides that are included in the watering of plants and are easily translocated into the plant tissue as it grows. Alternatively they are applied to the soil or doused on seeds.
This is not the same as "roundup ready plants" which are GM plants that are resistant to roundup. You sound confused and appear to be bent on spreading fear about harm to humans who consume these plants.
Considering the importance of bees to agriculture, I think the potential of any link between pesticides and colony collapses warrants both extreme concern and funding.
Well, I don't think you read the article. There's a complicated situation here. It's not that the toxin is killing the bees directly but:
“So far, they mostly require manufacturers to ensure that doses encountered on the field do not kill bees, but they basically ignore the consequences of doses that do not kill them but may cause behavioral difficulties,”
So we have this situation where we believe a non-lethal dosage of this pesticide ruins the bee's ability to navigate back home which is a very serious problem. The real issue is that there's no way to quantify this and study it prior to releasing or approving a pesticide. So you have this situation where these folks are saying "we want to use technology to better our productivity in agriculture" and then you are levying unfathomable responsibility on the corporate giants who are developing said technologies. It's not as black and white as you make it out to be. I mean, how do you know that the pesticide doesn't make the bee a murderous backstabber in the colony years down the road?
I'm hesitant to comment on anything like this anymore, it got pretty ugly last time I asked follow up questions.
Still it makes great press. It gives people who an agenda leverage. Most important it allows some groups to extort money from others while ignoring those groups who would tell them to bugger off.
It's a 594 page report with 220 authors from 62 nations leaving 18,611 review comments published by the United Nations. And that's what your professional assessment of this effort? Great press? Extortion?
Yes there is climate change. Is that bad? Depends on where you are and what change you experience. We do know it has been hotter before.
So I have two things here, I have a six hundred page report with many many many citations from peer reviewed journals. And I have your two or three sentences of cheap rhetoric -- you don't live on the coasts so you say "depends on where you are and what change you experience." And we should just all turtle inwards and say "fuck commerce and 90% of the world population"? You say that we know it's been hotter than before yet you don't explain how the temperature slowly got to that point, slower than a hundred years, slow enough for it not to totally destroy a key link in the food chain. Nobody's depending on polar bears, but what happens when the fisheries in the ocean start coming up drastically short or we get another dust bowl? This report, it's not worried about Earth, animals, plants, etc. It's worried about humans. We depend on those other things but the reason to worry is not FUD and your idiotic assertions aren't doing anything to calm anybody. So please shut the hell up until you have something meaningful to contribute.
Nonsense. The reals reason is that Google maintains a very complex evil portfolio that they need to offset with good assets by the end of the fiscal year. Capitalism and the free market has turned their "do no evil" slogan into "do no net evil." As a result, Google Voice generates rare and coveted benidons that are traded on the moral exchange. One benidon offsets one hedon as a base unit at the end of the year. While Microsoft and Apple executives Scrooge McDuck in their massive hedon reserves and show them off to investors, every year Google struggles more and more to finish in the white.
I can't find any details on the specifics of the proposal so I can't help but wonder if this is one of those things where everyone is guilty and now the government can arrest and detain whoever they want? So a scenario is a terrorist uses Yahoo Mail or Twitter to send messages, the French catch it and shut it down. Years later, I'm using twitter or yahoo! Now, if they arrest me or confiscate my laptop, they have the choice to hold me on the grounds that I was visiting terrorist websites. If they are forced to say which websites, they might just cross reference my browsing history base URLs with their database and pick the least well-known site (maybe Reddit or Slashdot even?) that they claim to have detected terrorist activity on? Ideally (for the government), I'm sure they would get away without even ever naming the sites on national security grounds or something.
The politicians justify this by thinking they're good people and these laws where anyone could be arrested will not be abused. The people justify this because it happens infrequently enough that they can dismiss cases as outliers. But once a jerk is elected and these laws still exist, people start to notice because they'll use them against anyone -- even political enemies.
"I don't like this guy. Go arrest him and make sure to get his computer. We don't have anything on him but we will."
This is the problem when journalists with political agendas pretend to be statisticians.
From the report:
This chart, produced by John Grego of the University of South Carolina, shows no apparent correlation between changes in gasoline production and changes in gas price at the pump.
This analysis, performed by economist Phil Hanser at the energy consulting firm The Brattle Group, confirmed the AP's findings -- that production does not correlate with the adjusted price of unleaded gasoline.
Political agenda or not, they got a third party confirmation. Of course this doesn't account for "production in other areas" because you can't control production in other areas! This report is to examine if, historically, domestic drilling has lowered domestic prices on the assumption that domestic drilling is the only thing we control.
Drilling domestically might not lower the price of gasoline, but perhaps it creates a buffer in case worldwide oil flows are disrupted. That is, if all oil is imported and there is a boycott against the U. S., we are back to 1973, waiting in gas lines. If a local industry had to begin from scratch, prices would presumably be high for quite a while.
You're right but I would like to point out two things. One is that you seemingly forgot to mention the Strategic Petroleum Reserves that were created after that boycott. Despite what pure capitalists say about its influence on the market, this reserve still exists and has come in handy for taking "loans" out of during catastrophes. This would help us transition from foreign dependence to massive drilling at home.
... they have crazy revenues.
The other thing is that we actually do a lot of our own oil refining (especially in Texas). So, it's not like we're missing that huge part of the infrastructure, we import the crude and refine it on our soil. So really what we're missing is just the crude pipeline. The "local industry" you speak of is actually mostly already here to support us, all that's missing is the source and transportation of the crude (since it would probably flip from cargo ships to trucks initially?). What it comes down to is how long would it take a company to drill and lay pipeline? Probably not very long
you now have glowing articles in the state-controlled Associated Press shilling for the administration
Really? Did you catch this part of the article:
Politicians - especially those in the party that's not occupying the White House - have long harped on high gas prices when expedient. Then-Sen. Barack Obama said in 2008, when he was running for president, that "here in Ohio, you're paying nearly $3.70 a gallon for gas, 2-1/2 times what it cost when George Bush took office."
But Obama, who has seen gas prices go up 73 percent since he took office, was singing a different tune last week in his weekly radio address: "The truth is: The price of gas depends on a lot of factors that are often beyond our control. Unrest in the Middle East can tighten global oil supply. Growing nations like China or India adding cars to the road increases demand. But one thing we should control is fraud and manipulation that can cause prices to spike even further."
Sort of makes him sound like a two-faced idiot to me. On the campaign trail he promised to fix all this and now he's in the same spot as Bush with the same damned effect on gas prices!
And the idiocy of calling the AP "state owned" is really funny considering you just said they ripped on Bush and Cheney about a conspiracy. Hello! For 8 years, Bush and Cheney were president and vice president. If the AP was state owned and if they ruled for 8 years, why didn't they just dissolve it after publishing all those "conspiracy theories" you stated? The AP is a Not-for-profit cooperative that has been around since May of 1846 -- 15 years before the start of the American Civil War!
Minnesota Public Radio pulls some choice quotes ...
Submitter here, my mistake on that above source. When I read this in my news feed yesterday, I didn't see the AP markings all around this story. All of it appears to be completely and solely Associated Press sourced. I apologize if that confused anyone.
Noticed that when I was looking to see if anyone had come up with a sufficient rebuttal to this empirical link but aside from a few insane pundits, I didn't find much. The remaining arguments for "drill here, drill now" probably rests on "job creation" (waiting on that fact check) and, according to Thomas McClanahan from the Kansas City Star, it "means fewer dollars going to nasty, unstable regimes and more revenue for the Treasury, especially if the drilling is on public lands." He might be right about lowering the trade deficit but I think there are other things we could stop doing to prevent unstable regimes.