Which is why I think they're best off rejecting the file outright when it fails their scan.
This wouldn't really hurt their actual photo sharing service because real photos would be uploaded no matter what size they were, so they wouldn't lose their desired user base. And if someone who was trying this complained, they'd have to fork over the image and the support would simply state:
"Your image looks corrupted. What is it supposed to be?"
At that point the uploader would say, "It's a photo of static!!!! Upload it!!"
And then Amazon would upload it, because why not? They would have made it extremely expensive to abuse their system, even though it remains entirely possible to do. Everyone who tried this would have to go through the same process, while the people who were legitimately uploading actual photos would have no problem whatsoever and wouldn't care.
I do think many, if not most people are okay paying for movies, especially ones they know are good ones from friends, families, or trusted reviewers. That is, as long as the price is reasonable and it works as expected.
What makes piracy still attractive is the ability to get movies without certain restrictions and earlier than you'd get it from whatever method they subscribe to.
Price matters more to those who have little disposable income, but that is not as many people as you might think. Mostly it's young people. Certainly, I was much more tempted by piracy when I was younger and had little income. Not so much a problem now.
Convenience probably matters as much as price, but I think that has come a long way.
I do think that most people understand that you need to pay for what you want to see. Perhaps not the abusive prices you sometimes would get, but *something*. Free doesn't always win, even when you think it would.
I would be amused if they implemented a check for this and then simply said, "we're sorry, it appears your image was very large and might have been corrupted during upload. Please check your file and try again "
Those gym teachers need to change, or be changed. We just have to not go so far in the other direction that we accept obesity as an expression of your special uniqueness.
I don't want kinds shamed, but providing kids education about the effects of obesity and providing resources to help them change that if they want to is something we should see more of.
I know some really great people who happen to be obese, but they suffer from higher injury rates as well as things like heart disease and diabetes and it makes them unhappy. I think most of them would prefer not to be obese they just need help, but it's much much harder to make those changes as an adult than it would be for a younger person.
So it drives me nuts when I see people trying to keep kids from being educated in the name of not "fat shaming" them. I see very few other dangerous medical conditions where we make any bones about delivering the facts to those who need them.
Admittedly it is an awkward term, but it is used rhetorically by the pro-life side to make their point that what is eliminated is not a different species. It is a reaction to the use of accurate, but very specific, and clinical terminology to aid in the similar rhetorical *alienation* of the subject of the abortion (the developing human) from the usual concern for children in society.
However, if the way the word is constructed bothers you, I doubt anyone would argue if you called it a "developing human who has not been born yet". It's just kind of a mouthful. I prefer to use the shorthand for brevity.
However, I am not certain that they cannot end the easy participation of the average user in the process.
There will always be a guy selling DVDs on the corner, frequently backed up by organized crime. I'm not so certain that people who are less committed to that lifestyle will be always there and impossible to stop. That ease of participation relies on freedoms are now taken for granted which I feel may well become very eroded in the future.
You are correct. Sperm have all of their mitochondria located by the flagellum, not spread throughout the cytoplasm of the main body, which makes sense due to the fact that the real energy expenditure in a sperm cell is going to be movement.
The mitochondria and flagellum are left behind as a distinct unit when the main body merges with the egg. So, there are no male mitochondria in the resulting fertilized egg. There could be some sort of odd condition that allows something like the sperm mitochondria to make it inside the egg, but if that happens it is not the rule, and probably means that something is wrong.
That is why you will only inherit mitochondria via the female line, which has had an interesting ability to aid in tracing human migrations through history.
She wasn't risk adverse. She just wanted to make Yahoo work again on it's own terms. And that was hubris. There is little doubt in my mind that she though she could use her Google magic to resurrect Yahoo from the dead.
As you said, Yahoo's model has been doomed for years. In fact, you might as well say the doom has already occurred. They went over the event horizon of that black hole ten years ago, and now they're just trying to avoid being sucked farther in.
Personally, I feel they need to take stock, and yes, perhaps make a solid purchase and then uncouple from the old business and use it to push off to get out of their hole. Their *brand* still has recognition, and hence has value, but it may be time to rest it a bit and let some other business take the lead. The problem is, they need to find that business and Mayer hasn't been interested in that.
The core company actually has a negative market capitalization.
And remember market cap is that number which always seems to be worth more than the company really should be worth.
Shrinking your employee headcount is useless unless you have a profitable "core" capability that you're trying to scale down to. Yahoo's core business is irrelevant. They have users, but those users aren't making them any money.
So a loss of employees at this point is just Yahoo following conventional wisdom to bail out the boat to keep the stock price high. That gets Mayer more time to work before she's shit canned by the board, but it is at best a delaying tactic. If she has no real plan, then it is just gutting the company's resources which will accelerate the downward spiral.
If you look at AOL, they're still in business, but only because they had a good purchase that got them into the advertising business. I think they spent like $100mil on Advertising.com while they threw away $750mil on Bebo, a purchase I remember not understanding when I was working at AOL and knew insider stuff. Yahoo doesn't have an Advertising.com. It just has Bebos. And Mayer doesn't look like she has the interest in getting Yahoo a nice solid core business to land on.
I don't think Mayer has helped her company at all, but I think that, at the heart of it, Yahoo is a business whose day has come. They've failed. They're irrelevant. She *might* have been able to do something about it, but I think that if she had been able to turn it around, she would have deserved to be lauded like Steve Jobs.
The fact is, she was weaksauce when Yahoo was a dead letter in any situation except a heroic turnaround. You aren't going to create a heroic turnaround by firing her (or 15% of the workforce). It's not like she was holding back the heroically talented people there. They were in trouble long before she showed up.
Yahoo needs to do something like what Michael Dell suggested for Apple before Steve Jobs came back. Sell off their profitable groups, sell their assets, set up the employees with a nice severance package and give the money back to their shareholders and shut down.
I admit, Apple made that advice look silly but only because they could still get Steve Jobs, but who does Yahoo have?
My issue with Sanders isn't the world he would like to see, where everyone has health care or racial prejudice is a thing of the past, etc. My problem is his vehicle for trying to get us to those places. That's an important distinction.
It is his suggestion that we have to fight a class struggle and extract money from people who would prefer not to give it, or who simply *can't* afford it in order to make his ideals come true. That's socialism and while its end goals are not undesirable, it's always about how you get to those goals that matters. And it remains to be seen if socialism can actually do that for the USA, even if it was enacted "properly".
While I have little sympathy for a billionaire, history has shown me that when the revolution happens, the billionaires escape and live in exile in Paris and anyone who remains who has worked to get their head a little above the crowd gets that head chopped off. This is a concept which I have no sympathy for in the slightest.
While I see the point you're trying to make, some people believe that killing unborn children is the same thing as killing any other person. And I don't think you'd consider it odd that someone would protest against legalized mass killing if it was in another context.
Many people would consider it odd if your response to people killing other people was: well if you don't like killing people, don't kill them and leave me alone so I can kill them in peace. Protests against it make sense, as do the protests where the other side suggests that there is a privacy or health issue. I wouldn't consider telling either side to shut up about it.
Other people believe that guns kill people, which they do. Of course, the connection is not as direct, as guns don't automatically kill people, sometimes they kill animals, or paper targets.
That said, they can certainly be used to kill people. I am actually more on the side of Second Amendment liberties than not, but even I would not suggest that someone has no right to protest against guns. Guns can be used by one person to kill innocent people. I'd call that a concern. If you feel strongly about it, by all means protest one way or another.
The above two issues are places where it makes sense that the other side might ask for the "thing" to be outlawed. They're dangerous to someone who has no choice about avoiding them.
In this case, really, the only example where you can say, "just don't go see it," is comedy. And I agree with that 100%. When I went to college and everyone went to go to the leftist student protest, I didn't call for it to not be allowed, I just stayed away. I would think that the student body or the small fraction thereof who is offended by a protest or a comedy show would be capable of simply not going. And that is why things are going off the deep end in colleges and elsewhere.
There do exist events which are simply free speech where the offended majority now just wants to shut down *speech*. Speech should not be shut down by offense. Even if the speech is asking for something like "safe and legal abortion" to be continued or made illegal, or guns, or even racial prejudice, the *speech that either side uses to make their case* is what should not be blocked, even if you disagree with it or even find it offensive. And that is exactly what is at stake with over-sensitivity.
It used to be that you'd have asshole gym teachers treating you like shit because you weren't on one of their teams. That pretty much ruined high school gym class for me, and I wasn't even out of shape, just not in a competitive sport. I happily took up working out and weight lifting when I was in college and out on my own because I considered being healthy valuable.
However, now I think it has swung too far in the other direction. You can't tell someone they will be healthier if they make certain lifestyle changes or try and maintain a lower weight, and then help them do so. You have to "accept" them as overweight or even obese. In a country where we are edging our way more towards making everyone responsible for the health care of others, this will seriously screw our health care system.
I think we should be setting a standard and then having professionals who assist people in getting there. While there are always going to be people who end up larger or with a higher body fat than others, there are very few conditions which condemn you to being automatically obese no matter what. And even those conditions need to be fought against aggressively because being obese is dangerous by itself.
What cannot happen is the asshole gym teacher factor where you're shit if you don't come genetically programmed as the captain of the football/track/baseball/swimming team. I wouldn't think that setting that sort of standard in teaching should be all that difficult to manage. I have to admit, I sort of blame the intense focus on competitive sports in schools for that, because instead of working to ensure the health of the whole population of a school, they're instead focusing time, money, and interest into a small group of stand-outs who probably don't need the extra effort to begin with.
It's nice to win the popular vote, there's no denying it.
However, as someone else pointed out, neither the Bush nor the Gore campaign was run on that basis because the popular vote doesn't matter if the electoral vote is won.
If the Bush campaign targeted states or localities where they'd make more popular votes, they'd have run a different campaign and it is entirely possible Bush would have won the popular vote.
So no, I don't think the popular vote meant as much as it seems to. If Bush had done a massive "get out the vote" campaign in Republican strongholds that he would have otherwise ignored in safe Republican district, he may have gotten more popular votes.
If he spent money that way in an electoral college race, however, he would have lost.
If you have a district with 75% Republicans and one with only 49% Republicans, you don't spend your money or effort in the 75% Republican one because you needed to deliver districts and states, not people. With even a slight turnout in the 75% district, Bush was a winner, but he needed to spend to get every single person in that contested district he could.
Technically, this is possible. Land values in the US for tax purpose are in "mils" which are 1/1000th of a dollar. Even when this was created early on, a "mil" was never more than a unit of account.
I'm still going to point out that it is irrelevant. There are plenty of government employees. If they don't have enough employees to oversee the contractors, that is a fault of the government.
And if the government turned these functions over to contractors with no way of assuring that they were secure or manageable, that is still the government's fault.
Yes, if the contractors screwed up, they certainly share responsibility and if there was some sort of cover-up by the contractor, that would also mitigate it.
However, default passwords? Anyone could have audited that. The government did not. The contractor should be fired, but so should the people supposed to be doing the "oversight".
There is insurance for such things as well. When I was on a Board of Directors for a corporation, the directors were insured against certain claims, so the insurance may end up being responsible for payment if the corporate indemnification did not cover the whole thing.
This is called Directors and Officers Insurance and covers what corporate indemnification will not.
Since an MMO like that keeps moving the goalposts, maintaining his character probably felt more like a job than his job. So losing his account could either mean he contemplated suicide, or alternately he blinked, looked around, and realized that perhaps he should shower, shave, and dust five years worth of Cheetos dust off himself and he lived happily ever after.
Seriously, when they created Daily Tasks... I mean Daily Quests, it confirmed to me that I was sitting in a hamster wheel where I was logging in to do the same thing every day, so that I could get fake gold so that I could buy a fake item which they would proceed to nerf in the next patch and render completely quaint and obsolete in the next expansion. While you're running through new content and exploring stuff, it's pretty fun. And that lasts about a month and then you're back to farming shit.
So, odds are even that they actually saved him from madness and suicide.
Unless Google certifies that all of its links are to HTTPS sites, then it isn't an error condition, because the site is both up and providing the information that you searched for. In that case, it's a warning. And warnings should be clearly marked as such.
If I mean to go to a blog site that I know is insecure, but Google hates that it doesn't have HTTPS and turns it red and puts a line through it, then I might believe that the site is either offline, or perhaps dangerous.
If Google wants a nice shield icon or something to indicate that HTTPS is good to go, I'm down with that. That's informative, and it helps me understand what sites are, or are not secured in that manner.
If they start shaming sites that don't use it, then that is activist bullshit. And with Google's market share of search, that's a near monopoly who is making your site look like shit so most of your audience is going to see it.
SSL is not exactly hard to set up, but its not entirely trivial. Some people don't want to have to muck around with it, and they shouldn't have to if they don't actually provide a service that needs to be secure.
While I agree that law should be more efficient, sometimes you don't want it's enforcement to be *too* efficient.
Although I am not really sure where I stand on this, theoretically a judge, who is often a careerist, will frequently decide based on the case in the manner his colleagues prefer so that he receives preferment and does not receive scorn for his action. He will hand out sentences based on guidelines he doesn't necessarily believe in because of non-legislative "rules" created by the judiciary itself. He may well consider a case to be completely unjust, but will enforce the law as written because that is his job.
A jury on the other hand, may determine that the law was unfair and potentially nullify at that level.
Jury nullification is somewhat ambiguous as to its legitimacy, but I have to say that I'd prefer a jury nullifying a law when the other option is the people picking up guns and rebelling over it. Sometimes you need the lawyers to realize that the law isn't everything.
I do understand that courts that operate with only judges and professional jurors do exist and work in places like Europe, but Europe does not have a long history of judicial independence. Any set of justices can become captive to either a government or to a principle. The US courts are no different in that regard and I would prefer there to at least remain a popular check on their power which will tend towards the defendant going free.
If I was a paid shill and that was all I could come up with, I suppose I'd post anonymously, too...
And today we present the Shill Gambit.
The shill gambit is a type of ad hominem or poisoning the well logical fallacy, wherein one party dismisses the other’s argument by proclaiming them to be on the payroll of some company.
Sometimes known as the Big Pharma Shill Gambit or the Monsanto Shill Gambit. The shill gambit is used fallaciously when the only “evidence” given of such a connection to a big company or government is the endorsement of the position of the government or company, without any other evidence–the implication is that they provide that endorsement only because they receive some sort of compensation from the company or other agency.
On the other hand when such conflict of interest is both demonstrated by verifiable evidence and can be shown to interfere with a person’s judgement of the evidence, then it’s no longer a logical fallacy.
Compensation depends on what you're getting out of it, and it should be fairly negotiated. This is being done without anyone's explicit permission, and that is wrong if the person being provided this service would instead prefer to save the money or simply not have to deal with their equipment operating in that mode.
Having your equipment become a public access point turns your equipment into something that can be used by anyone. This can have the effect of causing the government to become interested in your access point.
What happens when the "firewall" between your private network and the public network is badly designed or faulty and someone discovers the vulnerability?
Do I have to accept some technician at my house to "fix" my equipment if the only thing broken on it is that part of the equipment? How would that work if it broke and I didn't care to fix it? Would I now be denied access to the other APs and be charged for service if I didn't let them fix it on their own schedule at my personal inconvenience?
Yeah, it's not a huge inconvenience, but when inconveniences can be forced on you without your specific permission, they start to add up.
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Which is why I think they're best off rejecting the file outright when it fails their scan.
This wouldn't really hurt their actual photo sharing service because real photos would be uploaded no matter what size they were, so they wouldn't lose their desired user base. And if someone who was trying this complained, they'd have to fork over the image and the support would simply state:
"Your image looks corrupted. What is it supposed to be?"
At that point the uploader would say, "It's a photo of static!!!! Upload it!!"
And then Amazon would upload it, because why not? They would have made it extremely expensive to abuse their system, even though it remains entirely possible to do. Everyone who tried this would have to go through the same process, while the people who were legitimately uploading actual photos would have no problem whatsoever and wouldn't care.
I do think many, if not most people are okay paying for movies, especially ones they know are good ones from friends, families, or trusted reviewers. That is, as long as the price is reasonable and it works as expected.
What makes piracy still attractive is the ability to get movies without certain restrictions and earlier than you'd get it from whatever method they subscribe to.
Price matters more to those who have little disposable income, but that is not as many people as you might think. Mostly it's young people. Certainly, I was much more tempted by piracy when I was younger and had little income. Not so much a problem now.
Convenience probably matters as much as price, but I think that has come a long way.
I do think that most people understand that you need to pay for what you want to see. Perhaps not the abusive prices you sometimes would get, but *something*. Free doesn't always win, even when you think it would.
I would be amused if they implemented a check for this and then simply said, "we're sorry, it appears your image was very large and might have been corrupted during upload. Please check your file and try again "
Those gym teachers need to change, or be changed. We just have to not go so far in the other direction that we accept obesity as an expression of your special uniqueness.
I don't want kinds shamed, but providing kids education about the effects of obesity and providing resources to help them change that if they want to is something we should see more of.
I know some really great people who happen to be obese, but they suffer from higher injury rates as well as things like heart disease and diabetes and it makes them unhappy. I think most of them would prefer not to be obese they just need help, but it's much much harder to make those changes as an adult than it would be for a younger person.
So it drives me nuts when I see people trying to keep kids from being educated in the name of not "fat shaming" them. I see very few other dangerous medical conditions where we make any bones about delivering the facts to those who need them.
Admittedly it is an awkward term, but it is used rhetorically by the pro-life side to make their point that what is eliminated is not a different species. It is a reaction to the use of accurate, but very specific, and clinical terminology to aid in the similar rhetorical *alienation* of the subject of the abortion (the developing human) from the usual concern for children in society.
However, if the way the word is constructed bothers you, I doubt anyone would argue if you called it a "developing human who has not been born yet". It's just kind of a mouthful. I prefer to use the shorthand for brevity.
I'm pretty sure that I was not equating death to comedy.
I was equating the speech involved in debating those issues with comedy.
Much comedy is satire and except in rare cases, it is also protected speech.
Debate and protest about the matters mentioned are also such as well on both sides.
I agree that they will never end "piracy".
However, I am not certain that they cannot end the easy participation of the average user in the process.
There will always be a guy selling DVDs on the corner, frequently backed up by organized crime. I'm not so certain that people who are less committed to that lifestyle will be always there and impossible to stop. That ease of participation relies on freedoms are now taken for granted which I feel may well become very eroded in the future.
You are correct. Sperm have all of their mitochondria located by the flagellum, not spread throughout the cytoplasm of the main body, which makes sense due to the fact that the real energy expenditure in a sperm cell is going to be movement.
The mitochondria and flagellum are left behind as a distinct unit when the main body merges with the egg. So, there are no male mitochondria in the resulting fertilized egg. There could be some sort of odd condition that allows something like the sperm mitochondria to make it inside the egg, but if that happens it is not the rule, and probably means that something is wrong.
That is why you will only inherit mitochondria via the female line, which has had an interesting ability to aid in tracing human migrations through history.
She wasn't risk adverse. She just wanted to make Yahoo work again on it's own terms. And that was hubris. There is little doubt in my mind that she though she could use her Google magic to resurrect Yahoo from the dead.
As you said, Yahoo's model has been doomed for years. In fact, you might as well say the doom has already occurred. They went over the event horizon of that black hole ten years ago, and now they're just trying to avoid being sucked farther in.
Personally, I feel they need to take stock, and yes, perhaps make a solid purchase and then uncouple from the old business and use it to push off to get out of their hole. Their *brand* still has recognition, and hence has value, but it may be time to rest it a bit and let some other business take the lead. The problem is, they need to find that business and Mayer hasn't been interested in that.
The core company actually has a negative market capitalization.
And remember market cap is that number which always seems to be worth more than the company really should be worth.
Shrinking your employee headcount is useless unless you have a profitable "core" capability that you're trying to scale down to. Yahoo's core business is irrelevant. They have users, but those users aren't making them any money.
So a loss of employees at this point is just Yahoo following conventional wisdom to bail out the boat to keep the stock price high. That gets Mayer more time to work before she's shit canned by the board, but it is at best a delaying tactic. If she has no real plan, then it is just gutting the company's resources which will accelerate the downward spiral.
If you look at AOL, they're still in business, but only because they had a good purchase that got them into the advertising business. I think they spent like $100mil on Advertising.com while they threw away $750mil on Bebo, a purchase I remember not understanding when I was working at AOL and knew insider stuff. Yahoo doesn't have an Advertising.com. It just has Bebos. And Mayer doesn't look like she has the interest in getting Yahoo a nice solid core business to land on.
I don't think Mayer has helped her company at all, but I think that, at the heart of it, Yahoo is a business whose day has come. They've failed. They're irrelevant. She *might* have been able to do something about it, but I think that if she had been able to turn it around, she would have deserved to be lauded like Steve Jobs.
The fact is, she was weaksauce when Yahoo was a dead letter in any situation except a heroic turnaround. You aren't going to create a heroic turnaround by firing her (or 15% of the workforce). It's not like she was holding back the heroically talented people there. They were in trouble long before she showed up.
Yahoo needs to do something like what Michael Dell suggested for Apple before Steve Jobs came back. Sell off their profitable groups, sell their assets, set up the employees with a nice severance package and give the money back to their shareholders and shut down.
I admit, Apple made that advice look silly but only because they could still get Steve Jobs, but who does Yahoo have?
My issue with Sanders isn't the world he would like to see, where everyone has health care or racial prejudice is a thing of the past, etc. My problem is his vehicle for trying to get us to those places. That's an important distinction.
It is his suggestion that we have to fight a class struggle and extract money from people who would prefer not to give it, or who simply *can't* afford it in order to make his ideals come true. That's socialism and while its end goals are not undesirable, it's always about how you get to those goals that matters. And it remains to be seen if socialism can actually do that for the USA, even if it was enacted "properly".
While I have little sympathy for a billionaire, history has shown me that when the revolution happens, the billionaires escape and live in exile in Paris and anyone who remains who has worked to get their head a little above the crowd gets that head chopped off. This is a concept which I have no sympathy for in the slightest.
While I see the point you're trying to make, some people believe that killing unborn children is the same thing as killing any other person. And I don't think you'd consider it odd that someone would protest against legalized mass killing if it was in another context.
Many people would consider it odd if your response to people killing other people was: well if you don't like killing people, don't kill them and leave me alone so I can kill them in peace. Protests against it make sense, as do the protests where the other side suggests that there is a privacy or health issue. I wouldn't consider telling either side to shut up about it.
Other people believe that guns kill people, which they do. Of course, the connection is not as direct, as guns don't automatically kill people, sometimes they kill animals, or paper targets.
That said, they can certainly be used to kill people. I am actually more on the side of Second Amendment liberties than not, but even I would not suggest that someone has no right to protest against guns. Guns can be used by one person to kill innocent people. I'd call that a concern. If you feel strongly about it, by all means protest one way or another.
The above two issues are places where it makes sense that the other side might ask for the "thing" to be outlawed. They're dangerous to someone who has no choice about avoiding them.
In this case, really, the only example where you can say, "just don't go see it," is comedy. And I agree with that 100%. When I went to college and everyone went to go to the leftist student protest, I didn't call for it to not be allowed, I just stayed away. I would think that the student body or the small fraction thereof who is offended by a protest or a comedy show would be capable of simply not going. And that is why things are going off the deep end in colleges and elsewhere.
There do exist events which are simply free speech where the offended majority now just wants to shut down *speech*. Speech should not be shut down by offense. Even if the speech is asking for something like "safe and legal abortion" to be continued or made illegal, or guns, or even racial prejudice, the *speech that either side uses to make their case* is what should not be blocked, even if you disagree with it or even find it offensive. And that is exactly what is at stake with over-sensitivity.
It used to be that you'd have asshole gym teachers treating you like shit because you weren't on one of their teams. That pretty much ruined high school gym class for me, and I wasn't even out of shape, just not in a competitive sport. I happily took up working out and weight lifting when I was in college and out on my own because I considered being healthy valuable.
However, now I think it has swung too far in the other direction. You can't tell someone they will be healthier if they make certain lifestyle changes or try and maintain a lower weight, and then help them do so. You have to "accept" them as overweight or even obese. In a country where we are edging our way more towards making everyone responsible for the health care of others, this will seriously screw our health care system.
I think we should be setting a standard and then having professionals who assist people in getting there. While there are always going to be people who end up larger or with a higher body fat than others, there are very few conditions which condemn you to being automatically obese no matter what. And even those conditions need to be fought against aggressively because being obese is dangerous by itself.
What cannot happen is the asshole gym teacher factor where you're shit if you don't come genetically programmed as the captain of the football/track/baseball/swimming team. I wouldn't think that setting that sort of standard in teaching should be all that difficult to manage. I have to admit, I sort of blame the intense focus on competitive sports in schools for that, because instead of working to ensure the health of the whole population of a school, they're instead focusing time, money, and interest into a small group of stand-outs who probably don't need the extra effort to begin with.
It's nice to win the popular vote, there's no denying it.
However, as someone else pointed out, neither the Bush nor the Gore campaign was run on that basis because the popular vote doesn't matter if the electoral vote is won.
If the Bush campaign targeted states or localities where they'd make more popular votes, they'd have run a different campaign and it is entirely possible Bush would have won the popular vote.
So no, I don't think the popular vote meant as much as it seems to. If Bush had done a massive "get out the vote" campaign in Republican strongholds that he would have otherwise ignored in safe Republican district, he may have gotten more popular votes.
If he spent money that way in an electoral college race, however, he would have lost.
If you have a district with 75% Republicans and one with only 49% Republicans, you don't spend your money or effort in the 75% Republican one because you needed to deliver districts and states, not people. With even a slight turnout in the 75% district, Bush was a winner, but he needed to spend to get every single person in that contested district he could.
Technically, this is possible. Land values in the US for tax purpose are in "mils" which are 1/1000th of a dollar. Even when this was created early on, a "mil" was never more than a unit of account.
If only the drone was actually priced in mils....
I'm still going to point out that it is irrelevant. There are plenty of government employees. If they don't have enough employees to oversee the contractors, that is a fault of the government.
And if the government turned these functions over to contractors with no way of assuring that they were secure or manageable, that is still the government's fault.
Yes, if the contractors screwed up, they certainly share responsibility and if there was some sort of cover-up by the contractor, that would also mitigate it.
However, default passwords? Anyone could have audited that. The government did not. The contractor should be fired, but so should the people supposed to be doing the "oversight".
Good ideas don't always make for good businesses.
And yes, I am skeptical too, but you can have a good idea and have it fail to be profitable, especially if no one knows what to do with it.
There is insurance for such things as well. When I was on a Board of Directors for a corporation, the directors were insured against certain claims, so the insurance may end up being responsible for payment if the corporate indemnification did not cover the whole thing.
This is called Directors and Officers Insurance and covers what corporate indemnification will not.
Since an MMO like that keeps moving the goalposts, maintaining his character probably felt more like a job than his job. So losing his account could either mean he contemplated suicide, or alternately he blinked, looked around, and realized that perhaps he should shower, shave, and dust five years worth of Cheetos dust off himself and he lived happily ever after.
Seriously, when they created Daily Tasks... I mean Daily Quests, it confirmed to me that I was sitting in a hamster wheel where I was logging in to do the same thing every day, so that I could get fake gold so that I could buy a fake item which they would proceed to nerf in the next patch and render completely quaint and obsolete in the next expansion. While you're running through new content and exploring stuff, it's pretty fun. And that lasts about a month and then you're back to farming shit.
So, odds are even that they actually saved him from madness and suicide.
Unless Google certifies that all of its links are to HTTPS sites, then it isn't an error condition, because the site is both up and providing the information that you searched for. In that case, it's a warning. And warnings should be clearly marked as such.
If I mean to go to a blog site that I know is insecure, but Google hates that it doesn't have HTTPS and turns it red and puts a line through it, then I might believe that the site is either offline, or perhaps dangerous.
If Google wants a nice shield icon or something to indicate that HTTPS is good to go, I'm down with that. That's informative, and it helps me understand what sites are, or are not secured in that manner.
If they start shaming sites that don't use it, then that is activist bullshit. And with Google's market share of search, that's a near monopoly who is making your site look like shit so most of your audience is going to see it.
SSL is not exactly hard to set up, but its not entirely trivial. Some people don't want to have to muck around with it, and they shouldn't have to if they don't actually provide a service that needs to be secure.
While I agree that law should be more efficient, sometimes you don't want it's enforcement to be *too* efficient.
Although I am not really sure where I stand on this, theoretically a judge, who is often a careerist, will frequently decide based on the case in the manner his colleagues prefer so that he receives preferment and does not receive scorn for his action. He will hand out sentences based on guidelines he doesn't necessarily believe in because of non-legislative "rules" created by the judiciary itself. He may well consider a case to be completely unjust, but will enforce the law as written because that is his job.
A jury on the other hand, may determine that the law was unfair and potentially nullify at that level.
Jury nullification is somewhat ambiguous as to its legitimacy, but I have to say that I'd prefer a jury nullifying a law when the other option is the people picking up guns and rebelling over it. Sometimes you need the lawyers to realize that the law isn't everything.
I do understand that courts that operate with only judges and professional jurors do exist and work in places like Europe, but Europe does not have a long history of judicial independence. Any set of justices can become captive to either a government or to a principle. The US courts are no different in that regard and I would prefer there to at least remain a popular check on their power which will tend towards the defendant going free.
If I was a paid shill and that was all I could come up with, I suppose I'd post anonymously, too...
And today we present the Shill Gambit.
The shill gambit is a type of ad hominem or poisoning the well logical fallacy, wherein one party dismisses the other’s argument by proclaiming them to be on the payroll of some company.
Sometimes known as the Big Pharma Shill Gambit or the Monsanto Shill Gambit. The shill gambit is used fallaciously when the only “evidence” given of such a connection to a big company or government is the endorsement of the position of the government or company, without any other evidence–the implication is that they provide that endorsement only because they receive some sort of compensation from the company or other agency.
On the other hand when such conflict of interest is both demonstrated by verifiable evidence and can be shown to interfere with a person’s judgement of the evidence, then it’s no longer a logical fallacy.
http://www.skepticalraptor.com...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/S...
Compensation depends on what you're getting out of it, and it should be fairly negotiated. This is being done without anyone's explicit permission, and that is wrong if the person being provided this service would instead prefer to save the money or simply not have to deal with their equipment operating in that mode.
Having your equipment become a public access point turns your equipment into something that can be used by anyone. This can have the effect of causing the government to become interested in your access point.
What happens when the "firewall" between your private network and the public network is badly designed or faulty and someone discovers the vulnerability?
Do I have to accept some technician at my house to "fix" my equipment if the only thing broken on it is that part of the equipment? How would that work if it broke and I didn't care to fix it? Would I now be denied access to the other APs and be charged for service if I didn't let them fix it on their own schedule at my personal inconvenience?
Yeah, it's not a huge inconvenience, but when inconveniences can be forced on you without your specific permission, they start to add up.
That would be DOCSWS.
In Russia, we call them "winterfaces"!