Deception is bad. On the other hand, can you taste the difference? And if not, does it matter?
Me, I admit probably not. There are grapes and wines that I like and grapes and wines that I don't, but I certainly couldn't call an Eastern Europe wine from a BC or California wine. That said, there are people who can. And think about it... the croatian wineries that can stand on their own name don't need to be deceptive. So the fraud wine is lower end stuff from eastern europe. the point here is that its not a good eastern european wine passing itself off as an Oakangan product, its usually a fairly poor one.
And yes it matters. Its bad for the BC and California wine business. The fraud wines are illegitmately increasing their marketshare through deception, and by necessity this decreases the marketshare of legitimate wineries by the same amount.
It also undermines my intention to buy locally when I select a BC wine. (And American intentions are similiarly undermined when they select wines purporting to be from California.)
Plus as the quality of the product is genuinely lower, it lowers the established reputation for quality from these regions. The Oakangan and the Napa Valley are both prime locations for growing grapes, and the wine from these locations is consistently very good... thus low quality eastern european wine damages their reputation (which in turn devalues the legitimate product...the whole "I don't see what all the fuss is about. This high falutin Napa Valley bottle doesn't taste any better than the cheap house wine we drank in Serbia." sort of situation. Well no shit, turns out its the same wine.
Actually, this is different. In the EU and US, names of food is controlled as trademarks. You can still produce sparking wine in the Napa Valley, but you can't claim it came from the Champagne region.
Of course not, because that would be an outright lie. It was produced in Napa Valley, USA not the Champagne, France, so of course you can't claim it came from Champagne, France.
I think you meant that you can't call California sparkling wine "Champagne", which is true for the reason you outlined.
That said, things are getting pretty dodgy with Wine.
A current problem in BC for example is that less reputable companies are taking grapes grown in wineries in Croatia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and are shipping them to be bottled in British Columbia, Canada and are thus legally and accurately bearing labels claiming 'bottled in the Oakanagan, British Columbia'.
Of course, since the grapes aren't actually grown in the oakanagan, the whole thing is a complete farce. But these wines are ending up on "BC wine lists", and being sold out liquor stores as "BC Wines" I don't know offhand but I wouldn't be surprised if California's good name is being similarly tainted by this practice.
Actually if you remove a tag of yourself in someone else's picture, they're not allowed to add it back. Which is a good thing, if you ask me.
I suspect the way that is likely implemented is that the tag is hidden instead of removed. So facebook still knows about it (so it can prevent it from being re-added... and so it can continue to use it to data mine)... its just not more generally visible.
They are no disconnected. They are associated with a location (via the poster), and a group of friends (via the other people tagged in the photos). This is a huge amount of information just there. If the photos have GPS we have your locations, which may include your house. If not, we can use flickr pools to get your location anyway.
Oh don't get me wrong, its a scary amount of information. But its not really any different than a photo of the local fencing club posting a picture of you accepting a silver at a tournament you participated in. You've got location, people you associate with, hobby information, maybe a picture of your girlfriend, etc, etc, etc. The amount of information that's on the web in general is 'scary', but its still effort to link the data together, and the results aren't fool proof. Is the John Smith at the fencing tournament the same one that posted on someone's blog or the same one that asked a question about cancer on this forum? On the web, you can make educated guesses... sometimes... on facebook... everything there is handed to them on a silver platter. Join the facebook group for your fencing club and the cancer support group and there is NO guesswork.
The web is a 'little scray' facebook is 'horrifying'.
So, there is absolutely no problem with this. I'm told people over 18 are mature enough to make these kinds of decisions for themselves.
Insofar as what people document about themselves, yes. Its idiotic, but people are allowed to be idiots.
However, I do find it disturbing the degree to which people will document others as well. And one can't share one's own life without sharing the lives of their social group too. And that is a problem. Facebook aggravates it because it makes it trivial for what others document about me to be linked back to me. Its a lot more work to build a profile on me based on the occasional reference to me on various club pages, and personal blogs than it is to build a profile of a facebook member, based SOLEY on what OTHER PEOPLE have published ABOUT YOU.
But your friends know you. And they may, in fact, be posting information about you. Everything from tagging pictures to leaving notes. You have no control over this.
That's true to a point. But on some level that's not 'your information' that's others information about you. You couldn't stop your friends from outing you as gay or communist or vegetarian in the 60s and you can't today. Facebook isn't really a factor.
However, in terms of data mining and automated profiling etc its worse if you have a facebook account than if you don't. If someone tags a non-FB member its just a name attached to a photo. It doesn't really go anywhere. Its true that someone could see it or read a note mentioning you and connect it to you, or do sophisticated data mining to link all those references together and assemble a profile... but if you tag someone who is a fb member (the way they want you to) it creates a link back to that account, making it utterly TRIVIAL to connect it back to you.
I'm not on facebook. So while there may be some pictures on it with my name tagged to them, its not really any worse than the web in general. My name/photo is together in a few places online, but they aren't all linked together back to a single 'account' somewhere. If there are tagged photos of me on fb its the same, they are their but all disconnected. If you have a facebook account they'd all link back to that.
My 'privacy' isn't absolute. I don't expect it to be impossible for people find stuff about me online. But I do object strongly to stuff like facebook where a single company is handed tons of data self-documented by its own users... its idiotic that anyone would participate.
I have wondered why the post office couldn't go electric for many things. IE would it be more efficient to just have a scanner at the post office, you stick in your post card it is scanned and...
Yes we've had fax machines for decades now...
For something like a postcard or letter, half the value is the fact that it's a hand written card that physically traveled half the world from the other person to you. If the message itself was all that was necessary they could have just sent me picture/text message from their phone, or sent a fax.
Plus we already have several email->fax and email->snail mail services occupying the niche. I don't see the post office getting much from getting involved itself.
IE would it be more efficient to just have a scanner at the post office, you stick in your post card it is scanned and shredded and recycled. They print it out at the other end.
So right off the start it would be printed twice vs just once. It -might- be more efficient, but the savings on shipping would have to be twice as efficient due to the cost of printing it a 2nd time... just to break even.
So you want to create a brother to the IRS to investigate "milage tax" claims? Oh brother.
It would be a fraction of the size of the monstrosity that would be required to monitor all of us all the time.
If you are going to tax them based on where and when they drive, YES YOU DO. The only time you don't need to monitor everyone's movement is when they aren't moving. Otherwise, you need to know which road they are on, if any, and what time it is so you can apply the correct tax rate.
Who gives a shit if its not 100% ? Its not going to be 100% no matter what you do. If a New Yorker drives in New Jersey, and pays the tax in New York, so what? That'll be adequately offset by the guy from New Jersey driving to Manhattan.
Is there really a lot of state roads (because interstates are already 90% federally funded) that would be so grossly underfunded because of a massive interstate traffic imbalance? And if they are they are more than making up for it in tourism dollars and sales taxes from this imbalance of out-of-state drivers.
It's simply not worth the loss of privacy and creation of government departments necessary to manage it to move it from NON EXISTANT to A BLIGHT ON SOCIETY.
That is a separate question. But the essential issue at hand is that fuel tax revenue is dropping as drivers shift to more efficient vehicles. But wear and tear on the roads isn't dropping. Further increasing the fuel tax is one solution, but its starting to disproportionately punish people with less efficient cars -- making them pay for far more than their share of the road maintenance. As we shift to electric or alternative fuels, this becomes an even bigger problem, so at some point we ARE going to need to wind down funding from fuel taxes and obtain it elsewhere.
An odometer tax, with a rate based on where you live, is comparatively simple, and relatively fair. And its been working fine for the insurance companies for decades*.
* your insurance rate in most places is a function of where you live (and your driving record of course), rather than based on exactly how risky where you drive is. Its not perfect, but its close enough.
The GP may be exaggerating, but how about when I drive from Maine to the Grand Canyon and pretend it didn't happen? Or when I claim that my wife takes me to work every day (when I drive myself)?
You can pretend your business lost money last year too when filing your taxes too. You can drive across town, set your car on fire, and then make an insurance claim too.
Sometimes people will get away with it. Sometimes they will get caught. The more outrageous the lie the better odds of being caught.
Insurance companies investigate claims, the IRS audits tax payers, etc.
No reason they can't randomly investigate/audit your 'suspecious' odometer claims in a variety of ways. People will be able to get away with it, but enough people will get caught that most won't try. Just make the fines for getting caught enough that its not worth it.
The GP may be exaggerating, but how about when I drive from Maine to the Grand Canyon and pretend it didn't happen?
Sure you might get away with it... provided you avoided camera tolls, and other existing camera monitored infrastructure. Sooner or later you'll go on a trip and forget that you got a $5 toll charged by a photo-camera crossing a bridge, and get nailed hard enough to make all the taxes you dodged for the last 10 years irrelevant.
Or when I claim that my wife takes me to work every day (when I drive myself)?
It wouldn't take an investigator/auditor very long to uncover that either, now would it.
The point is: we don't need to monitor everyone's movement ALL OF THE TIME to effectively implement something like this. Its not going to be perfect, and it doesn't have to be. Its simply not worth the invasive loss of privacy to move it from GOOD ENOUGH to ALMOST PERFECT.
I will love to see all the attorney's general complaints over mom/pops charging 10 hours to diagnose something that even the OEM can't document!
There is a layer between mom/pops and the dealer. The big chain repair shops in particular will have the resources to make good use of additional diagnostic information. To the point of having in house engineers trained by the manufacturers to provide support.
I will love to see all the attorney's general complaints over mom/pops charging 10 hours to diagnose something that even the OEM can't document!
Heh, I'd rather pay 10 hours at 70$/hr for 'pop' to diagnose something the OEM can't figure out vs $120/hr for the OEM to spend the same 10 hours not being able to figure it out.
I generally actually prefer a good mom/pop shop for maddeningly intermittent or particularly difficult to diagnose issues because of this.
To do a reverse slashdot and make an IT analogy of this car scenario... sometimes you really need to involve Microsoft to solve an error, but far more often than not, you can solve it independently (or at least with 3rd party consultants/technicians) -- in large part because a LOT of (not all, but a LOT) of the errors are documented fairly well, and the web community has filled in a lot of the gaps in the docs. It would be a very different world if every time outlook couldn't download your mail you had to send your computer into Microsoft to fix the "0x000AA352B error code".
That would be the essential plan, no? Clone somebody using molecules far away, and then kill them.
That's a different sort of clone. Its not a new organism with the same DNA (e.g. like an identical twin), its an exact copy of the same organism. That's different. For starters the exact copy isn't going to live any longer than the original one would have.
(Of course ST explored that a bit further with various episodes that had transporters 'malfunction' in various ways....)
A branch falls off, and instead of dying, it just becomes a new plant.
I'm no biologist, but wouldn't that make it an evolutionary dead end? I mean I've heard of lots of organizems that -can- reproduce asexually and create clones, but I didn't think any ONLY reproduced by cloning.
Further, I think its absurd to call it the oldest living organism. Clones may be identical but they are separate organisms. If I cloned you and then killed you, you're family would be unimpressed by my 'he's not dead because I cloned him' argument. And if I we keep making new clones every 20 years or so for a 1000 years, the latest generation clone is still not 1000 years old by any normal persons reckoning. Do we actually have evidence that this particular organism was alive a long time ago?
Since the very first page of the questionnaire has radio buttons that overwrite each other in every browser but IE, any thinking user should conclude if Symantec can't even author a website you shouldn't trust them with your PC's internet security.
If you aren't using IE you probably are too savvy to buy the product they are selling too. They're not losing anyone who would have bought it.
"ised for the treatment of Alan Turing in the post war era. An online petition got more than enough signatures to force an official statement..."
That's just the sort of encouragement these 'sign my [useless] online petition' people need.
I'm all for protesting, but an online petition is one small step above... scratch that... exactly equivalent to moaning about an issue on slashdot.
That the gov't reacted is not because of the power of the online petition, it was far more likely simply because it was a convenient and symbolic gesture that would distract news media from more critical stories.
The US Army is murdering people? Sweet! Apparently killing the the asshole trying to kill you is "murder" to this ass backwards son of a bitch.
The OVERWHELMINGLY VAST MAJORITY of afghani's that have been killed in the war wouldn't be trying to kill you if you hadn't invaded their country. And the civilian casualties, the farmers, the women, the children? They never tried killing anyone, anywhere.
I'm not EVER going to call the soldiers murderers, as long they go where they're told and shoot what they're told to shoot at.
But the army itself is merely a weapon on some level. The people wielding that weapon are guilty of murder. These wars were not justifiable. Too many innocent people have died on both sides for no good reason.
it's $4K for 2 days work. If they could pull off 10 heists like this, it's the equivalent of $40K take home pay working for less than 3 weeks a year.
Except that's a fallacy. They can't pull off 10 heists like this. The odds of them getting caught go up astronomically.
This keeps coming up, and it's just idiotic. You propose they should've spent more time in the store trying to find this stuff? WTF? It's smash and grab, not smash, grab, and look for accessories and boxes.
No, I'm merely pointing it out to highlight that while this may have been 50k worth of merchandise to Apple and the media - its realizable value is only a fraction of that to the theives, and being incomplete is partly why. In contrast, had they stolen new-in-box units from a stock room, warehouse, shipping container or freight truck, they'd be much easier to sell, and for more money. They might be able to keep 50-75% of the value instead of 20-50%.
A smash-and-grab is not the most complex crime to execute to be sure; but this one was well choreographed.
Fair enough.
They knew just how to hit the plate glass to bring it down fast so they could all run it without even slowing down and they know which team members were going to grab what.
That is much less difficult than you might imagine.
I don't know what these guys plan to do to get around the serial numbers, but I bet they already have a plan for fencing the goods, and I'd guess its about as sound as any criminal enterprise can be.
They left power adapters, discs, cords, and manuals etc behind, so the products are unboxed and incomplete. It might have been $46,000 retail, but between 20% and 50% on the street, on the low end of that if they are fencing them instead of trying to sell them themselves. Divided by 5 guys.
To me the biggest fail of this crime was that they only make a couple grand each. I doubt they clear 4k each. What kind of retard masterminds, organizes, and choreographs a five man heist where he only makes 4 grand if he's LUCKY.
I don't know whether my idea of criminality standards are just a bit higher, but when I watched that video I wasn't the slightest bit "amazed" by it.
No doubt.
Five guys take 46G (full retail value) far less on 2ndary markets; call it 1/2 to make it a round number. That's maybe 8,000 each. MAYBE. For crying out loud, if you are going to commit a crime... someone like Bernie Madoff comes to mind. But this?
Not so much.
What's next. Next time some kids rob a convenience store and fill a pickup truck with cigarettes we get it on the front page? Oh... wait...I get it, its news because it was Apple. Lame.
Context is everything. Your entirely right in your analysis, based on the context you put them in.
But for an alternate view... this is how I use these two:
"I'm on my way".
I do this when I'm running late, usually with an eta either when I'm late or when I'm needed for something -- I get off work at randomish times so the time changes all the time. I don't need a response or a conversation, I just want to let them know when I'll be there so they can decide how to use their time until I get there. If it doesn't matter when I get there, then I don't.
Which pub, what time
When I text something like that, its not an 'opener', its because we've already agreed we're going out. Again I don't need a conversation. I just need to know where and when. I'll meet friends for lunch like this too... a bunch of them work toghether and pick a place every day. If I can join them, I just need to know what they've decided and when they'll be there... I'll save the conversation for the meal.
That doesn't make her operation of it silent. I find it distracting simply from the clicking of the key presses and the fact that she's fumbling with it, and only half paying attention to what were doing and/or what I'm saying.
For casual conversations in a lot of circles, texting has almost completely replaced phone calls. Actual phone calls are only useful anymore when something is time critical or the conversation would have a lot of back and forth discussion or details.
That's what a "conversation" -is-.
If what are you doing can be accomplished via texting it is either:
a) not a conversation b) a stupidly inefficient conversation (as in 30 minutes to accomplish with a 2 minute phone call)
Texting is fine if you just want to send 'hey whats up' or 'I'm on my way' or a 'catch a movie tonight?' or 'which pub, what time?'
But people racking up 2000+ messages a month are usually just wasting time. If a text message exchagne exceeds about 5 messages, you'd have been better off with a phone call in terms of time, and in terms of building a real connection with someone.
The big 'advantage' of text message conversations is that they SEEM less intrusive. You APPEAR to have a conversation with someone whithout stopping what you are doing. Thing is, its complete bullshit. I used to watch TV/movies with my wife while she text messaged her friends. She thought it was 'good' because she didn't have to pause for 5-10 minutes to have a conversation. But it drove me fucking nuts with the little alerts going off and her constant clicking away on her phone. And it turns out that despite the fact that she thought she could do both at once, she ended up missing half the show.
Pausing it for 10 minutes, and just having a conversation works far better. Point is: texting is more disruptive and rude to the people you are with than takign the occasional phone call. Being completely interrupted once in a while for a couple minutes is better than being half ignored for 40 minute stretches.
Your conditions betray your fundamental lack of understanding of your own question.
[-boggle-]
I think you misunderstood me.
You ask someone to perform a fractional operation without using fractions!
The parent poster claimed multiplication was simply shorthand for addition.
I took that as to mean that we don't need a multiplication operator or operations. Its just more convenient than using addition for everything. My question was to illustrate why that is incorrect.
How does that work out to addition? I'm going to use the commutative property of multiplication to get around the biggest problem you've created for me.
3/2 * 4/5 = 4/5 * 3/2
4/5 = 1 1/2 so we can add 4/5 to itself 1 1/2 times.
4/5 + 4/10 = 12/10 Q.E.D.
Couple things. First 4/5 does not equal 1 1/2. That threw me for a moment, you meant to say 3/2 = 1 1/2. Second, evaluating 4/5 * 1 1/2 as equal to 4/5 + 4/10s requires multiplication. You essentially are distributing (4/5) over (1 1/2) or (1+1/2):
When demonstrating how you can do multiplication using *just addition*, it's pretty deceptive to just leave all the multiplication you are doing out.
You might complain that I multiplied the second term by 1/2. (Or 0.5. *shudder*) Or that I divided it by 2. This might seem more reasonable if I demonstrated on a number line.
Indeed I would complain loudly. The entire purpose of the problem was to illustrate that you can't rearrange it to define it in terms of pure addition. Rearranging it so that you only have to divide by 2 or multiply by 1/2 instead of 4/5ths misses the point.
But it might be useful to think of it that way in certain contexts. If your nephew charged your niece eighty...
Yes, I don't dispute that at all, and agree its a fine way to explain the situation to someone who doesn't grasp multiplication. But all you've done is rearrange it so the multiplication is simpler. Its still there.
If you're curious about Math, I hope you'll pursue that curiosity.
I've got a much better grasp of mathematics than you've given me credit for. To the point that I found the tone of your post condescending. But as I feel you genuinely set out to improve my understanding rather than mock, I've taken no offense.
Slashdot Mirror
Deception is bad. On the other hand, can you taste the difference? And if not, does it matter?
Me, I admit probably not. There are grapes and wines that I like and grapes and wines that I don't, but I certainly couldn't call an Eastern Europe wine from a BC or California wine. That said, there are people who can. And think about it... the croatian wineries that can stand on their own name don't need to be deceptive. So the fraud wine is lower end stuff from eastern europe. the point here is that its not a good eastern european wine passing itself off as an Oakangan product, its usually a fairly poor one.
And yes it matters. Its bad for the BC and California wine business. The fraud wines are illegitmately increasing their marketshare through deception, and by necessity this decreases the marketshare of legitimate wineries by the same amount.
It also undermines my intention to buy locally when I select a BC wine. (And American intentions are similiarly undermined when they select wines purporting to be from California.)
Plus as the quality of the product is genuinely lower, it lowers the established reputation for quality from these regions. The Oakangan and the Napa Valley are both prime locations for growing grapes, and the wine from these locations is consistently very good... thus low quality eastern european wine damages their reputation (which in turn devalues the legitimate product...the whole "I don't see what all the fuss is about. This high falutin Napa Valley bottle doesn't taste any better than the cheap house wine we drank in Serbia." sort of situation. Well no shit, turns out its the same wine.
Actually, this is different. In the EU and US, names of food is controlled as trademarks. You can still produce sparking wine in the Napa Valley, but you can't claim it came from the Champagne region.
Of course not, because that would be an outright lie. It was produced in Napa Valley, USA not the Champagne, France, so of course you can't claim it came from Champagne, France.
I think you meant that you can't call California sparkling wine "Champagne", which is true for the reason you outlined.
That said, things are getting pretty dodgy with Wine.
A current problem in BC for example is that less reputable companies are taking grapes grown in wineries in Croatia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and are shipping them to be bottled in British Columbia, Canada and are thus legally and accurately bearing labels claiming 'bottled in the Oakanagan, British Columbia'.
Of course, since the grapes aren't actually grown in the oakanagan, the whole thing is a complete farce. But these wines are ending up on "BC wine lists", and being sold out liquor stores as "BC Wines" I don't know offhand but I wouldn't be surprised if California's good name is being similarly tainted by this practice.
Actually if you remove a tag of yourself in someone else's picture, they're not allowed to add it back. Which is a good thing, if you ask me.
I suspect the way that is likely implemented is that the tag is hidden instead of removed. So facebook still knows about it (so it can prevent it from being re-added... and so it can continue to use it to data mine)... its just not more generally visible.
So its probably actually worse.
They are no disconnected. They are associated with a location (via the poster), and a group of friends (via the other people tagged in the photos). This is a huge amount of information just there. If the photos have GPS we have your locations, which may include your house. If not, we can use flickr pools to get your location anyway.
Oh don't get me wrong, its a scary amount of information. But its not really any different than a photo of the local fencing club posting a picture of you accepting a silver at a tournament you participated in. You've got location, people you associate with, hobby information, maybe a picture of your girlfriend, etc, etc, etc. The amount of information that's on the web in general is 'scary', but its still effort to link the data together, and the results aren't fool proof. Is the John Smith at the fencing tournament the same one that posted on someone's blog or the same one that asked a question about cancer on this forum? On the web, you can make educated guesses... sometimes... on facebook... everything there is handed to them on a silver platter. Join the facebook group for your fencing club and the cancer support group and there is NO guesswork.
The web is a 'little scray' facebook is 'horrifying'.
So, there is absolutely no problem with this. I'm told people over 18 are mature enough to make these kinds of decisions for themselves.
Insofar as what people document about themselves, yes. Its idiotic, but people are allowed to be idiots.
However, I do find it disturbing the degree to which people will document others as well. And one can't share one's own life without sharing the lives of their social group too. And that is a problem. Facebook aggravates it because it makes it trivial for what others document about me to be linked back to me. Its a lot more work to build a profile on me based on the occasional reference to me on various club pages, and personal blogs than it is to build a profile of a facebook member, based SOLEY on what OTHER PEOPLE have published ABOUT YOU.
But your friends know you. And they may, in fact, be posting information about you. Everything from tagging pictures to leaving notes. You have no control over this.
That's true to a point. But on some level that's not 'your information' that's others information about you. You couldn't stop your friends from outing you as gay or communist or vegetarian in the 60s and you can't today. Facebook isn't really a factor.
However, in terms of data mining and automated profiling etc its worse if you have a facebook account than if you don't. If someone tags a non-FB member its just a name attached to a photo. It doesn't really go anywhere. Its true that someone could see it or read a note mentioning you and connect it to you, or do sophisticated data mining to link all those references together and assemble a profile... but if you tag someone who is a fb member (the way they want you to) it creates a link back to that account, making it utterly TRIVIAL to connect it back to you.
I'm not on facebook. So while there may be some pictures on it with my name tagged to them, its not really any worse than the web in general. My name/photo is together in a few places online, but they aren't all linked together back to a single 'account' somewhere. If there are tagged photos of me on fb its the same, they are their but all disconnected. If you have a facebook account they'd all link back to that.
My 'privacy' isn't absolute. I don't expect it to be impossible for people find stuff about me online. But I do object strongly to stuff like facebook where a single company is handed tons of data self-documented by its own users... its idiotic that anyone would participate.
'Email would be more efficient, whether it is printed or not is left to the recipient.
Agreed. But there is a niche market for the email->snail mail services. They primarily to send to people who don't have computers/email.
I have wondered why the post office couldn't go electric for many things. IE would it be more efficient to just have a scanner at the post office, you stick in your post card it is scanned and...
Yes we've had fax machines for decades now...
For something like a postcard or letter, half the value is the fact that it's a hand written card that physically traveled half the world from the other person to you. If the message itself was all that was necessary they could have just sent me picture/text message from their phone, or sent a fax.
Plus we already have several email->fax and email->snail mail services occupying the niche. I don't see the post office getting much from getting involved itself.
IE would it be more efficient to just have a scanner at the post office, you stick in your post card it is scanned and shredded and recycled. They print it out at the other end.
So right off the start it would be printed twice vs just once. It -might- be more efficient, but the savings on shipping would have to be twice as efficient due to the cost of printing it a 2nd time... just to break even.
So you want to create a brother to the IRS to investigate "milage tax" claims? Oh brother.
It would be a fraction of the size of the monstrosity that would be required to monitor all of us all the time.
If you are going to tax them based on where and when they drive, YES YOU DO. The only time you don't need to monitor everyone's movement is when they aren't moving. Otherwise, you need to know which road they are on, if any, and what time it is so you can apply the correct tax rate.
Who gives a shit if its not 100% ? Its not going to be 100% no matter what you do. If a New Yorker drives in New Jersey, and pays the tax in New York, so what? That'll be adequately offset by the guy from New Jersey driving to Manhattan.
Is there really a lot of state roads (because interstates are already 90% federally funded) that would be so grossly underfunded because of a massive interstate traffic imbalance? And if they are they are more than making up for it in tourism dollars and sales taxes from this imbalance of out-of-state drivers.
It's simply not worth the loss of privacy and creation of government departments necessary to manage it to move it from NON EXISTANT to A BLIGHT ON SOCIETY.
That is a separate question. But the essential issue at hand is that fuel tax revenue is dropping as drivers shift to more efficient vehicles. But wear and tear on the roads isn't dropping. Further increasing the fuel tax is one solution, but its starting to disproportionately punish people with less efficient cars -- making them pay for far more than their share of the road maintenance. As we shift to electric or alternative fuels, this becomes an even bigger problem, so at some point we ARE going to need to wind down funding from fuel taxes and obtain it elsewhere.
An odometer tax, with a rate based on where you live, is comparatively simple, and relatively fair. And its been working fine for the insurance companies for decades*.
* your insurance rate in most places is a function of where you live (and your driving record of course), rather than based on exactly how risky where you drive is. Its not perfect, but its close enough.
The GP may be exaggerating, but how about when I drive from Maine to the Grand Canyon and pretend it didn't happen? Or when I claim that my wife takes me to work every day (when I drive myself)?
You can pretend your business lost money last year too when filing your taxes too.
You can drive across town, set your car on fire, and then make an insurance claim too.
Sometimes people will get away with it. Sometimes they will get caught. The more outrageous the lie the better odds of being caught.
Insurance companies investigate claims, the IRS audits tax payers, etc.
No reason they can't randomly investigate/audit your 'suspecious' odometer claims in a variety of ways. People will be able to get away with it, but enough people will get caught that most won't try. Just make the fines for getting caught enough that its not worth it.
The GP may be exaggerating, but how about when I drive from Maine to the Grand Canyon and pretend it didn't happen?
Sure you might get away with it... provided you avoided camera tolls, and other existing camera monitored infrastructure. Sooner or later you'll go on a trip and forget that you got a $5 toll charged by a photo-camera crossing a bridge, and get nailed hard enough to make all the taxes you dodged for the last 10 years irrelevant.
Or when I claim that my wife takes me to work every day (when I drive myself)?
It wouldn't take an investigator/auditor very long to uncover that either, now would it.
The point is: we don't need to monitor everyone's movement ALL OF THE TIME to effectively implement something like this. Its not going to be perfect, and it doesn't have to be. Its simply not worth the invasive loss of privacy to move it from GOOD ENOUGH to ALMOST PERFECT.
I will love to see all the attorney's general complaints over mom/pops charging 10 hours to diagnose something that even the OEM can't document!
There is a layer between mom/pops and the dealer. The big chain repair shops in particular will have the resources to make good use of additional diagnostic information. To the point of having in house engineers trained by the manufacturers to provide support.
I will love to see all the attorney's general complaints over mom/pops charging 10 hours to diagnose something that even the OEM can't document!
Heh, I'd rather pay 10 hours at 70$/hr for 'pop' to diagnose something the OEM can't figure out vs $120/hr for the OEM to spend the same 10 hours not being able to figure it out.
I generally actually prefer a good mom/pop shop for maddeningly intermittent or particularly difficult to diagnose issues because of this.
To do a reverse slashdot and make an IT analogy of this car scenario... sometimes you really need to involve Microsoft to solve an error, but far more often than not, you can solve it independently (or at least with 3rd party consultants/technicians) -- in large part because a LOT of (not all, but a LOT) of the errors are documented fairly well, and the web community has filled in a lot of the gaps in the docs. It would be a very different world if every time outlook couldn't download your mail you had to send your computer into Microsoft to fix the "0x000AA352B error code".
That would be the essential plan, no? Clone somebody using molecules far away, and then kill them.
That's a different sort of clone. Its not a new organism with the same DNA (e.g. like an identical twin), its an exact copy of the same organism. That's different. For starters the exact copy isn't going to live any longer than the original one would have.
(Of course ST explored that a bit further with various episodes that had transporters 'malfunction' in various ways....)
A branch falls off, and instead of dying, it just becomes a new plant.
I'm no biologist, but wouldn't that make it an evolutionary dead end? I mean I've heard of lots of organizems that -can- reproduce asexually and create clones, but I didn't think any ONLY reproduced by cloning.
Further, I think its absurd to call it the oldest living organism. Clones may be identical but they are separate organisms. If I cloned you and then killed you, you're family would be unimpressed by my 'he's not dead because I cloned him' argument. And if I we keep making new clones every 20 years or so for a 1000 years, the latest generation clone is still not 1000 years old by any normal persons reckoning. Do we actually have evidence that this particular organism was alive a long time ago?
Is "Outraged" a bit redundant, I was under the impression that it was implied when talking about Christian bloggers.
I was under the impression that it was implied when talking about bloggers.
Since the very first page of the questionnaire has radio buttons that overwrite each other in every browser but IE, any thinking user should conclude if Symantec can't even author a website you shouldn't trust them with your PC's internet security.
If you aren't using IE you probably are too savvy to buy the product they are selling too. They're not losing anyone who would have bought it.
"ised for the treatment of Alan Turing in the post war era. An online petition got more than enough signatures to force an official statement..."
That's just the sort of encouragement these 'sign my [useless] online petition' people need.
I'm all for protesting, but an online petition is one small step above... scratch that... exactly equivalent to moaning about an issue on slashdot.
That the gov't reacted is not because of the power of the online petition, it was far more likely simply because it was a convenient and symbolic gesture that would distract news media from more critical stories.
The US Army is murdering people? Sweet! Apparently killing the the asshole trying to kill you is "murder" to this ass backwards son of a bitch.
The OVERWHELMINGLY VAST MAJORITY of afghani's that have been killed in the war wouldn't be trying to kill you if you hadn't invaded their country. And the civilian casualties, the farmers, the women, the children? They never tried killing anyone, anywhere.
I'm not EVER going to call the soldiers murderers, as long they go where they're told and shoot what they're told to shoot at.
But the army itself is merely a weapon on some level. The people wielding that weapon are guilty of murder. These wars were not justifiable. Too many innocent people have died on both sides for no good reason.
A low probability,...
Nuff said.
Sure its possible, but its beyond unlikely.
Besides: What would basement nerds need an iphone for? ;) The laptop is always 3 feet away, and they aren't expecting any phone calls anyway.
it's $4K for 2 days work. If they could pull off 10 heists like this, it's the equivalent of $40K take home pay working for less than 3 weeks a year.
Except that's a fallacy. They can't pull off 10 heists like this. The odds of them getting caught go up astronomically.
This keeps coming up, and it's just idiotic. You propose they should've spent more time in the store trying to find this stuff? WTF? It's smash and grab, not smash, grab, and look for accessories and boxes.
No, I'm merely pointing it out to highlight that while this may have been 50k worth of merchandise to Apple and the media - its realizable value is only a fraction of that to the theives, and being incomplete is partly why. In contrast, had they stolen new-in-box units from a stock room, warehouse, shipping container or freight truck, they'd be much easier to sell, and for more money. They might be able to keep 50-75% of the value instead of 20-50%.
A smash-and-grab is not the most complex crime to execute to be sure; but this one was well choreographed.
Fair enough.
They knew just how to hit the plate glass to bring it down fast so they could all run it without even slowing down and they know which team members were going to grab what.
That is much less difficult than you might imagine.
I don't know what these guys plan to do to get around the serial numbers, but I bet they already have a plan for fencing the goods, and I'd guess its about as sound as any criminal enterprise can be.
They left power adapters, discs, cords, and manuals etc behind, so the products are unboxed and incomplete. It might have been $46,000 retail, but between 20% and 50% on the street, on the low end of that if they are fencing them instead of trying to sell them themselves. Divided by 5 guys.
To me the biggest fail of this crime was that they only make a couple grand each. I doubt they clear 4k each. What kind of retard masterminds, organizes, and choreographs a five man heist where he only makes 4 grand if he's LUCKY.
I don't know whether my idea of criminality standards are just a bit higher, but when I watched that video I wasn't the slightest bit "amazed" by it.
No doubt.
Five guys take 46G (full retail value) far less on 2ndary markets; call it 1/2 to make it a round number. That's maybe 8,000 each. MAYBE. For crying out loud, if you are going to commit a crime... someone like Bernie Madoff comes to mind. But this?
Not so much.
What's next. Next time some kids rob a convenience store and fill a pickup truck with cigarettes we get it on the front page? Oh... wait...I get it, its news because it was Apple. Lame.
Context is everything. Your entirely right in your analysis, based on the context you put them in.
But for an alternate view... this is how I use these two:
"I'm on my way".
I do this when I'm running late, usually with an eta either when I'm late or when I'm needed for something -- I get off work at randomish times so the time changes all the time. I don't need a response or a conversation, I just want to let them know when I'll be there so they can decide how to use their time until I get there. If it doesn't matter when I get there, then I don't.
Which pub, what time
When I text something like that, its not an 'opener', its because we've already agreed we're going out. Again I don't need a conversation. I just need to know where and when. I'll meet friends for lunch like this too... a bunch of them work toghether and pick a place every day. If I can join them, I just need to know what they've decided and when they'll be there... I'll save the conversation for the meal.
Send her a text and tell her to mute the phone.
That doesn't make her operation of it silent. I find it distracting simply from the clicking of the key presses and the fact that she's fumbling with it, and only half paying attention to what were doing and/or what I'm saying.
For casual conversations in a lot of circles, texting has almost completely replaced phone calls. Actual phone calls are only useful anymore when something is time critical or the conversation would have a lot of back and forth discussion or details.
That's what a "conversation" -is-.
If what are you doing can be accomplished via texting it is either:
a) not a conversation
b) a stupidly inefficient conversation (as in 30 minutes to accomplish with a 2 minute phone call)
Texting is fine if you just want to send 'hey whats up' or 'I'm on my way' or a 'catch a movie tonight?' or 'which pub, what time?'
But people racking up 2000+ messages a month are usually just wasting time. If a text message exchagne exceeds about 5 messages, you'd have been better off with a phone call in terms of time, and in terms of building a real connection with someone.
The big 'advantage' of text message conversations is that they SEEM less intrusive. You APPEAR to have a conversation with someone whithout stopping what you are doing. Thing is, its complete bullshit. I used to watch TV/movies with my wife while she text messaged her friends. She thought it was 'good' because she didn't have to pause for 5-10 minutes to have a conversation. But it drove me fucking nuts with the little alerts going off and her constant clicking away on her phone. And it turns out that despite the fact that she thought she could do both at once, she ended up missing half the show.
Pausing it for 10 minutes, and just having a conversation works far better. Point is: texting is more disruptive and rude to the people you are with than takign the occasional phone call. Being completely interrupted once in a while for a couple minutes is better than being half ignored for 40 minute stretches.
Your conditions betray your fundamental lack of understanding of your own question.
[-boggle-]
I think you misunderstood me.
You ask someone to perform a fractional operation without using fractions!
The parent poster claimed multiplication was simply shorthand for addition.
I took that as to mean that we don't need a multiplication operator or operations. Its just more convenient than using addition for everything. My question was to illustrate why that is incorrect.
How does that work out to addition? I'm going to use the commutative property of multiplication to get around the biggest problem you've created for me.
3/2 * 4/5 = 4/5 * 3/2
4/5 = 1 1/2 so we can add 4/5 to itself 1 1/2 times.
4/5 + 4/10 = 12/10 Q.E.D.
Couple things. First 4/5 does not equal 1 1/2. That threw me for a moment, you meant to say 3/2 = 1 1/2.
Second, evaluating 4/5 * 1 1/2 as equal to 4/5 + 4/10s requires multiplication. You essentially are distributing (4/5) over (1 1/2) or (1+1/2):
(4/5)(1+1/2) == (4/5*1)+(4/5*1/2) = 4/5+(4*1)/(5*2) = 4/5) + 4/10
Third, adding fractions might seem clever, but even arriving at a common denominator requires identity multiplication.
4/5 + 4/10 == 4/5(2/2) + 4/10 == 8/10+4/10 == 12/10
When demonstrating how you can do multiplication using *just addition*, it's pretty deceptive to just leave all the multiplication you are doing out.
You might complain that I multiplied the second term by 1/2. (Or 0.5. *shudder*) Or that I divided it by 2. This might seem more reasonable if I demonstrated on a number line.
Indeed I would complain loudly. The entire purpose of the problem was to illustrate that you can't rearrange it to define it in terms of pure addition. Rearranging it so that you only have to divide by 2 or multiply by 1/2 instead of 4/5ths misses the point.
But it might be useful to think of it that way in certain contexts. If your nephew charged your niece eighty ...
Yes, I don't dispute that at all, and agree its a fine way to explain the situation to someone who doesn't grasp multiplication. But all you've done is rearrange it so the multiplication is simpler. Its still there.
If you're curious about Math, I hope you'll pursue that curiosity.
I've got a much better grasp of mathematics than you've given me credit for. To the point that I found the tone of your post condescending. But as I feel you genuinely set out to improve my understanding rather than mock, I've taken no offense.