"Not For Individual Sale" means that the product isn't marked in a manner which is required by law for sale to individuals. Nutrition info, etc... that information appears on the outer box.
You could legally sell those items if you slapped the nutrition info (or whatever else is required) on the item as a sticker.
Like I said... don't deliberately do illegal shit in the first place and this wouldn't be an issue. If she had pleaded not guilty to all three, I'd have been a whole lot more supportive of her position.
So what you are saying is that if she were more dishonest, you would be more supportive of her?
If the government is restricting your ability to communicate an idea, I'd say it's a First Amendment issue.
If the government argues that it's not a method for communicating ideas, then there is no reason to care what character combination appears in that non-communication medium.
A standard plate will typically follow a mask of XXX####
It will not be unique from the perspective of the character pattern, while a personalized plate (assuming you can pick any combo) gives you the option of literally anything. No mask.
Vanity plates indicate a high ratio of an individual's personal opinion of his own importance versus his actual importance in society.
I think you may be reaching just a bit there to fit it to your prejudices.
I really think you have to consider it on a 'plate' by 'plate' basis.
For example, the 'EAT THE' virgina plate was freaking awesome. I don't think the guy was boosting up his own ego, and used the plate as a means to crack a joke. (for those who don't get it, the plate was a special issue plate with the motto, "Kids First", just under the ID portion.
What about the HAM radio guys who put their callsigns on their plates? Oh noes, they have a hobby and used a plate instead of a less readable bumper sticker. What a sense of entitlement they must have.
So does painting the interior of your home any color but an eggshell white.
I don't waste any of my time caring about irrelvant stuff, especially time wasters like commenting on how some posters waste their time caring about irrelvant stuff.
As for why she's getting fined for a crime there's no evidence she committed, she *admitted* to it....there's only one track that was even in dispute and that would have made only a difference of $2.19 in the judgement.
There were THREE separate and unique infringements she was accused of committing. She admitted the first. She abstained from answering about the second. She denied the third.
Just because you admit to one crime, it doesn't make you guilty of other independent crimes. It also doesn't matter how small of a difference it would make in an overall judgement, it is still a judgement of guilt for which there exists no evidence.
If you are ok with that, then you need to send me $1.50 as a fine. I find you guilty. That's even less than the amount you said didn't matter and therefore was ok, so therefore you owe me the money. Do you see how silly that logic is?
I think your disdain for the subject matter is clouding your judgement of the nature of book sales and the worth of 'real' readers.
As with any market, there are different types/categories of buyers. You have some people who buy on trends, you have some people who purchase every scrap of paper published by an author but never touch other authors of the same genre. You have people who will only buy the book after the movie (but will always buy the book)...
However, your statement struck me as remarkably snobbish. Declaring that such readers are "No True Scotts... err, No True Habitual reader" based only upon the type of novel they enjoy reading. It's not based in fact, and implies quite a bit that you maybe don't WANT those people to be habitual readers.
I'd even go so far as to say I think you may be quite wrong about your judgement that these people vanish with the next new trend. Afterall, if they are always chasing the new trend of novels, doesn't that imply a longstanding habit of purchasing novels? The rationale as to WHY they purchase the novels may differ, but that's irrelevant to your point that these people cannot be looked upon as long-term customers.
I'm worried, not because this is possible, but because we may react in a way which spends a lot of money for very little protection. Not unlike gun control or airport security.
To quote another bit of sci-fi, "Life finds a way." And that quote isn't to mean that things are going to get out of control, but the simple nature of 'life' is that it is dead simple to engineer/develop bioweapons. Perhaps not The Stand levels of bioweapons, but you don't need to 'breed' a particularly difficult strain of influenza to kill thousands of people.
Of course, this goes back to a point I've made many times in the past: Life is deadly, and there are so many ways that things are trying/going to kill you that people happily delude themselves into believeing they don't exist.
IMO the only thing preventing these things, is a lack of motivation, not a lack of capability. Consider the DC Sniper, there is NOTHING that can be done to prevent something like that from happening again. It doesn't even take two people to pull off, just one person, moderately cautious, with access to the most basic of firearms, and the intent to cause harm.
Sadly, if it happens again, we will see another round of 'must do something' go through our government, and we will be less free, with the same risk.
The term 'Jury of peers' is just a holdover from the time when society had multiple classes of people. If you were a noble, your peers were nobles. If you were a commoner, your peers were commoners.
In the US, the basic concept is that because we don't have royalty/nobility and everyone is equal under the law, then we are all 'peers'. This has been debated a bit when it comes to the racial/ethnic makeup of the jury, but for the most part, the jury 'should' match the typical person in the US (of the general area of the court)
So, back to your point. The expectation of a jury's technical background should be no more or less than the typical american.
Isn't that the focus of a current case before the SCOTUS? A guy was buying books overseas and reselling them here. The general feeling was that SCOTUS was going to side on the 'first sale' side of the debate (ie, the reseller).
With that being the case, I don't see how Antiqua wouldn't be able to reproduce a book, sell it, and have it be a legal copy regardless of where it was transported later.
You start at the bottom because you shouldn't risk people if you aren't certain it is safe.
Let's say you launch a rocket packed full of sensors rather than a living creature. Each of those sensors is gathering specific data and only what you planned for it to gather. The rocket launches, and you recover the payload. Here are some failures which could occur:
1. Your recover parachutes fail on landing, destroying your payload. With a live animal, an autopsy could determine of the animal was alive at the time of impact. Grisly, but burns in the lungs, state of bleeding in the wounds, chemical saturation in tissues... all this information is useful to determine if your occupant would have survived if not for the parachute failure. Your sensor data may not survive at all, but a physical body retains evidence.
2. What if one of your sensors fail in mission? Did CO2 levels rise to dangerous amounts? etc... An animal 'records' data by virtue of being, and a failure in the animal produces useful data, but a failure in a sensor only reports that you don't know anything about that value post sensor failure.
3. Education and growth of your scientists requires doing. You could pull up research data from NASA (if you trust the published data, or feel that it is sufficient for your needs), but your scientists don't become 'experts' by simply reading about the past work of previous experts, they need to gain experience designing tests, conducting experiments, and learn how to deal with situations where your data doesn't match your expectations. There is a reason why the Apollo program would cost as much, if not more to do if we tried to do it today. The reason is we don't actually have that experience in our workforce anymore. We would have to relearn, and while we could avoid pitfalls which hampered the original efforts, we wouldn't be developing our engineers and scientists to the same level. The reason a lot of older engineers are good is because they know when to take risks, and when not to take risks because they have first hand experience with how those risks can become reality. A young inexperienced engineer could always err on the side of caution, or ignore risks due to inexperience or overconfidence. So 'doing' the experience may be repeating past work, but it isn't past work for the people actually designing/performing/evaluating those experiments. For them, this IS the first time it is being done.
I've had to dissuade someone from skipping a vibration test for some avionics. Their rationale was that the design had already had the exact same vibration test performed, and this was just building 10 more units from the exact same previous design.
I pointed out, (having been the designer 10 years ago), that when we first ran the vibration test, we discovered a part would fail, on certain lots of the equipment. The reason it failed, was because those specific lots were sourcing the component from a different fabrication location, of the same company. (IE Lot A sourced the component from Texas Instruments Plant A, and lot B sourced the component from Texas Instruments Plant B). The manufacturing process in Plant B applied the glue slightly different than Plant A. The difference was just enough to cause the component to fail during endurance vibration tests, which would have killed the reliability over a 30 year lifespan. When buying 100 components, you won't get TI to change their process for a production line of 10 million units. So the solution was to purchase enough extra components from that specific factory to allow for production and spares to be produced in quantities sufficient to support the product for 30 years.
Fast forward 10 years, and you want to sell to a second customer. If you just purchase the components, and assume that the factory's process hasn't changed in those 10 years (even if purchasing from the same 'better' factory) you are risking an unknown.
It's that sort of experience that you only learn by doing. Sure you can read abou
How can (e.g.) giving an alibi be used against you?
Surely they mean "may" not "will".
I remember listening to a lecture from a lawyer that explained the rationale. I apologize that I can't explain exactly why it says will, but he gave a good explanation for the wording.
I don't know if it was part of the 'Never talk to the police' series that's pretty popular on youtube, but that's the one that keeps popping into my head.
As an employee, why would I want to work in states like Texas or Arizona that provide much less in the way of protections for workers?
Well, it probably goes like this:
Employer: "We would like you to work for us in Texas. We are offering you this salary" Candidate: "Hmm, I don't really like Texas because I prefer California. How about you take that salary and raise it by 20%?"
I tend to get a bit long-winded in my posts, but I think listing out the biographical information of everyone mentioned in order to ensure that a tangential point that I wasn't even making is backed up by verifiable fact is a bit overkill.
In fact, I probably mentioned too much in my first post, so here is a condensed version to focus on the point:
The analysis allowed this conversation to occur:
Me: "Hey, did you guys know Bill?" Friend A: "Bill Smith? Yeah he and I still chat from time to time." Friend B: "Oh yeah, he and I were good friends. I never realized you guys knew him too." Me: "Hey, let's get together with Bill the next time we are all in the area!"
I agree on the wifi range. I have literally no need for my wireless to extend more than 10' from walls of my house, yet I am picking up networks at approximately -70 to -80dBm which must be from neighbors at least 40-50' from my router.
However, I often cannot run wires to the locations where I keep some PCs due to odd architectural issues. First, I rent a house, so drilling holes isn't an easy option. (I can patch the walls, but I'd rather avoid the labor) Second, the house is on a slab, so going through the basement/crawlspace isn't an option.
Right now, wireless works VERY well for me in getting an internet connection to a PC housed in the kitchen cabinets for running music/looking up recipes while cooking. There isn't anything I need to do on that PC which requires anything more than 1-2 Mbps. For a HTPC, opting for the tricker wired installation is usually better, but wired isn't always better for every stationary situation.
Don't put yourself down, I only have about 50-60 people friended on Facebook, and while the analysis resulted in a lot of boring charts (99.9% of my comments were to 3 people), I was suprised at some of the information that was useful. I love seeing how seemingly noisy data can be arranged in a manner which reveals useful information.
One particular useful aspect was being able to visualize how my connections were connected to each other. I discovered a rather strange 'link' between two people that I could discover no reason why they were linked.
One was a lead engineer for a major defense program, and the other was a high-school friend of mine. Both lived nearly 600 miles from each other, and were separated by nearly 40 years of age. My HS friend was extremely blue collar and eschewed school, my chief engineer friend? You get the idea. These two people had nothing in common.
Except for one thing, a mutual friend between them. Turns out that both of them had befriended a third person who happened to work first at the one friend's location, and then 10 years later, at the second friends location.
The connection? The linking person was a pilot on Air Force one. The engineer worked on Air Force One in the 90s, and my HS friend was an Airman at Andrews AFB in the 2000s.
I called them up and arranged a gathering between old friends who never knew that they had a lot in common.
I wanted to run my own email server. However, I do not do IT for a living. That's not a problem, most people say, email servers are simple. I agree, opening up the port and running a server would be simple, but what would crush me is trying to keep that server secure, and my email mostly free from spam.
I just don't have the time to setup the server properly, with subscriptions to spammer blacklists, maintaining security patches, and the whole slew of work required to make that simple email server something that would work for me.
I found that my old gmail account generally worked well with regard to keeping spam away from my account, and I never had to worry about making the server secure. So I signed up for google apps (back when it was free for small users), and setup my domain to use google to host my email.
Now I have all the email addresses I want, associated with my domain, and google handles ALL the annoying work of maintaining the server, handling security, general administration and so on. I can be reasonably assured that whenever I want to access my email, I will be able to via a simple web browser. I don't need to worry that my ISP is crappy, or blocking me, or that I had a power outage at my home.
For me, that amount of time savings and convenience is well worth the tradeoff that someone in the government could gain access to that specific email address' contents.
And most importantly, nothing prevents me from creating or using a throw-away email address on another site if I wanted more obscurity. Privacy, unfortunately, requires a proactive effort, but the benefits I receive from a centralized, managed, and to date uncensored email service currently far outweighs the current drawbacks. If that ever shifts in the other direction, as I mentioned, nothing is really preventing me from just dropping google.
If they never did anything after 9/11 and it happened a second time,
If they never did anything, 9/11 couldn't happen a second time. Examples include the times that someone DID try to rush the cabin, pretty much everyone on the plane lept to action.
The rest of your post... It's an anathema to democracy. But I suppose that someone posting as 'anonymous' should be taken seriously when they state they have nothing to hide at anytime.
You are missing the point that this opens up the possiblity for small(er) companies to utilize the advantages provided by robots. Such advantages were previously only available to much larger companies, and then typically only used for large scale assembly.
Smaller companies have the capability to serve niche or marginal markets which are ignored by larger companies (on purpose). A common (and successful) tactic for large companies is to shed businesses in which they made be profitable, but not #1 or 2. It doesn't mean a business operating here wouldn't be profitable, but not desireable to large companies. Small companies can fill these gaps, and access to robotics makes it possible for them to do so without being driven out of business due to 'close enough' cheaper competitors.
Let's say I wanted to build a really nice, and nice because it was specific, docking station for a phone. Without access to robotic assembly, my products would likely be much more expensive than the units produced in lots of millions. A customer would see my product, and say, "Well, it fits my need perfectly, but the iHome product meets 90% of my need at 10% of the cost, so I can't justify purchasing your perfect, but labor expensive product"
The result of such a problem is that I wouldn't be able to operate a business AT ALL. So I wouldn't be employed (doing that), my finance people wouldn't be employed, my logistics people wouldn't be employed. etc... Just beacuse the robot replaces a few assembly jobs, doesn't mean that using robotics in assembly means no new jobs are created. Sure, no specific assembly jobs are created, but all the other jobs to run the business ARE created.
From an economic perspective, if you have the capability to add 3 jobs, but lose 2, it's better than not just not having those 3.
Slashdot Mirror
"Not For Individual Sale" means that the product isn't marked in a manner which is required by law for sale to individuals. Nutrition info, etc... that information appears on the outer box.
You could legally sell those items if you slapped the nutrition info (or whatever else is required) on the item as a sticker.
Like I said... don't deliberately do illegal shit in the first place and this wouldn't be an issue. If she had pleaded not guilty to all three, I'd have been a whole lot more supportive of her position.
So what you are saying is that if she were more dishonest, you would be more supportive of her?
I now know that there are at least 4 other John Does out there!
Just like the 5 other teams before Seal Team 6? ;)
If the government is restricting your ability to communicate an idea, I'd say it's a First Amendment issue.
If the government argues that it's not a method for communicating ideas, then there is no reason to care what character combination appears in that non-communication medium.
It depends on how you look at it.
A standard plate will typically follow a mask of XXX####
It will not be unique from the perspective of the character pattern, while a personalized plate (assuming you can pick any combo) gives you the option of literally anything. No mask.
Oh sure, NOW it's easy. Why don't you ask the original fire-sharer Prometheus how that worked out for him?
An ego trip? Really? And this statement?
Vanity plates indicate a high ratio of an individual's personal opinion of his own importance versus his actual importance in society.
I think you may be reaching just a bit there to fit it to your prejudices.
I really think you have to consider it on a 'plate' by 'plate' basis.
For example, the 'EAT THE' virgina plate was freaking awesome. I don't think the guy was boosting up his own ego, and used the plate as a means to crack a joke. (for those who don't get it, the plate was a special issue plate with the motto, "Kids First", just under the ID portion.
What about the HAM radio guys who put their callsigns on their plates? Oh noes, they have a hobby and used a plate instead of a less readable bumper sticker. What a sense of entitlement they must have.
So does painting the interior of your home any color but an eggshell white.
I don't waste any of my time caring about irrelvant stuff, especially time wasters like commenting on how some posters waste their time caring about irrelvant stuff.
As for why she's getting fined for a crime there's no evidence she committed, she *admitted* to it....there's only one track that was even in dispute and that would have made only a difference of $2.19 in the judgement.
There were THREE separate and unique infringements she was accused of committing. She admitted the first. She abstained from answering about the second. She denied the third.
Just because you admit to one crime, it doesn't make you guilty of other independent crimes. It also doesn't matter how small of a difference it would make in an overall judgement, it is still a judgement of guilt for which there exists no evidence.
If you are ok with that, then you need to send me $1.50 as a fine. I find you guilty. That's even less than the amount you said didn't matter and therefore was ok, so therefore you owe me the money. Do you see how silly that logic is?
I think your disdain for the subject matter is clouding your judgement of the nature of book sales and the worth of 'real' readers.
As with any market, there are different types/categories of buyers. You have some people who buy on trends, you have some people who purchase every scrap of paper published by an author but never touch other authors of the same genre. You have people who will only buy the book after the movie (but will always buy the book)...
However, your statement struck me as remarkably snobbish. Declaring that such readers are "No True Scotts... err, No True Habitual reader" based only upon the type of novel they enjoy reading. It's not based in fact, and implies quite a bit that you maybe don't WANT those people to be habitual readers.
I'd even go so far as to say I think you may be quite wrong about your judgement that these people vanish with the next new trend. Afterall, if they are always chasing the new trend of novels, doesn't that imply a longstanding habit of purchasing novels? The rationale as to WHY they purchase the novels may differ, but that's irrelevant to your point that these people cannot be looked upon as long-term customers.
I'm worried, not because this is possible, but because we may react in a way which spends a lot of money for very little protection. Not unlike gun control or airport security.
To quote another bit of sci-fi, "Life finds a way." And that quote isn't to mean that things are going to get out of control, but the simple nature of 'life' is that it is dead simple to engineer/develop bioweapons. Perhaps not The Stand levels of bioweapons, but you don't need to 'breed' a particularly difficult strain of influenza to kill thousands of people.
Of course, this goes back to a point I've made many times in the past: Life is deadly, and there are so many ways that things are trying/going to kill you that people happily delude themselves into believeing they don't exist.
IMO the only thing preventing these things, is a lack of motivation, not a lack of capability. Consider the DC Sniper, there is NOTHING that can be done to prevent something like that from happening again. It doesn't even take two people to pull off, just one person, moderately cautious, with access to the most basic of firearms, and the intent to cause harm.
Sadly, if it happens again, we will see another round of 'must do something' go through our government, and we will be less free, with the same risk.
The term 'Jury of peers' is just a holdover from the time when society had multiple classes of people. If you were a noble, your peers were nobles. If you were a commoner, your peers were commoners.
In the US, the basic concept is that because we don't have royalty/nobility and everyone is equal under the law, then we are all 'peers'. This has been debated a bit when it comes to the racial/ethnic makeup of the jury, but for the most part, the jury 'should' match the typical person in the US (of the general area of the court)
So, back to your point. The expectation of a jury's technical background should be no more or less than the typical american.
Isn't that the focus of a current case before the SCOTUS? A guy was buying books overseas and reselling them here. The general feeling was that SCOTUS was going to side on the 'first sale' side of the debate (ie, the reseller).
With that being the case, I don't see how Antiqua wouldn't be able to reproduce a book, sell it, and have it be a legal copy regardless of where it was transported later.
You start at the bottom because you shouldn't risk people if you aren't certain it is safe.
Let's say you launch a rocket packed full of sensors rather than a living creature. Each of those sensors is gathering specific data and only what you planned for it to gather. The rocket launches, and you recover the payload. Here are some failures which could occur:
1. Your recover parachutes fail on landing, destroying your payload. With a live animal, an autopsy could determine of the animal was alive at the time of impact. Grisly, but burns in the lungs, state of bleeding in the wounds, chemical saturation in tissues... all this information is useful to determine if your occupant would have survived if not for the parachute failure. Your sensor data may not survive at all, but a physical body retains evidence.
2. What if one of your sensors fail in mission? Did CO2 levels rise to dangerous amounts? etc... An animal 'records' data by virtue of being, and a failure in the animal produces useful data, but a failure in a sensor only reports that you don't know anything about that value post sensor failure.
3. Education and growth of your scientists requires doing. You could pull up research data from NASA (if you trust the published data, or feel that it is sufficient for your needs), but your scientists don't become 'experts' by simply reading about the past work of previous experts, they need to gain experience designing tests, conducting experiments, and learn how to deal with situations where your data doesn't match your expectations. There is a reason why the Apollo program would cost as much, if not more to do if we tried to do it today. The reason is we don't actually have that experience in our workforce anymore. We would have to relearn, and while we could avoid pitfalls which hampered the original efforts, we wouldn't be developing our engineers and scientists to the same level. The reason a lot of older engineers are good is because they know when to take risks, and when not to take risks because they have first hand experience with how those risks can become reality. A young inexperienced engineer could always err on the side of caution, or ignore risks due to inexperience or overconfidence. So 'doing' the experience may be repeating past work, but it isn't past work for the people actually designing/performing/evaluating those experiments. For them, this IS the first time it is being done.
I've had to dissuade someone from skipping a vibration test for some avionics. Their rationale was that the design had already had the exact same vibration test performed, and this was just building 10 more units from the exact same previous design.
I pointed out, (having been the designer 10 years ago), that when we first ran the vibration test, we discovered a part would fail, on certain lots of the equipment. The reason it failed, was because those specific lots were sourcing the component from a different fabrication location, of the same company. (IE Lot A sourced the component from Texas Instruments Plant A, and lot B sourced the component from Texas Instruments Plant B). The manufacturing process in Plant B applied the glue slightly different than Plant A. The difference was just enough to cause the component to fail during endurance vibration tests, which would have killed the reliability over a 30 year lifespan. When buying 100 components, you won't get TI to change their process for a production line of 10 million units. So the solution was to purchase enough extra components from that specific factory to allow for production and spares to be produced in quantities sufficient to support the product for 30 years.
Fast forward 10 years, and you want to sell to a second customer. If you just purchase the components, and assume that the factory's process hasn't changed in those 10 years (even if purchasing from the same 'better' factory) you are risking an unknown.
It's that sort of experience that you only learn by doing. Sure you can read abou
I've never understood the "can and will" part.
Especially the will part.
How can (e.g.) giving an alibi be used against you?
Surely they mean "may" not "will".
I remember listening to a lecture from a lawyer that explained the rationale. I apologize that I can't explain exactly why it says will, but he gave a good explanation for the wording.
I don't know if it was part of the 'Never talk to the police' series that's pretty popular on youtube, but that's the one that keeps popping into my head.
As an employee, why would I want to work in states like Texas or Arizona that provide much less in the way of protections for workers?
Well, it probably goes like this:
Employer: "We would like you to work for us in Texas. We are offering you this salary"
Candidate: "Hmm, I don't really like Texas because I prefer California. How about you take that salary and raise it by 20%?"
I tend to get a bit long-winded in my posts, but I think listing out the biographical information of everyone mentioned in order to ensure that a tangential point that I wasn't even making is backed up by verifiable fact is a bit overkill.
In fact, I probably mentioned too much in my first post, so here is a condensed version to focus on the point:
The analysis allowed this conversation to occur:
Me: "Hey, did you guys know Bill?"
Friend A: "Bill Smith? Yeah he and I still chat from time to time."
Friend B: "Oh yeah, he and I were good friends. I never realized you guys knew him too."
Me: "Hey, let's get together with Bill the next time we are all in the area!"
A,B,Bill: "Sounds like a plan."
I agree on the wifi range. I have literally no need for my wireless to extend more than 10' from walls of my house, yet I am picking up networks at approximately -70 to -80dBm which must be from neighbors at least 40-50' from my router.
However, I often cannot run wires to the locations where I keep some PCs due to odd architectural issues. First, I rent a house, so drilling holes isn't an easy option. (I can patch the walls, but I'd rather avoid the labor) Second, the house is on a slab, so going through the basement/crawlspace isn't an option.
Right now, wireless works VERY well for me in getting an internet connection to a PC housed in the kitchen cabinets for running music/looking up recipes while cooking. There isn't anything I need to do on that PC which requires anything more than 1-2 Mbps. For a HTPC, opting for the tricker wired installation is usually better, but wired isn't always better for every stationary situation.
Don't put yourself down, I only have about 50-60 people friended on Facebook, and while the analysis resulted in a lot of boring charts (99.9% of my comments were to 3 people), I was suprised at some of the information that was useful. I love seeing how seemingly noisy data can be arranged in a manner which reveals useful information.
One particular useful aspect was being able to visualize how my connections were connected to each other. I discovered a rather strange 'link' between two people that I could discover no reason why they were linked.
One was a lead engineer for a major defense program, and the other was a high-school friend of mine. Both lived nearly 600 miles from each other, and were separated by nearly 40 years of age. My HS friend was extremely blue collar and eschewed school, my chief engineer friend? You get the idea. These two people had nothing in common.
Except for one thing, a mutual friend between them. Turns out that both of them had befriended a third person who happened to work first at the one friend's location, and then 10 years later, at the second friends location.
The connection? The linking person was a pilot on Air Force one. The engineer worked on Air Force One in the 90s, and my HS friend was an Airman at Andrews AFB in the 2000s.
I called them up and arranged a gathering between old friends who never knew that they had a lot in common.
I do not understand why everyone prefers that.
I wanted to run my own email server. However, I do not do IT for a living. That's not a problem, most people say, email servers are simple. I agree, opening up the port and running a server would be simple, but what would crush me is trying to keep that server secure, and my email mostly free from spam.
I just don't have the time to setup the server properly, with subscriptions to spammer blacklists, maintaining security patches, and the whole slew of work required to make that simple email server something that would work for me.
I found that my old gmail account generally worked well with regard to keeping spam away from my account, and I never had to worry about making the server secure. So I signed up for google apps (back when it was free for small users), and setup my domain to use google to host my email.
Now I have all the email addresses I want, associated with my domain, and google handles ALL the annoying work of maintaining the server, handling security, general administration and so on. I can be reasonably assured that whenever I want to access my email, I will be able to via a simple web browser. I don't need to worry that my ISP is crappy, or blocking me, or that I had a power outage at my home.
For me, that amount of time savings and convenience is well worth the tradeoff that someone in the government could gain access to that specific email address' contents.
And most importantly, nothing prevents me from creating or using a throw-away email address on another site if I wanted more obscurity. Privacy, unfortunately, requires a proactive effort, but the benefits I receive from a centralized, managed, and to date uncensored email service currently far outweighs the current drawbacks. If that ever shifts in the other direction, as I mentioned, nothing is really preventing me from just dropping google.
I'm not sure I understand, what is retarded about the units? Has their velocity been reduced?
W T H I thought the whole point of this thing was to go through quicker AND not have to be man-handled!?
That's why I always opt-out. If I don't opt out, I get scanned... AND they will probably pat me down too.
At least with the pat-down I get to skip the scan entirely, and my privacy violation lasts only as long as the memory of a single TSA screener.
If they never did anything after 9/11 and it happened a second time,
If they never did anything, 9/11 couldn't happen a second time. Examples include the times that someone DID try to rush the cabin, pretty much everyone on the plane lept to action.
The rest of your post... It's an anathema to democracy. But I suppose that someone posting as 'anonymous' should be taken seriously when they state they have nothing to hide at anytime.
Information Assurance. You aren't wrong, but it's a slightly better term.
Computer security is something you do as a subset of working towards information assurance.
You are missing the point that this opens up the possiblity for small(er) companies to utilize the advantages provided by robots. Such advantages were previously only available to much larger companies, and then typically only used for large scale assembly.
Smaller companies have the capability to serve niche or marginal markets which are ignored by larger companies (on purpose). A common (and successful) tactic for large companies is to shed businesses in which they made be profitable, but not #1 or 2. It doesn't mean a business operating here wouldn't be profitable, but not desireable to large companies. Small companies can fill these gaps, and access to robotics makes it possible for them to do so without being driven out of business due to 'close enough' cheaper competitors.
Let's say I wanted to build a really nice, and nice because it was specific, docking station for a phone. Without access to robotic assembly, my products would likely be much more expensive than the units produced in lots of millions. A customer would see my product, and say, "Well, it fits my need perfectly, but the iHome product meets 90% of my need at 10% of the cost, so I can't justify purchasing your perfect, but labor expensive product"
The result of such a problem is that I wouldn't be able to operate a business AT ALL. So I wouldn't be employed (doing that), my finance people wouldn't be employed, my logistics people wouldn't be employed. etc... Just beacuse the robot replaces a few assembly jobs, doesn't mean that using robotics in assembly means no new jobs are created. Sure, no specific assembly jobs are created, but all the other jobs to run the business ARE created.
From an economic perspective, if you have the capability to add 3 jobs, but lose 2, it's better than not just not having those 3.