Let's simulate a single cell, then an organism, then aging. Then we can start extending our lifespan. THEN we can start living, not just this handful of years between being a powerless child and a weak, aging adult. Then you can worry about galaxies.
What does an astrophysicist know about cellular biology? Probably about as much as a biologist knows about astrophysics.
Compounding that, we wouldn't have made a fraction of the scientific progress to date if we focused on a single discipline until it was mastered before moving onto the next one. What good would supersonic airliners be if our civil and material engineering knowledge never learned how to make a tarmac which could support their weight?
Ever wonder how much of our knowledge of high energy particles and fields came about because of cross-pollenation from physicists?
IIRC, generally the same place you check-in with the airport to let them know you are there. The plane still gets assigned a "gate" even if that gate is simply a virtual tarmac parking location, so it can be sent along with a gent on a luggage trolly.
I've flown on private jets many times. Perhaps at larger airports, but when I went I was never searched, or had any of my luggage inspected. I walked up to the terminal, waved to the pilot, and walked onto the plane. If I was going on a trip longer than a few days, he would load my luggage into the plane, but didn't search it.
That's one of the perks about flying chartered I thought. I walked up, 5 minutes later I was on board and all we waited on was departure clearance.
Does this have something to do with Japan or their export restrictions?
Well, no --- that was what the whole Guantanamo Bay thing was about; the legal fiction was that since the interns were neither citizens nor prisoners of war, and were not held on non-US soil, then constitutional and international treaty rights did not apply.
What Constituional rights? The First Amendment doesn't say "Citizens are permitted to..." It says (paraphrased) Congress shall not.
It grants us nothing. It doesn't matter if someone comes down from the Andromeda galaxy, it is a rule by which the government is forbidden to cross. That they do or have does not change the meaning of the rule, it simply highlights the lack of enforcement applied to that rule.
"I don't remember exactly what I wrote as I was drunk. "
He said he thinks that he called the president a prick. If the provider didn't delete the email (I doubt it), I bet he knows EXACTLY what he wrote since he can look up the damned thing. Probably made some comment like "If I ever see you I'm going to..." but decided not to 'remember' that part in order to not have the rest of the world respond with, "What did you THINK would happen?"
Personally, I can think of a lot more worse things that could happen, especially if instead of the president, I emailed my boss while drunk.
And the more media companies attempt to strengthen their grasp, the more consumers will slip through their fingers (apologies to Princess Leia for mangling her quote).
The problem with that quote? Didn't they just murder her adoptive family and a billion other people immediately afterward?
At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums,
Same generation, different culture.
The Democrat looks at the Republican and wonders how he could believe that. The New Yorker takes a look at the rural farmer and wonders why he would subject himself to that sort of life. The rural citizen wonders how anyone could deal with so much noise. And DC elects Marion Barry. Again.
But if you want the real reason: The people who care about a subject will get their way. Just because some people would vote for/against an issue doesn't mean that they actually care enough about that issue to do anything about it.
No, Shatner knows his lines. That is important to his sense of professionalism, according to an interview I read recently (which I think was posted here on Slashdot.)
He had to. One day the teleprompter was sabataaged. Shatner, being the consumate professional, memorized the entire script for all characters and communicated it to the rest of them via sign language.
well, what happens if the purchaser sold their old dwelling at the same time?
Crime sucks. The owner of the building pays for vandalism if they don't have insurance. Not that I agree with it, but if a fund was established for this sort of thing...
If you are trying to be nice, then give the buyer 10% over the cost of the house so they can move. They wouldn't have 'put down roots' there yet like the original owner likely did.
Even if you don't do that, there IS an avenue for the buyer. Sue the realtor/attorney/Notary to cover your damages. They should carry insurance for this sort of thing, and if they don't sueing them will result in setting a standard that they SHOULD. If it's rare, then it will be cheap. If it isn't rare, then they will be forced to implement more safeguards.
A government fund doesn't really address that issue. If everyone ends up 'fine' then all the thief did was steal $500,000 from the government.
Not if a reasonable man would have suspected it was stolen. This law protects the innocent, such as this case, someone who purchased a house through a legitimate real estate agent.
That's not protecting the innocent. Why not give the BUYERS their money back from the fund, then you don't have to bother with trying to find the 'fair compensation' value. It's right there on the bill of sale. What about the guy who comes home to find find his house effectively GONE? One could say that the person who literally had their home stolen from them might be a bit more of a victim than the person who just needs a mortgage reversed (Paper)
This guy (well, assuming this happened to someone where it was a residence) will have to find a new home, hope it's near his job, move his belongings, etc. Oh, and now he is a VERY motivated buyer so good luck getting any sort of a deal.
The problem with this method is that for it to be 'fair' to the original owner, you would have to pay back a lot of costs in addition to the value of the stolen property. That doesn't even get into the emotional attachment. I sold a home I put a lot of work into years ago and I still have fond memories of it. I'd be pissed if the place I remodeled by hand was stolen from me.
Just void the sale paperwork and let the companies who screwed up in the first place (Notary, Realtor, Bank, etc) foot the bill like they should.
The thing is, step 3 is not as huge as it sounds. Only the most densely-populated areas will benefit from better usage of available frequencies, so new infrastructure is only needed for big cities and such.
That sounds pretty nasty to regulate.
You would have an area where you would be transmitting television for hundreds of miles (rural areas) and have that butt up against areas where you would be transmitting 'something else' That area in between would need the infrastructure (since the TV signals would interfere) but wouldn't get the benefit from either the TV broadcast or the wireless service.
For such long range frequencies, I'd think a uniform platform is unfortunately necessary across the entire country to avoid 'dead zones' which would fluctuate based on weather conditions, as opposed to just a few areas that get poor reception (but which could be fixed by a repeater)
But Star Trek's writers couldn't envision a focusable artificial lens, and had Kirk wearing reading glasses.
It is also sometimes a 'gift' to the actor. A lot of times the actor DOES have a problem that we don't have a current solution for but the 'future' world likely would. Rather than punish the actor by having them attempt to do a scene without glasses, or expect them to not suffer from arthritis, they will write in either some impediment to what we would expect the cure to be, or write in a new disease we aren't familiar with and thus can't think of a quick 'future' fix.
It does lead to an interesting debate regarding what we (the net) consider to be right and acceptable.
Here we have a story of someone seeing someone else doing something and basically saying, "I can do that." Do we get upset when a new pizza restaurant opens up? Or perhaps another excavation company? What makes this worse than some company saying "Hey, I can do that cheaper."
I realize there are issues with respect to intellectual property, but this IS an important point of discussion. When is the line crossed?
I billed it as a feature, but robot Nixom demanded that the tax-nonpayers be delivered intact to the Pain Monster. Something about 4 limbs being necessary for a quartering.
It's been a while since I designed any robots, but there is a big problem with robots in general in that unless you explicitly design sensors to detect something, it won't.
I can't get into the applications here (there are just too many) but having the ability to feel objects not perfectly lined up with the robot's programmed path could help prevent a lot of injuries.
Imagine a robot with this skin wrapped around it, as it moves, it comes into contact with something that it shouldn't have (Some guy), it immediately can stop that motion and hopefully just bruise the guy instead of just continuing mindlessly and slicing the guys arm off or crushing him to death.
That's just an off the top guess, but I would also very much like a robotic grasping arm that could sense pressure. It's easy to design something to grasp, and maybe even put in some resistance (ie: hooke's law), but getting a feel for the force it exerts and the exact positioning of that force could be very useful.
Imagine a grasping arm that doesn't need to be perfectly aligned with an object and could react to the thing it was grasping (ie: reducing the movement of one 'finger' if it felt the object slipping) being able to compensate for a misaligned object could be very useful.
And am I the only one who just does not click on any 'shortened' URL
You aren't the only one. I won't click on them either. I probably wouldn't go to your fluffybunnies url either and tend to stick to just the few I have 'whitelisted' in my brain. A certain citrus celebration themed URL comes to mind when discussing URLs that sound safe on paper...
I realize I was being a bit snarky there, but currently TV does provide a useful service. At the time, it was really the only way to broadcast a message quickly and efficiently to pretty much everyone.
It is a limited resource with respect to the fact that you can really only have one entity use a section of it at a time, but it is also unlimited with respect to the fact that it never decreases with respect to how much you use it. ie: it remains unchanged if you use it for 10 seconds or 100 years. (Not true with resources like minerals) As it stands, it is a mistake to NOT use a resource which is not consumed, and TV at the time was pretty much the best way to utilize that resource and gain some revenue.
It was only recently that we could really use it for anything other than basic broadcasting (The few other needs were met as things like emergency messages could override the TV broadcasts)
To really replace television as the means of revenue, the following would need to happen:
1. Techology would have to improve to the level where we could have receivers which cost approximately the same as today's TV tuner. 2. Everyone would need these receivers 3. We would need an infrastructure which reached EVERYONE that TV can now reach 4. Then we could switch to broadcasting television over this alternate infrastructure.
Then you could use the spectrum however you wished. But that step 3 is a HUGE step that we are not even close to being able to complete.
So we either 'waste' the bandwidth on television and establish an infrastructure for a universal network because we can't use this spectrum, or we establish an infrastructure for a universal network so we can free up the spectrum.
There must be other ways to transmit TV these days
I agree, what we really need is a means to transmit a video and audio signal in a manner which can reach almost our entire population. If only there were a means to do this without us having to lay down thousands of miles of data lines, either hanging on poles, or underground.
Honestly, it takes an effort TO classify something. As a contractor? I am NOT allowed to do it except as a derivative. Things I created FROM classified data is classified at the level of the data but things I create are NOT implicitly classified (typically).
When has anyone actually taken it all the way through the legal system? That's part of the problem, is that the aggressor can just hold out longer than the victim. The victim settles (And it IS often fair for the victim) but it doesn't prove the 'point'.
Forgetting the fact that a flat tax and/or a consumption tax system is a stupid idea, how does implementing that take power away from politicians?
Initially, that was sort of built into the Constitution, but quickly ignored. I'm also not going to get into a discussion regarding the benefits/drawbacks of a flat tax system outside of your question.
Right now politicians have a HUGE amount of power that they are not authorized to have (by the Constitution). They are able to do things which they are not normally allowed to do by not directly implementing such laws, but by using taxation (or tax breaks) as incentives to encourage the actions they cannot legislate.
As an introduction, Congress really has no authority to set a drinking age. That IS left up to the states. However, by using funding, they can threaten to withold funding from the States unless certain conditions are met. Even though if they tried to set a 21 year old drinking age directly, it would be found unconstitutional, this method has been determined by the Supreme Court to be constitutional because the states can always opt out of receiving the funds, and thus are not actually bound by law. That sets the premise for how you can get around the constitution and perform actions which you normally are prohibited from doing.
So you have taxes, and you can't tell people that they must do this, or they can't do that, or even if you could, it wouldn't have the votes to actually pass an all out ban. So you create a tax break for behavior that you want people to do, and a tax for behavior you don't want people to do. If you take away the power of politicians to put all these little tweaks into the tax code and only modify it on very general terms with a lot of public scrutiny, you VASTLY limit their power.
You don't need a flat tax to do so, but you would remove a great deal of power from them if you limited the ways in which they can manipulate the tax code for political gain.
That just addresses the 'power' aspect of it. I also object to it because it can be a very unjust tool. Since it is circumventing the constitution, it essentially allows almost anything to be done. If you were to sufficiently raise taxes to the point where living without certain tax breaks is a sufficient burden, you have the ability to pass 'laws' which don't have the same oversight yet essentially penalize people for behaving in legal, but not approved ways.
People think it sounds good now when it's just applied to 'Nasty, things people should know better, sins' (Smoking, Drinking, etc) but it slowly gets applied to lifestyles (Eating, exercise, Cars, homes) and eventually will become the 'official government way of life' and we won't have enough disposable income after taxes to do otherwise.
Yeah, just like uploading your band's new song to YouTube (or, a more apt analogy, uploading it to your band's website that no one has ever heard of) makes you instantly successful.
Do you really think the publishing industry does nothing to promote the books it prints?
Success doesn't matter if your goal was simply to make your book available. For the purposes of barriers to entry into the market, there are essentially none. If you really want to get into the discussion of advertising costs and how that requires someone to finance you... that's really tangential to the discussion. You might not make as much money as you would like, but with an initial cost of $0 to enter the market, and the ability to distribute to millions for a few dollars more, it really can't be any more fair.
Let's face it, the only thing keeping anyone from publishing their work these days is their own motivation to do so.
That IS an interesting way to look at it. It makes it all the more interesting when you think about what he sacrificed just before he literally lost a piece of himself on the beach.
With so many outstanding series were canceled after only two seasons, like Firefly, Deadwood, and countless others, is there any hope that the same might happen here?
Easy.
King has enough clout now to demand that if the studio fails to follow through and cancels the TV portion they would be liable for a set penalty that would be equal to the ad revenue for a successful show. Therefore they would have no incentive to try and play the margins by cancelling this show for one which might earn a % more.
That, and this:
This will be shown later at night. It would fit in somewhere after the key prime time shows due to content. OR would go to a place like Showtime or HBO.
Yeah, they did the XCP thing. And ripped Linux off of the PS3. But if you want to send a message, you buy the products they make that conform to standards (assuming they're worth buying), and don't buy the ones that don't. That's the stuff that influences what they make. Just crossing a company off the list for something they did years ago isn't a way to affect change.
So I buy the stuff from them that meets my needs and conforms to standards... until it doesn't.
Sony's actions with regard to OtherOS makes this an impossible goal. They literally altered a product after the fact. You don't have the protection of buying a standard because most of the time, you aren't making decisions based on standards, but features. They altered the deal, and you just have to pray that they don't alter it any further.
You can't change their ways by buying their 'good' products if they can turn them into 'bad' products at will.
They have escaped your bounds for which a company can be controlled by purchasing their good products.
To paraphrase another movie quote: at this point, The only winning move is not to play.
Sony has annual revenues of around 80 billion dollars, over 150,000 employees and an order of magnitude more contractors and manufacturing partners. XCP sucked, but - Sony is the size of a nation. Do you boycott China because of the melamine-laced products?
Yes I do. Until China and its culture supports the standards I expect from a country or producer I do not buy their products. If they could say they were going to, and then put some (money) teeth behind that goal, I'd probably start buying from them again.
Sometimes it isn't easy to follow certain ideals. Just because something is hard, doesn't mean that it isn't worth doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's simulate a single cell, then an organism, then aging. Then we can start extending our lifespan. THEN we can start living, not just this handful of years between being a powerless child and a weak, aging adult. Then you can worry about galaxies.
What does an astrophysicist know about cellular biology? Probably about as much as a biologist knows about astrophysics.
Compounding that, we wouldn't have made a fraction of the scientific progress to date if we focused on a single discipline until it was mastered before moving onto the next one. What good would supersonic airliners be if our civil and material engineering knowledge never learned how to make a tarmac which could support their weight?
Ever wonder how much of our knowledge of high energy particles and fields came about because of cross-pollenation from physicists?
IIRC, generally the same place you check-in with the airport to let them know you are there. The plane still gets assigned a "gate" even if that gate is simply a virtual tarmac parking location, so it can be sent along with a gent on a luggage trolly.
I've flown on private jets many times. Perhaps at larger airports, but when I went I was never searched, or had any of my luggage inspected. I walked up to the terminal, waved to the pilot, and walked onto the plane. If I was going on a trip longer than a few days, he would load my luggage into the plane, but didn't search it.
That's one of the perks about flying chartered I thought. I walked up, 5 minutes later I was on board and all we waited on was departure clearance.
Does this have something to do with Japan or their export restrictions?
Well, no --- that was what the whole Guantanamo Bay thing was about; the legal fiction was that since the interns were neither citizens nor prisoners of war, and were not held on non-US soil, then constitutional and international treaty rights did not apply.
What Constituional rights? The First Amendment doesn't say "Citizens are permitted to..." It says (paraphrased) Congress shall not.
It grants us nothing. It doesn't matter if someone comes down from the Andromeda galaxy, it is a rule by which the government is forbidden to cross. That they do or have does not change the meaning of the rule, it simply highlights the lack of enforcement applied to that rule.
"I don't remember exactly what I wrote as I was drunk. "
He said he thinks that he called the president a prick. If the provider didn't delete the email (I doubt it), I bet he knows EXACTLY what he wrote since he can look up the damned thing. Probably made some comment like "If I ever see you I'm going to..." but decided not to 'remember' that part in order to not have the rest of the world respond with, "What did you THINK would happen?"
Personally, I can think of a lot more worse things that could happen, especially if instead of the president, I emailed my boss while drunk.
And the more media companies attempt to strengthen their grasp, the more consumers will slip through their fingers (apologies to Princess Leia for mangling her quote).
The problem with that quote? Didn't they just murder her adoptive family and a billion other people immediately afterward?
At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums,
Same generation, different culture.
The Democrat looks at the Republican and wonders how he could believe that. The New Yorker takes a look at the rural farmer and wonders why he would subject himself to that sort of life. The rural citizen wonders how anyone could deal with so much noise. And DC elects Marion Barry. Again.
But if you want the real reason: The people who care about a subject will get their way. Just because some people would vote for/against an issue doesn't mean that they actually care enough about that issue to do anything about it.
No, Shatner knows his lines. That is important to his sense of professionalism, according to an interview I read recently (which I think was posted here on Slashdot.)
He had to. One day the teleprompter was sabataaged. Shatner, being the consumate professional, memorized the entire script for all characters and communicated it to the rest of them via sign language.
well, what happens if the purchaser sold their old dwelling at the same time?
Crime sucks. The owner of the building pays for vandalism if they don't have insurance. Not that I agree with it, but if a fund was established for this sort of thing...
If you are trying to be nice, then give the buyer 10% over the cost of the house so they can move. They wouldn't have 'put down roots' there yet like the original owner likely did.
Even if you don't do that, there IS an avenue for the buyer. Sue the realtor/attorney/Notary to cover your damages. They should carry insurance for this sort of thing, and if they don't sueing them will result in setting a standard that they SHOULD. If it's rare, then it will be cheap. If it isn't rare, then they will be forced to implement more safeguards.
A government fund doesn't really address that issue. If everyone ends up 'fine' then all the thief did was steal $500,000 from the government.
Not if a reasonable man would have suspected it was stolen. This law protects the innocent, such as this case, someone who purchased a house through a legitimate real estate agent.
That's not protecting the innocent. Why not give the BUYERS their money back from the fund, then you don't have to bother with trying to find the 'fair compensation' value. It's right there on the bill of sale. What about the guy who comes home to find find his house effectively GONE? One could say that the person who literally had their home stolen from them might be a bit more of a victim than the person who just needs a mortgage reversed (Paper)
This guy (well, assuming this happened to someone where it was a residence) will have to find a new home, hope it's near his job, move his belongings, etc. Oh, and now he is a VERY motivated buyer so good luck getting any sort of a deal.
The problem with this method is that for it to be 'fair' to the original owner, you would have to pay back a lot of costs in addition to the value of the stolen property. That doesn't even get into the emotional attachment. I sold a home I put a lot of work into years ago and I still have fond memories of it. I'd be pissed if the place I remodeled by hand was stolen from me.
Just void the sale paperwork and let the companies who screwed up in the first place (Notary, Realtor, Bank, etc) foot the bill like they should.
The thing is, step 3 is not as huge as it sounds. Only the most densely-populated areas will benefit from better usage of available frequencies, so new infrastructure is only needed for big cities and such.
That sounds pretty nasty to regulate.
You would have an area where you would be transmitting television for hundreds of miles (rural areas) and have that butt up against areas where you would be transmitting 'something else' That area in between would need the infrastructure (since the TV signals would interfere) but wouldn't get the benefit from either the TV broadcast or the wireless service.
For such long range frequencies, I'd think a uniform platform is unfortunately necessary across the entire country to avoid 'dead zones' which would fluctuate based on weather conditions, as opposed to just a few areas that get poor reception (but which could be fixed by a repeater)
But Star Trek's writers couldn't envision a focusable artificial lens, and had Kirk wearing reading glasses.
It is also sometimes a 'gift' to the actor. A lot of times the actor DOES have a problem that we don't have a current solution for but the 'future' world likely would. Rather than punish the actor by having them attempt to do a scene without glasses, or expect them to not suffer from arthritis, they will write in either some impediment to what we would expect the cure to be, or write in a new disease we aren't familiar with and thus can't think of a quick 'future' fix.
It does lead to an interesting debate regarding what we (the net) consider to be right and acceptable.
Here we have a story of someone seeing someone else doing something and basically saying, "I can do that." Do we get upset when a new pizza restaurant opens up? Or perhaps another excavation company? What makes this worse than some company saying "Hey, I can do that cheaper."
I realize there are issues with respect to intellectual property, but this IS an important point of discussion. When is the line crossed?
This sounds like a pretty useless robot to me.
I billed it as a feature, but robot Nixom demanded that the tax-nonpayers be delivered intact to the Pain Monster. Something about 4 limbs being necessary for a quartering.
Maybe there's another use I'm missing?
Robotics.
It's been a while since I designed any robots, but there is a big problem with robots in general in that unless you explicitly design sensors to detect something, it won't.
I can't get into the applications here (there are just too many) but having the ability to feel objects not perfectly lined up with the robot's programmed path could help prevent a lot of injuries.
Imagine a robot with this skin wrapped around it, as it moves, it comes into contact with something that it shouldn't have (Some guy), it immediately can stop that motion and hopefully just bruise the guy instead of just continuing mindlessly and slicing the guys arm off or crushing him to death.
That's just an off the top guess, but I would also very much like a robotic grasping arm that could sense pressure. It's easy to design something to grasp, and maybe even put in some resistance (ie: hooke's law), but getting a feel for the force it exerts and the exact positioning of that force could be very useful.
Imagine a grasping arm that doesn't need to be perfectly aligned with an object and could react to the thing it was grasping (ie: reducing the movement of one 'finger' if it felt the object slipping) being able to compensate for a misaligned object could be very useful.
And am I the only one who just does not click on any 'shortened' URL
You aren't the only one. I won't click on them either. I probably wouldn't go to your fluffybunnies url either and tend to stick to just the few I have 'whitelisted' in my brain. A certain citrus celebration themed URL comes to mind when discussing URLs that sound safe on paper...
I realize I was being a bit snarky there, but currently TV does provide a useful service. At the time, it was really the only way to broadcast a message quickly and efficiently to pretty much everyone.
It is a limited resource with respect to the fact that you can really only have one entity use a section of it at a time, but it is also unlimited with respect to the fact that it never decreases with respect to how much you use it. ie: it remains unchanged if you use it for 10 seconds or 100 years. (Not true with resources like minerals) As it stands, it is a mistake to NOT use a resource which is not consumed, and TV at the time was pretty much the best way to utilize that resource and gain some revenue.
It was only recently that we could really use it for anything other than basic broadcasting (The few other needs were met as things like emergency messages could override the TV broadcasts)
To really replace television as the means of revenue, the following would need to happen:
1. Techology would have to improve to the level where we could have receivers which cost approximately the same as today's TV tuner.
2. Everyone would need these receivers
3. We would need an infrastructure which reached EVERYONE that TV can now reach
4. Then we could switch to broadcasting television over this alternate infrastructure.
Then you could use the spectrum however you wished. But that step 3 is a HUGE step that we are not even close to being able to complete.
So we either 'waste' the bandwidth on television and establish an infrastructure for a universal network because we can't use this spectrum, or we establish an infrastructure for a universal network so we can free up the spectrum.
There must be other ways to transmit TV these days
I agree, what we really need is a means to transmit a video and audio signal in a manner which can reach almost our entire population. If only there were a means to do this without us having to lay down thousands of miles of data lines, either hanging on poles, or underground.
Honestly, it takes an effort TO classify something. As a contractor? I am NOT allowed to do it except as a derivative. Things I created FROM classified data is classified at the level of the data but things I create are NOT implicitly classified (typically).
When has anyone actually taken it all the way through the legal system? That's part of the problem, is that the aggressor can just hold out longer than the victim. The victim settles (And it IS often fair for the victim) but it doesn't prove the 'point'.
Forgetting the fact that a flat tax and/or a consumption tax system is a stupid idea, how does implementing that take power away from politicians?
Initially, that was sort of built into the Constitution, but quickly ignored. I'm also not going to get into a discussion regarding the benefits/drawbacks of a flat tax system outside of your question.
Right now politicians have a HUGE amount of power that they are not authorized to have (by the Constitution). They are able to do things which they are not normally allowed to do by not directly implementing such laws, but by using taxation (or tax breaks) as incentives to encourage the actions they cannot legislate.
As an introduction, Congress really has no authority to set a drinking age. That IS left up to the states. However, by using funding, they can threaten to withold funding from the States unless certain conditions are met. Even though if they tried to set a 21 year old drinking age directly, it would be found unconstitutional, this method has been determined by the Supreme Court to be constitutional because the states can always opt out of receiving the funds, and thus are not actually bound by law. That sets the premise for how you can get around the constitution and perform actions which you normally are prohibited from doing.
So you have taxes, and you can't tell people that they must do this, or they can't do that, or even if you could, it wouldn't have the votes to actually pass an all out ban. So you create a tax break for behavior that you want people to do, and a tax for behavior you don't want people to do. If you take away the power of politicians to put all these little tweaks into the tax code and only modify it on very general terms with a lot of public scrutiny, you VASTLY limit their power.
You don't need a flat tax to do so, but you would remove a great deal of power from them if you limited the ways in which they can manipulate the tax code for political gain.
That just addresses the 'power' aspect of it. I also object to it because it can be a very unjust tool. Since it is circumventing the constitution, it essentially allows almost anything to be done. If you were to sufficiently raise taxes to the point where living without certain tax breaks is a sufficient burden, you have the ability to pass 'laws' which don't have the same oversight yet essentially penalize people for behaving in legal, but not approved ways.
People think it sounds good now when it's just applied to 'Nasty, things people should know better, sins' (Smoking, Drinking, etc) but it slowly gets applied to lifestyles (Eating, exercise, Cars, homes) and eventually will become the 'official government way of life' and we won't have enough disposable income after taxes to do otherwise.
Yeah, just like uploading your band's new song to YouTube (or, a more apt analogy, uploading it to your band's website that no one has ever heard of) makes you instantly successful.
Do you really think the publishing industry does nothing to promote the books it prints?
Success doesn't matter if your goal was simply to make your book available. For the purposes of barriers to entry into the market, there are essentially none. If you really want to get into the discussion of advertising costs and how that requires someone to finance you... that's really tangential to the discussion. You might not make as much money as you would like, but with an initial cost of $0 to enter the market, and the ability to distribute to millions for a few dollars more, it really can't be any more fair.
Let's face it, the only thing keeping anyone from publishing their work these days is their own motivation to do so.
That IS an interesting way to look at it. It makes it all the more interesting when you think about what he sacrificed just before he literally lost a piece of himself on the beach.
With so many outstanding series were canceled after only two seasons, like Firefly, Deadwood, and countless others, is there any hope that the same might happen here?
Easy.
King has enough clout now to demand that if the studio fails to follow through and cancels the TV portion they would be liable for a set penalty that would be equal to the ad revenue for a successful show. Therefore they would have no incentive to try and play the margins by cancelling this show for one which might earn a % more.
That, and this:
This will be shown later at night. It would fit in somewhere after the key prime time shows due to content. OR would go to a place like Showtime or HBO.
Yeah, they did the XCP thing. And ripped Linux off of the PS3. But if you want to send a message, you buy the products they make that conform to standards (assuming they're worth buying), and don't buy the ones that don't. That's the stuff that influences what they make. Just crossing a company off the list for something they did years ago isn't a way to affect change.
So I buy the stuff from them that meets my needs and conforms to standards... until it doesn't.
Sony's actions with regard to OtherOS makes this an impossible goal. They literally altered a product after the fact. You don't have the protection of buying a standard because most of the time, you aren't making decisions based on standards, but features. They altered the deal, and you just have to pray that they don't alter it any further.
You can't change their ways by buying their 'good' products if they can turn them into 'bad' products at will.
They have escaped your bounds for which a company can be controlled by purchasing their good products.
To paraphrase another movie quote: at this point, The only winning move is not to play.
Sony has annual revenues of around 80 billion dollars, over 150,000 employees and an order of magnitude more contractors and manufacturing partners. XCP sucked, but - Sony is the size of a nation. Do you boycott China because of the melamine-laced products?
Yes I do. Until China and its culture supports the standards I expect from a country or producer I do not buy their products. If they could say they were going to, and then put some (money) teeth behind that goal, I'd probably start buying from them again.
Sometimes it isn't easy to follow certain ideals. Just because something is hard, doesn't mean that it isn't worth doing.