Comment Too many issues (Score 1) 126
We, the electorate, have a laundry list of issues that are important to us. While the wealthy care about just one thing: their pocket books. It's easy to divide and conqueror us.
I can picture it now; they got a whole queue of people called "Bond, James Bond", "Jason Bourne" and "Jack Ryan". Hilarity ensues...
Yeah, just watch out for the one who asks for Kim Philby.
I can see that Iowa can prohibit in-state sales not through dealers, but why would that forbid Tesla from providing test drives and then, if the customer wants to talk turkey, refer them to e.g. a Missouri store, or an Internet site based in another state? This is how Tesla handles NJ; you want a Tesla in NJ you can test drive one and then hop over to NY to buy it.
Is there some Iowa law against manufacturers allowing people to borrow cars for free?
I'm surprised that more homes aren't equipped with house wide 12/24 volt DC, that would go a LONG way towards decreasing the costs/efficiency issues with LED's and many home electronics.
Um, no. Lower voltage means greater losses within the house, given the same wire thickness. Doing the step-down as close as possible to the use means higher efficiency.
Like most complaints about the government that I see on Slashdot, this never happened. They set energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs, that's it. Some companies decided to meet those requirements with CFLs, some with LEDs, some with high efficiency incandescents.
There are a very few incandescents which meet the current interim standards. There are none which meet the final standards, which were in fact chosen knowing that. Claiming it was just a matter of setting efficiency standards rather than banning the incandescent bulb is sophistry.
Chances are your dimmers and bulbs just aren't compatible. There are at least four kinds of dimmers out there -- those labeled for incandescent only, those labeled for magnetic ballast, those labeled for electronic ballast, and universal.
These labels are typically wrong, of course (nothing's ever easy).
An incandescent-only dimmer is a leading-edge (forward) phase cut dimmer. It works by turning on the power partway into the sine wave, cutting off the rising edge. It requires only two wires (hot and load), and obtains power for its own use by using the low-resistance path through an incandescent filament when it is off. Generally works poorly if at all with an LED fixture.
An electronic ballast dimmer is a trailing-edge (reverse) phase cut dimmer, and works by turning the power OFF partway into the sine wave. It requires a neutral wire as well as hot and load. Originally intended for low-voltage halogen fixtures using an electronic ballast.
A magnetic ballast dimmer is also a leading-edge (forward) phase cut dimmer, but requires three wires. Originally intended for low-voltage halogen fixtures using a magnetic ballast.
A universal dimmer is a two-wire forward phase cut dimmer that is supposed to work well with both types of ballast, but in practice just sucks.
Your LED lights will likely dim properly with either an electronic ballast dimmer, or a magnetic ballast dimmer (even though the LED certainly uses an electronic ballast), but not both, and will work poorly or not at all with the other types. And of course if you have multiple brands of LED they could require different types.
As for reproduction, I would say that issues that are not in the domain of choice, are not in the domain of ethics. The presumption (dubious as it may be) is that people in general could choose to be in the same financial conditions as multinational corporations. The reasonableness of this disparity in activities seems to directly correlate with the degree one accepts the notion they could (perhaps if they "worked harder"), as you seem to have alluded to yourself. If one simply and clearly cannot, regardless of any questions of individual choice, engage in a particular activity, I would see this as excluding their circumstances from morality or ethics entirely, and therefore others acting otherwise who are in the domain of choice in that respect, would not run contrary to the Categorical Imperative.
I would argue that the amount of effort one puts out is not directly related to the value of ones efforts to society, and that one is generally paid based on the value of their work to the larger society.
By this measure, people incapable of extraordinary feats, "cannot, regardless o any questions of individual choice" achieve extraordinary feats. Bill Gates (as an example) was capable of building a company with revenues such that it was able to take advantage of the tax laws in such a way as to leverage an increase in personal wealth. That someone else can't would therefore exclude their circumstances (and thus the consequences of their circumstances) from morality or ethics entirely (by your own argument).
Thus person A's accumulation of wealth is not immoral or unethical, merely because person B is incapable of doing the same.
I think the problem that most people get tangled up in here is exactly what financial wealth does and does not represent. It represents the ability to do work now in return for a marker that allows one to call upon societies resources and labor at some future point in time to accomplish some goal of their choosing. The assumption implicit in the mind of most people who abhor accumulation of wealth is that the government is better able to direct the resources and labor of society, even though the government has not demonstrated the ability to provide sufficient value to society to accumulate such markers, whole people such as Andrew Carnegie have done so. I have serious doubts that something like the Carnegie Free Library system would have come about without the accumulation of said markers by an individual, who then spent them in such an endeavor. Government unfortunately is incapable of long term thing beyond the next election cycle. The only time this is not true is when term limit or self limits kick in. Even then, we've seen second term presidents compromise their ethical and moral positions, despite the fact that there is no chance of their reelection due to term limits.
Last person the FAA tried to fine for commercial use of a drone for aerial photography won in the FAAs own court.
Yeah, Director Cormey, I'm sure you like the current procedure where you just obtain a warrant from an "independent" magistrate, a.k.a former prosecutor R. Stamp, even after the fact if you need to. Especially if you can do it based on an "anonymous tip" courtesy of your buddies over in the NSA. I'm sure that makes you feel good when you put on your Judge Dredd costume and run around a hotel bedroom screaming "I AM THE LAW" (BTW the "escort" you hired to watch this performance isn't REALLY impressed, you know)
Too bad. Enough abuses by criminals and governments (but I repeat myself) have finally gotten the encryption idea going, even among corporate behemoths. Next will be end-to-end encryption of voice as a matter of course. What will you ever do when you can't just touch a key and listen to anything you want? You might have to do some actual... work!
I pulled a number out of thin air. It had to be a bad one, eh?
But about dust, if you had the mass equivalent of a moderate asteroid in dust, I'm not sure it all would burn up in the atmosphere.
And if it did, how much heat would that transfer to the earth ( as a system ). I don't know that the difference would be appreciable by us.
It's that simple. Even with the patches, bash is still running the contents of environment variables through its general command parser in order to parse the procedure. That's ridiculously dangerous... the command parser was never designed to be secure in that fashion. The parsing of env variables through the command parser to pass sh procedures OR FOR ANY OTHER REASON should be removed from bash outright. Period. End of story. Light a fire under the authors someone. It was stupid to use env variables for exec-crossing parameters in the first place. No other shell does it that I know of.
This is a major attack vector against linux. BSD systems tend to use bash only as an add-on, but even BSD systems could wind up being vulnerable due to third party internet-facing utilities / packages which hard-code the use of bash.
-Matt
There you go!
"The Damn TSA and traffic stops doing warrantless examination of hard drive and cell phone contents have ruined it for the rest of us".
Very sad.
fortune: No such file or directory