Creation is usually influenced or built off earlier creations.
[[Citation Needed]]
Seriously, I'm not buying it. Despite the massive increase in copyright terms over the last few decades - there's been no noticeable drop in the rate of creation of artistic works (books, movies, music, whatever).
In a reality where all the stocks recovered completely at the end of that crash, that would be a valid question. But even in our reality, someone who was using (or the fund they owned shares in was using) an automated system to sell if the price dropped was potentially hurt.
Actually I've had Seagate, WD (I wrote an article about a WD drive about ten years ago, it will be in Random Scribblings), Maxtor, and others, and I haven't been disappointed with any of them.
Who was actually harmed by this crash?
Anyone who owned those stocks, of who owned funds which own those stocks, or who own index stocks, or... really potentially a whole lot of ordinary people, not just "a bunch of wall street [sic] speculators".
Probably the biggest eSports tournament was the 2014 LoL World Championship. It hosted 45,000 people in the stadium, and streamed to over 27 million people.
That still puts it in the lowest tiers of sporting events.
You see, it is often the case here that roads are built for speeds much higher than the actual posted limit. Parameters like lane width, grade, shoulder presence & width, presence/absence of median, etc. all contribute to an intuitive psychological understanding of what an appropriate (and safe) speed is.
Horseshit.
I would back date the origin to something closer to the late 19th century as urbanization and cities grew. You had increasing agricultural efficiency allowing more people to live away from the land and more and larger business organizations that required "white collar" jobs to manage the organization -- clerks, accountants, record-keepers, etc.
White collar isn't necessarily middle class - Bob Cratchit was a white collar worker after all. The conflation of the two (with the massive growth of university graduates, white collar jobs, and rising salaries) is largely a post WWII phenomenon.
That was short lived, but a great example of how PCs in many ways decimated a field as a single accountant could now do the work of many. I think they said that long-term it didn't hurt that much because as the ease of which you could create sophisticated models in PC applications became understood, the same number of accountants were now doing vastly more complex accounting jobs.
My favorite example is my wife's job (as it happens, she is an accountant)... Thirty years ago, at about a quarter of it's current size, they had a full time accountant, two bookkeepers, and a filing clerk. Today they have a mostly full time accountant (who also doubles as IT and HR) - and the phone girl who does data entry and filing. The difference is today they have a POS.
Accounting really hasn't changed much in that time, especially for medium and small businesses. It's only the big boys that really go in for heavy duty modeling, for smaller businesses there's just not that much need.
So, the "biggest eSports" tournament isn't even as big or logistically complicated as a lightly attended baseball game here in my mid-sized market town?
Color me unimpressed.
Seriously, as far as "big" events goes, the "World Of Tanks Grand Finals" doesn't even make the needle twitch off the zero peg. And not even the "on a computer" aspect is very interesting here in 2015.
If millions of people die because of inadequate testing then that's the fault of the people who tested the drug. There are plenty of humans who would volunteer for tests with full knowledge and understanding of the risks.
On your planet maybe. But here on Earth we don't allow human testing in the early phases of drug development. And even if they did allow human testing, the volunteers can't possibly have full knowledge and understanding of the risks - because at that stage of the game, that knowledge doesn't exist. That's why we test on animals in the first place.
There are plenty of animals that don't suffer the same was a chimps to, such as mice, that can be used for a lot of the tests.
Where they can be, they already are. Primates are among the expensive and difficult lab animals to maintain, and thus are only used where no other reasonable alternative exists. (Or, again, the world you describe is a very different one from Earth.)
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the notion of a broad middle class is a kind of historical accident caused by the confluence of growth in technology, wide and cheap resource availability and high labor demand. We may be nearing the end of the middle class as we've known it and mostly like it, and returning to a more historical pattern of broad poverty and narrow wealth.
I've been saying that for a decade now - the middle class as we know it today essentially didn't exist within living memory. (That's changing as the Greatest Generation dies off, but my point stands.) It's a product of the post-WWII explosion in technology and consumer demand. But it's the set of conditions that most living Westerners grew up in, and thus they take it for granted that it's theirs by right.
Where they seem to get nervous is over the fact that the jobs increasingly eliminated by automation are jobs that previously required a lot of education and were high wage, white collar jobs. And they're not being replaced by new jobs of the same type, they're being replaced by low-wage jobs that require hard to automate manual skills -- when they're being replaced at all.
That's the big change that's happened right under our noses over the last thirty odd years, and that almost all experts and so close to all of the masses as to make no difference completely missed... not automation (robots, etc... what's usually thought of as automation), but the microprocessor revolution. High skill jobs, formerly requiring college trained professionals (engineers and accountants for example), have vanished at a frightening rate.
In the past, machines replaced "manual labor." Today, machines are replacing "white collared labor." Getting more education won't help you anymore.
It's even worse than that - machines are replacing skilled white collar labor, professionals with degrees like engineers and accountants. Not only will more education not help you anymore, neither necessarily will experience.
What you fail to understand about the legal system is that written law doesn't really matter. Precedent doesn't really matter, and your precious perfect logic doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is what a judge thinks (or can be assumed to think, without contest) about a particular situation at a particular time. Everything else serves only to influence how the judge decides. Legal precedent gives the judge a background of similar decisions to compare against, written laws provide a basis for how legislators (and by representation, the society at large) think the decision should go, and logic (as presented by the lawyers in the court) is simply a means to convince the judge which of the conflicting opinions really best fits the situation.
For this particular case, the judge has decided that it's reasonable to consider the chimpanzees to be legally-recognized entities, because that allows for the most reasonable context in which to consider the remainder of the case. Issues like marriage, taxation, and voting rights are all matters for another case, to be decided if or when such a dispute reaches a court. Having a legal decision "in a vacuum" is not actually a problem.
It sounds to me like not only the police is wrong by applying for too many uses of the device (of course they do - it's their job to gather as much information about potential criminals as possible), also the courts appear to be wrong by not doing much evaluation of the requests. Now having to handle nine requests a day is a huge number as well (that's before accounting for holidays and weekends), yet no excuse for not following proper procedures.
What's interesting is that you make an assertion... and then act as though that assertion was a fact.
From the face of it, the courts should be more strict. Take more time to properly evaluate each one
One of the things you've failed to account for, there are probably hundreds of judges in a city of a half million - thus it's quite possible to be strict and evaluate each one and still come up with this number. It's a distributed parallel system - what sound like scary huge numbers arise quite easily from a relatively modest number of actors, especially considering the length of time involved.
But the ill-educated (or deeply biased, or prejudiced towards panic*) won't stop and think about these things. Thinking Is Hard.
And, to those moderating, yes - I know the actual number is 4,300. I'm just so damn tired of the level of ignorance so prevalent on Slashdot.
* Actually there's considerable overlap in these categories.
Once momentum of the object has slowed below orbital speed, it should fall towards earth and burn up in the atmosphere.
Slowing it below orbital speed just makes the whole problem 100x harder due to the vastly increased amount of time you need to hold the laser steady on target. All you actually need to do is get the periapsis down to around 200-300km, and atmospheric drag will do the rest.
Tracking should not be that hard as radar aimed weapons have been around for many years.
Tracking isn't the problem - aiming the laser at, and holding it steady on, the target is the problem.
If all else fails, lower your standards.
