Democrats are every bit as emotional and idiotic as Republicans.
Republicans remove social freedoms.
Democrats remove economic freedoms.
When one gets too bad, switch to the other. Rinse, repeat.
The fear of "throwing away your vote" has created a two-party system where both parties are pretty similar. Nothing will change until it gets a lot worse, bad enough for a third party to swing enough votes to really matter.
I also live in a country where checks does not exist. At least I have never seen one. So the grandparent comment of "I guess it could be done, but it might take some creativity." is pretty much mindboggling.
Account number + amount, transfer money. Zero or low fees, depending on bank. Trust me, this is the future.
They still allow objects with more serious potential through. A laptop as a blunt force instrument? The potential energy stored in a laptop battery? The RF radiation created by handheld electronics?
Bah! When I travel by air, I usually bring half a gallon of highly flammable liquid and a set of glass knives.
Just like everyone else.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41292000/jpg/_41292052_bottle203.jpg
Simply put, do what YOU love, fuck the rest of the world. Most people are idiots anyways.
No.
Do what will maximize your happiness throughout your life.
Plenty of WoW players have lived to change their mind and regret their priorities. Worst case: A few years of WoW, at the cost of girlfriend and education. 50 years left to regret the choice.
Of course, your brain will start making excuses and you might convince yourself it is actually all for the better and what you wanted all along. And you're happy. Such happiness is hollow and dry, deep down you know it is wrong.
A balanced life has value in our culture because it is the lifestyle that tend to give the most happiness in the long run.
"Copying of any Nintendo game is illegal and is strictly prohibited by domestic and international intellectual property laws. "Back-up" or "archival" copies are not authorized and are not necessary to protect your software.
Emphasis added.
Is that a written guarantee that no 7-year-old kid could possibly manage to destroy a game disk?
It's the second law of thermodynamics.
Re-read original post.
The energy enters the system in form of nutrition for the cells. The suggestion was to reclaim a part of this energy, not to generate the nutrition.
No perpetual motion. No violation.
In a hierarchical organization, change happens by fiat from the top down. In an anarchic place like the internet, shutting down servers through legal attacks serves the same purpose. It sucks for the server operators, but it forces users to try out newer and different solutions, which are often designed to fix old flaws. If you like analogies, the RIAA is like a fire that cleans out the deadwood.
Grandparent is pessimistic because he thinks piracy can be stomped out.
I believe the opposite, but I am still a pessimist. I am pessimistic because I worry about what will happen when the pirating masses will go underground when they are labeled as criminals.
BitTorrent is elegant but not really trying that hard to hide what it is transferring. Consider it a solution when Napster failed: The centralized server was the weakest link, so the new protocol operated without a centralized server.
The attack now is on surveillance on peer transfers. There is a solution, there have just not been any need for it yet. Distributed hash tables, strong encryption, onion routing. (Outlaw encryption? Hello, Steganography.)
The pessimistic part:
Treating masses like criminals accomplishes nothing except hiding the heavy criminals. The tools that will be created for safe piracy will likely also make it that much easier to transfer any other information, be it terrorist briefings or child porn.
Much like the prohibition era, trying to apply a law against the will of the masses will not accomplish much except benefiting criminals.
You don't see anyone wearing contact sunglasses, now do you? Not even the ones that darken in sunlight and lighten indoors.
No, it's because seeing people with solid black eyes would creep people right the hell out. Didn't you see Event Horizon?
My major complaint about contacts for blocking sun is far to difficult to find the "mirrored shades" variant.
Solid mirror eyes. Heck, you wouldn't need no flying car to know you're living in the future then.
Just back from a weekend trip (European) in London myself.
Google maps on my phone was extremely convenient. Lots of open wifi around so you should be able to use it without data also roaming costs.
Two words: Rainbow tables.
One word: Salt
And NASA can say "What do you think all that stuff was for? It worked, didn't it?"
Even better: We could hire Bruce Willis and make an action movie about how they prevented the end of the world and cash in afterward as well!
Seems nobody else is getting this. Sad to see that nobody made this comment already, and sadder still to see you only at +3.
Good comments documents WHY.
The United States is a major part of the civilized world, and DOES support capital punishment.
Maybe it shouldn't.
The problem with capital punishment is that you're doing irreversible mistakes every time you judge an innocent. Which does happen, uncomfortably often.
I agree with the common + site-specific approach.
3 standard prefixes (short for junk sites, long for important stuff)
Site-specific suffixes. slashdot could be "Slash", "SD", "Nerdy", "Slack" or anything else. This will stick in memory and can be written down as long as you keep the prefix in a different place.
This will throw any virus off the trail, though I assume you would still be vulnerable for a professional attack directed at you as an individual.
Convenience: Memorizing the 3 strong prefixes allows me to use different passwords everywhere and easily remember 90% without having to look them up.
Value can only be created by consuming resources. Whether that resource is energy, or some natural resource such as coal or iron, or human labor, etc, there is only a finite amount of that resource.
Wrong.
Simplified example: Let us assume you require 2 tons of rock to build a home. Then somebody teach you to build a better home from 1 ton of rock.
Now you have 1 spare ton of rock and a better home. Obviously, we have created value.
Economics is not about measuring the total amount of resources on earth. In the end, it is about efficiency, trading work and resources to always make more efficient use of resources.
Improved efficiency = Satisfying needs of more people with the same amount of resources = value.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
