If you believe that your worth and your wealth are the same thing, then there is no hope for you.

By your own logic; what makes you worthy of a salary greater than 90% of your neighbors? Why should you earn more than the unfit, 5'1" dullard who is illiterate in any language who cleans your table at lunchtime? How many years would she have to work to have what you make in a year? How is that fair? Indeed, why should anyone earn more than the minimum wage? Anything more would be unfair, wouldn't it?

Therein lies the misconception. Those who believe in capitalism don't believe you gain wealth by winning the lotto. You aren't given a prize for being the smartest either. You do it by adding value - not some metaphysical value that adds to your worth as a human being, but value that someone else can see and is willing to pay for. Sometimes that person is very smart, like Wozniak and Jobs, but more often they are just providing a service that a lot of people are willing to pay for. Like the lady who invented those little buttons that people put in their Crocs. I can personally attest that I would never in a million years have created that product - due to the fact that I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would ever don a pair of Crocs in the first place, let alone adorn it in such a hideous fashion. I would bet that I could best her in a "smarts" contest. You probably could too. But she made a couple of million bucks in her first year in business and you and I are collecting salaries working for someone else. And she deserves every penny of that money, and you and I don't no matter how great we think we are, because she went out there and earned it, and we didn't.

Really? I don't see how it is difficult to understand at all. Someone decided they want to try and force users to go all NVIDIA. I don't agree with it, but I can see how some suit would think it is a great idea.

Mmmh, I'm not entirely convinced. Yes, my collection is also 99.999% legit, save for the odd copy of something bloody hard to find that I got from a friend.

My personal experience on the iZune thing, however, is that a lot of them are bought by young people, who, almost per definition, often don't have the money to buy a lot of the argumentably too expensive on-media music. That drove them to learn how to get the music they want for cheap, and because the industry has been too stupid to swiftly hop on to the digital bandwagon, 'for cheap' became 'downloaded from the internet for free'.

A very convenient habit, and one very hard to break even now that the music industry have started to realise that there is something to this whole intarweb thing after all.

Yes, us older types with a good income and a lot of appreciation for the bands we choose to listen to will buy the stuff, often on physical media.
However, add to the above circumstances the fact that music has become not so much of an art as another mass-produed consumer item to be rammed down the shee-err, valued customers' collective throat, and what incentive is there to pay good money for something that you'll never listen to again in three weeks, when the newest fad buys airtime ?

Again, the above is based on personal experience, but I have a feeling that the share of illegal copies on the world's music players, while spectacularly less than what the MAFIAA wants us to believe, is still a lot more than you seem to think.

From that article:

It also mentions that data from every country other than Canada fails to support the claim.

My first thought after hearing this "unpublished claim" was that there's heavy selection bias here. People who get flu shots are primarily people who have higher exposure to infectious diseases, such as hospital workers and teachers. If it's true for influenza (spurring them to get a shot) it would be true for H1N1 as well.

Without hearing anything to the contrary (and esp. PaddyM's link showing other researchers see selection bias in the Canada study) the "news" here is really:

People more likely to catch the flu are more likely to catch the flu.

Stunning, isn't it?

Really, is it all that ironic that the IOC would consider our immigration and the recent crime statistics as reasons to not come here over RIO ? For me at least, I can see their point on a few issues :

1) The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate when measured against citizen head count to incarcerated or otherwise restricted status citizenry (Parole/Probation) of ANY country in the world.

2) A convicted U.S. felon can still travel internationally to other countries, yet the U.S. refuses to consider allowing another country's citizens to arrive here for what constitutes a misdemeanor or less, regardless of time passed

3) Getting back into the country as a citzen or "worse" GC or other status holder is worse than painful if singled out for secondary. I am non-white and get profiled every time I come back, despite having served and having no "reasons" to be flagged other than my last name which is clearly non-american originated.

4) While requiring a VISA or fingerprinting itself is not counter-intuitive to travel, the manner and inconsistency is. Having said that, for being touted as "the land of the free" and "a shining beacon of democracy" is ironic itself when our policies at the border (or even non-border with the TSA and Border Agents) clearly indicate that we are profiling even inside our borders. How do you explain roving road blocks for "immigration" checks just because you happen to be on a road within 100 miles of a border....

5) To host in Chicago, we'd be doing the same things we did in Atlanta. We'd be buying the homeless once again a 1-way ticket to nowhere (or anywhere but "here"), we'd be tearing down projects and displacing people/families to make way for the Olympic Village, and you can be damn sure that the average "Chicagoan" (sp?) would not be able to even get into the venues, much less afford the cost of the tickets being hosted in their own city. This happened in Atlanta where I live in 1996....

6) We just had the summit in Pittsburgh that was shameful in the way it's citizenry were treated as well as most of the peaceful demonstrators. Beatings, the use of a sound cannon and extensive use of tear gas, etc had me thinking initially this was some other country where liberty and democracy/freedom of speech was supressed.... Turns out I was right, but had the wrong country in mind, which was depressing and downright scary

The list could go on with examples, but it would be unfair to clutter the Slashdot database with further examples that are easily googled.
I do love my country and the people in it for the most part, but I'd be lying if I said I believed 95% of the hype that our Tourism Board spews out to attract visitors. I think the loss of tourism and downturn in visitors since we enacted the failed Patriot Act speaks volumes, the rest of the tidbits I shared just add further fuel to the reasons why those who would like to see us (the U.S.) just stay the hell away.
Suffice it to say in my opinion that on the one hand we have U.S. which has clearly become a very dim shadow of itself and the other hand we're trying to portray ourselves, or at least that's my impression as a U.S. Citizen.....

I mostly agree with your points about options. You will notice however that my arguments are basically addressing points others make about their own justifications for keeping with the system they prefer. If instead of appealing to silly arguments they had said what you said, "I use this because it's my preference", I would have agreed and would have seen no reason to post a reply. I'm not just saying they need excuses - I'm addressing the excuses they are posting here.

I don't think Americans are too full of anything. I think Americans are, like everybody else, lazy. They don't want to bother to learn something different until they have to. Fortunately for them, their economy is such and their prominence in the world is such that they could decide to use Morse code if they wanted to and the world would oblige, installing SMS/telegraph gateways if that's what it took to do business with America. Heck, millions of Americans choose to believe in creationism and the rest of the world is happy to nod politely and be amused at those excentric Americans. So, don't worry - the world has already accepted Americans' quirkiness about measurement systems.

I don't know about the rest of the world but I don't usually go about pestering anybody about their personal choices. I do however reserve the right to point out that arguments rationalizing your personal preference usually fall flat when confronted with the actual facts, like I do in this post.

In the end, thank you for your post - I welcome good ideas and open debate and I was getting tired of everybody pointing out my "little" mistake about the famous liter of water...

I suppose you often use Kilocelsius for 1000C, and Centicelsius for .01C, right?

You see, the cited advantage of the decimal system is not that a unit is based on two physical properties and setting a power-of-ten distance between them...

The advantage that is cited is that power-of-ten conversions are both useful and simple. In this case, however, they are not useful. Nobody converts to microcelsius, nanocelsius, kilocelsius, or gigacelsius because when real science is being performed, they use kelvin.

Wait, you think they actually give a shit about changing colloquialisms from one locale to another? We're damn lucky if we get a translation from Japan to English that doesn't involve phrases like "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" and "Heaven's plot to destroy all minds." In other words, we're lucky if we get anything better than a babblefish translate, and you're arguing about them changing whole ideas to suit other nationalities.

Do you understand what region locking even is? Yeah, sure I can import video games for personal use, but if I can't play them on my region locked console I have a $50 shiny coaster. That sounds like same fine protection to me.

Of course, if we ignored him, he'd probably go away only to be replaced by an anti-gaming figurehead that wasn't batshit fucking insane, so maybe it's best for everyone to just keep him around for the amusement factor.

I am still not actually convinced that he isn't in the pay of the ESA. I mean, he provides great publicity (I bet Bully wouldn't have sold nearly as well if he hadn't protested it, the game was half arsed), and any one who tries to ban video games (or anything related to that) ends up being tared with the same brush!

>>>Washington Times. Its the newspaper equivalent of Fox News.

That's a nice opinion, but it doesn't explain why we should ignore the article the Times printed You committed an Ad Hominem Fallacy. Example: "Paula says the umpire made the correct call, but this can't be true, because Paula is a liar." Assuming the premise is correct, that Paula's observation is probably a lie, the umpire may nonetheless have made the right call. Likewise Washington Times' article may still be a worthy article, and you've failed to explain why it isn't.

Someone else wrote:

>>>what's wrong with surfing porn at work?

Same thing that's objectionable about hanging a bikini calendar in your office. Some women find this objectionable and will file a lawsuit about "creating an unfriendly workplace" or some such. Therefore both the calendar and the porn are verboten. Of course it's not just women. Back in the days of Wang computers I saw a lot of jokes pasted to bulletin boards about male coworkers or husbands, and the size of the their Wangs.

Getting back to the article, it sounds like it was a more serious problem than just one or two visits to a site:
- "One foundation employee...during a three-week period in June 2008, the worker perused hundreds of pornographic Web sites" (bored from lack-of-work perhaps?)
- "Another employee in a different case was caught with hundreds of pictures, videos and even PowerPoint slide shows containing pornography."
- "Another employee who stored nude images of herself on her computer told investigators she mistakenly had downloaded the pictures."
- "The foundation is hardly the only government agency to be embarrassed... The inspector general for the SEC noted in a report last fall that it had recently conducted three investigations into employees who misused government computers to view pornography."

The remarkable thing is the lack of punishment. The first two employees merely got a 2-week suspension without pay. Oh no. Horror. The woman received mandatory counseling, and the senior exec who surfed 300+ days apparently got no punishment - just an early retirement. If I did this on my private job I'd get FIRED. I should forget private engineering and instead study public policy to land myself a nice cushy job in government.