True, though their is the balance with a homeless person who probably gets some government handouts. Do they take in more tax dollars then they give back? Of course the ultimate is to simply kill the tax collector and spend the rest of your life in prison where the taxes you pay are really minimized, especially if you arrange to spend it in solitary. I think that most everyone would rather pay taxes then spend life in solitary. It's still a better deal compared to what a local warlord in a society without government will give, arbitrary tax or death.
There's quite a bit of evidence that smoking helps various mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Note that it is usually poor people that smoke and people are often poor due to mental illness.
So true. We can expand it to any risky behaviour. Want to drive, that's risky, better sign a waiver. Work at an office job that involves sitting all day, that's risky, sign a waiver. Have sex, that's really risky, sign a waiver. And of course as others point out, there are a lot dietary decisions that end up costing healthcare dollars. And the most risky, leading a healthy lifestyle, living to a ripe old age costs perhaps the most healthcare dollars, sign a waiver in case you live longer then the mean and cost extra.
Actually in civilized countries, you usually have the choice to not pay taxes by refusing the benefits that come with taxes. You can drop out in various ways from moving into the bush to being simply homeless and living out of the garbage. With uncivilized countries you'll be expected to pay up whether you have the means or not and if you don't, they'll simply kill you.
Actually the taxes are worse in Somalia. Upon arrival you'll be grabbed by a local warlord and be informed that you better come up with X dollars (usually a few thousand, they're not too unreasonable) if you want to live, here's a phone. And they will kill you if you don't find some way to raise that money.
Smokers who quit will cost less to the public health care system
And you know this how? Smokers usually die quicker, so don't burden the system as much. My Dad died from smoking, once he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, most of his health spending was on morphine with just a few days of hospital care. My Mom, who is a non-smoker, developed Alzheimers 15 years ago and just keeps hanging in there, in a condition that if she was a dog, would see us sentenced for animal abuse, eating up tons of healthcare dollars as she is completely incapable of caring for herself
When the bring out a new model of car they don't mess with the pedals and steering wheel because that would be stupid. About as stupid as changing an ingrained UI just to make it "NEW!!!" Almost as bad as the use of the "white it out and spread it out" interface in Windows is that so many websites are now "updating" their look to this new user vicious standard so they can be "NEW" too.
with the fact that even car UIs, something that as you say, does basically one thing, still had the UI take a long time to settle down and lately parts of it have been breaking the paradigm of keep eyes on road.
The automobile has gone through quite a few control redesigns which are continuing. If you jumped into a Model T (maybe only early ones), you'd find it hard to figure out. Besides the controls that have been automated away, choke and ignition advance, the parking brake was operated by your left hand, along with ignition advance, throttle by right hand and gears by the pedals along with the brake being the right pedal. The steering wheel started out as a tiller and as late as 1899 was introduced in America as a wheel. Since various controls have migrated to the wheel or right beside. The turn signal operated by your left hand, which has acquired more and more functionality such as operating the lights, wipers, high beam. On the right, there was the gear shifter for quite a while before mostly migrating to the floor. And all the various controls that can be found on a modern steering wheel. Even my old truck has the cruise control buttons on the wheel. The shifter pattern has also changed at times. Had an early 5 speed where reverse was where 1st usually is. Speaking of my 25 year old truck, while most of the pedals are standard, on the left there's the parking brake release and the hi-lo headlight dimmer button on the floor. Turn signal only operates the turn signals with a knob on the dash that you pull to turn on the lights and turn to dim the dash lights and turn on the interior light. The wiper switch is besides it, turn one way for normal wiper operation, further for high speed, turn the other way for intermittent operation, push for squirting cleaner (still have to turn the wipers on manually). Another set of controls that seemed somewhat standardized for a long time and now are in flux are the climate controls and radio/sound system where automakers keep screwing around with stupid touch controls. Stupid due to breaking the paradigm that the driver should be able to operate everything by feel while watching the road. It took close to 50 years to standardize just the pedals on the car UI, while the modern computer UI is at the most 30 yrs old. Hopefully in another 100 yrs, things will have mostly settled down, but as the automobile has shown, new tech such as touch screens, still puts basic interface into flux, often with stupid design decisions such as trading easy to feel buttons for hard to use, changeable, touch screen.
CONNECT 28800/ARQ/V34/LAPM/V42BIS, at the best often 26.4, and better have a good modem to get that over the rusty barbed wire they call phone lines here (about a hour outside Vancouver).
Just to be clear, are you asking your fellow taxpayers to subsidize your broadband service? If so, do you consider that fair?
That's how society works, and always has. The Romans had subsidized roads. The American Constitution has a clause for postal roads, and with advancements in technology, broadband is about important for a working society as postal service was in the 18th century. Of course I'm sure you have nothing to do with the roads so as to not unfairly take advantage of your fellow taxpayers.
You must have had a good dial-up connection. Here it's about 12MBs an hour, so not even 300MBs a day if I don't mind tying up the phone for 24hrs and I've been kicked off a couple of ISPs for using less. As usual unlimited doesn't really mean unlimited. My government is paying the telco to put in a cell tower (and officially I lost my dial-up last Nov 16th, but since in Canada it is considered an essential service, it's still working). I figure it'll probably take about an hour to use the monthly quota if I pay the same as I do for dial-up ($38 a month).
I'm on dial-up and squid doesn't really help, especially as more and more sites are switching to HTTPS, which squid doesn't seem to cache. Shit I have a hard time loading a slashdot page since they went HTTPS. Looks like this one loaded about 2/3rds before giving up.
Besides the commerce clause that seems to give the federal government reason to do anything, there is also a clause relating to postal roads, which would be easy to stretch into meaning communication or email considering some of the other ways the courts have interpreted the Constitution.
While it's true that the ignition on the old cars had to be babied, as long as you did that along with keeping the valve lash in specs and changed the oil regularly, those old Japanese cars would go until the body rusted away. And once you could swap in an electric ignition things got a lot better. Meanwhile at the same time American cars would need a new engine before 100,000 miles as well as shit like the brake lines being built out of such shitty metal that even my '96 Ford recently lost its brakes (as well as my '88 which had multiple brake line failures before I replaced all of them), something that never happened with my 30 yr old Datsuns. Another thing was working on the vehicles. The Japanese were much better laid out, especially the wiring compared to the nightmare of having to work on American vehicles. And as the sibling post says, once pollution controls came in, the American cars actually got worse. When I moved to an American vehicle, it was just a constant nightmare of "how the hell could someone engineer this"? People like to blame the unions, but I really doubt that they were designing the vehicles and making the decisions on what type of metal to use for the engine block, brake lines, gas tanks that rusted out and so on. Whether it was a conscience decision or just the usual shitty American engineering due to complacency I can't say. I do remember the story of the American auto manufacturer outsourcing some parts and the Japanese not understanding why they wanted a 5 or 10% failure rate.
You do have a point that the browser should not be minimal, along with the mail program, word processor, spreadsheet, photo and video editing software etc. On the other hand, internet access is pretty common now and people should be able to have choice including at least changing their defaults, removing icons from the desktop and have their choice stick. Apple and especially IOS are special cases and expecting much out of them for choice is like expecting choice in a console.
There needs to be *something* available to download your preferred browser when things stop working (or with a fresh install).
I think we need to move past this claim that a browser is some optional application like Quickbooks.
Yes an OS should come with a minimal browser to get you started. Once you've downloaded a replacement, you should be able to uninstall that minimal browser or at least totally remove it from your desktop
1710 when the Statute of Anne (long name, An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.) was passed. To quote wiki,
Prior to the statute's enactment in 1710, copying restrictions were authorized by the Licensing of the Press Act 1662. These restrictions were enforced by the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers given the exclusive power to print—and the responsibility to censor—literary works. The censorship administered under the Licensing Act led to public protest; as the act had to be renewed at two-year intervals, authors and others sought to prevent its reauthorisation.[2]
...
The statute is considered a "watershed event in Anglo-American copyright history... transforming what had been the publishers' private law copyright into a public law grant".[5] Under the statute, copyright was for the first time vested in authors rather than publishers; it also included provisions for the public interest, such as a legal deposit scheme. The Statute was an influence on copyright law in several other nations, including the United States, and even in the 21st century is "frequently invoked by modern judges and academics as embodying the utilitarian underpinnings of copyright law".[6]
It's hard enough to fuse hydrogen that we'll probably never do that, little well fusing neon into iron. The Sun barely fuses hydrogen (the amount of energy produced in the core per sq. metre is quite low, there's just a lot of sq metres) and even when it reaches end of life and much more compact, it'll barely fuse helium. Iron (and nickel) are only produced in the largest stars due to the heat and pressure required. With luck,we'll get fusing deuterium and such in a controlled energy positive manner.
If copyright was to enable the creator of content make a living while they created new material, then copyright should end when the creator is dead.
Creators can have dependents, new debts etc. Writer writes a bestseller, royalty checks are coming in, movie deal in the process of being signed. Writer buys house and has a child. Writer dies. Why shouldn't the child get the benefits of the movie deal and the royalties for the remaining 19 odd yrs? There's even been cases of people who know they're dieing to create a work to look after their dependents. As copyright is to encourage the creation of works, that creator wouldn't bother creating the work. 20 odd years is long enough for the dependents to get on their feet. If I died tomorrow, my wife would get the pay that is owed to me and my business to sell or maintain, why should it be different for creators who are similarly self-employed?
Saw a weasel at the bird feeder yesterday, probably a lesser weasel rather then a slimeball one, cute little thing. It's interesting, do something nice like feeding the birds (it has been a cold winter here) and soon the rats show up, then the weasel shows up and no more rats. Shame that it doesn't work that way with Assange.
How about the wealthiest 6 Americans? Seems that 8 people own more wealth then the bottom 50% of humanity and they're acquiring more as quick as they can. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press...
And all those laws are unconstitutional. The 2nd amendment is pretty simple, as long as you're a person, you're right to have a gun is not to be infringed. Unluckily when the government does illegal stuff, it's hard to do anything about it besides ignore them if possible.
Slashdot Mirror
True, though their is the balance with a homeless person who probably gets some government handouts. Do they take in more tax dollars then they give back?
Of course the ultimate is to simply kill the tax collector and spend the rest of your life in prison where the taxes you pay are really minimized, especially if you arrange to spend it in solitary. I think that most everyone would rather pay taxes then spend life in solitary.
It's still a better deal compared to what a local warlord in a society without government will give, arbitrary tax or death.
There's quite a bit of evidence that smoking helps various mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Note that it is usually poor people that smoke and people are often poor due to mental illness.
So true. We can expand it to any risky behaviour. Want to drive, that's risky, better sign a waiver. Work at an office job that involves sitting all day, that's risky, sign a waiver. Have sex, that's really risky, sign a waiver. And of course as others point out, there are a lot dietary decisions that end up costing healthcare dollars.
And the most risky, leading a healthy lifestyle, living to a ripe old age costs perhaps the most healthcare dollars, sign a waiver in case you live longer then the mean and cost extra.
Actually in civilized countries, you usually have the choice to not pay taxes by refusing the benefits that come with taxes. You can drop out in various ways from moving into the bush to being simply homeless and living out of the garbage. With uncivilized countries you'll be expected to pay up whether you have the means or not and if you don't, they'll simply kill you.
Actually the taxes are worse in Somalia. Upon arrival you'll be grabbed by a local warlord and be informed that you better come up with X dollars (usually a few thousand, they're not too unreasonable) if you want to live, here's a phone. And they will kill you if you don't find some way to raise that money.
Smokers who quit will cost less to the public health care system
And you know this how? Smokers usually die quicker, so don't burden the system as much. My Dad died from smoking, once he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, most of his health spending was on morphine with just a few days of hospital care. My Mom, who is a non-smoker, developed Alzheimers 15 years ago and just keeps hanging in there, in a condition that if she was a dog, would see us sentenced for animal abuse, eating up tons of healthcare dollars as she is completely incapable of caring for herself
Good points about bumps though I consider that not being able to use them without taking your eyes of the road as a good enough reason to damn them.
I was responding to
When the bring out a new model of car they don't mess with the pedals and steering wheel because that would be stupid. About as stupid as changing an ingrained UI just to make it "NEW!!!" Almost as bad as the use of the "white it out and spread it out" interface in Windows is that so many websites are now "updating" their look to this new user vicious standard so they can be "NEW" too.
with the fact that even car UIs, something that as you say, does basically one thing, still had the UI take a long time to settle down and lately parts of it have been breaking the paradigm of keep eyes on road.
The automobile has gone through quite a few control redesigns which are continuing. If you jumped into a Model T (maybe only early ones), you'd find it hard to figure out. Besides the controls that have been automated away, choke and ignition advance, the parking brake was operated by your left hand, along with ignition advance, throttle by right hand and gears by the pedals along with the brake being the right pedal.
The steering wheel started out as a tiller and as late as 1899 was introduced in America as a wheel. Since various controls have migrated to the wheel or right beside. The turn signal operated by your left hand, which has acquired more and more functionality such as operating the lights, wipers, high beam. On the right, there was the gear shifter for quite a while before mostly migrating to the floor. And all the various controls that can be found on a modern steering wheel. Even my old truck has the cruise control buttons on the wheel. The shifter pattern has also changed at times. Had an early 5 speed where reverse was where 1st usually is.
Speaking of my 25 year old truck, while most of the pedals are standard, on the left there's the parking brake release and the hi-lo headlight dimmer button on the floor. Turn signal only operates the turn signals with a knob on the dash that you pull to turn on the lights and turn to dim the dash lights and turn on the interior light. The wiper switch is besides it, turn one way for normal wiper operation, further for high speed, turn the other way for intermittent operation, push for squirting cleaner (still have to turn the wipers on manually).
Another set of controls that seemed somewhat standardized for a long time and now are in flux are the climate controls and radio/sound system where automakers keep screwing around with stupid touch controls. Stupid due to breaking the paradigm that the driver should be able to operate everything by feel while watching the road.
It took close to 50 years to standardize just the pedals on the car UI, while the modern computer UI is at the most 30 yrs old. Hopefully in another 100 yrs, things will have mostly settled down, but as the automobile has shown, new tech such as touch screens, still puts basic interface into flux, often with stupid design decisions such as trading easy to feel buttons for hard to use, changeable, touch screen.
Thanks. Looks like squid needs to be recompiled with SSL support here.
CONNECT 28800/ARQ/V34/LAPM/V42BIS, at the best often 26.4, and better have a good modem to get that over the rusty barbed wire they call phone lines here (about a hour outside Vancouver).
Just to be clear, are you asking your fellow taxpayers to subsidize your broadband service? If so, do you consider that fair?
That's how society works, and always has. The Romans had subsidized roads. The American Constitution has a clause for postal roads, and with advancements in technology, broadband is about important for a working society as postal service was in the 18th century.
Of course I'm sure you have nothing to do with the roads so as to not unfairly take advantage of your fellow taxpayers.
You must have had a good dial-up connection. Here it's about 12MBs an hour, so not even 300MBs a day if I don't mind tying up the phone for 24hrs and I've been kicked off a couple of ISPs for using less. As usual unlimited doesn't really mean unlimited.
My government is paying the telco to put in a cell tower (and officially I lost my dial-up last Nov 16th, but since in Canada it is considered an essential service, it's still working). I figure it'll probably take about an hour to use the monthly quota if I pay the same as I do for dial-up ($38 a month).
I'm on dial-up and squid doesn't really help, especially as more and more sites are switching to HTTPS, which squid doesn't seem to cache. Shit I have a hard time loading a slashdot page since they went HTTPS. Looks like this one loaded about 2/3rds before giving up.
Besides the commerce clause that seems to give the federal government reason to do anything, there is also a clause relating to postal roads, which would be easy to stretch into meaning communication or email considering some of the other ways the courts have interpreted the Constitution.
While it's true that the ignition on the old cars had to be babied, as long as you did that along with keeping the valve lash in specs and changed the oil regularly, those old Japanese cars would go until the body rusted away. And once you could swap in an electric ignition things got a lot better. Meanwhile at the same time American cars would need a new engine before 100,000 miles as well as shit like the brake lines being built out of such shitty metal that even my '96 Ford recently lost its brakes (as well as my '88 which had multiple brake line failures before I replaced all of them), something that never happened with my 30 yr old Datsuns.
Another thing was working on the vehicles. The Japanese were much better laid out, especially the wiring compared to the nightmare of having to work on American vehicles. And as the sibling post says, once pollution controls came in, the American cars actually got worse.
When I moved to an American vehicle, it was just a constant nightmare of "how the hell could someone engineer this"? People like to blame the unions, but I really doubt that they were designing the vehicles and making the decisions on what type of metal to use for the engine block, brake lines, gas tanks that rusted out and so on.
Whether it was a conscience decision or just the usual shitty American engineering due to complacency I can't say. I do remember the story of the American auto manufacturer outsourcing some parts and the Japanese not understanding why they wanted a 5 or 10% failure rate.
You do have a point that the browser should not be minimal, along with the mail program, word processor, spreadsheet, photo and video editing software etc.
On the other hand, internet access is pretty common now and people should be able to have choice including at least changing their defaults, removing icons from the desktop and have their choice stick.
Apple and especially IOS are special cases and expecting much out of them for choice is like expecting choice in a console.
There needs to be *something* available to download your preferred browser when things stop working (or with a fresh install).
I think we need to move past this claim that a browser is some optional application like Quickbooks.
Yes an OS should come with a minimal browser to get you started. Once you've downloaded a replacement, you should be able to uninstall that minimal browser or at least totally remove it from your desktop
1710 when the Statute of Anne (long name, An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.) was passed. To quote wiki,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Usually these treaties are created and pushed by the USA.
It's hard enough to fuse hydrogen that we'll probably never do that, little well fusing neon into iron.
The Sun barely fuses hydrogen (the amount of energy produced in the core per sq. metre is quite low, there's just a lot of sq metres) and even when it reaches end of life and much more compact, it'll barely fuse helium. Iron (and nickel) are only produced in the largest stars due to the heat and pressure required.
With luck,we'll get fusing deuterium and such in a controlled energy positive manner.
If copyright was to enable the creator of content make a living while they created new material, then copyright should end when the creator is dead.
Creators can have dependents, new debts etc. Writer writes a bestseller, royalty checks are coming in, movie deal in the process of being signed. Writer buys house and has a child. Writer dies. Why shouldn't the child get the benefits of the movie deal and the royalties for the remaining 19 odd yrs?
There's even been cases of people who know they're dieing to create a work to look after their dependents. As copyright is to encourage the creation of works, that creator wouldn't bother creating the work. 20 odd years is long enough for the dependents to get on their feet.
If I died tomorrow, my wife would get the pay that is owed to me and my business to sell or maintain, why should it be different for creators who are similarly self-employed?
Saw a weasel at the bird feeder yesterday, probably a lesser weasel rather then a slimeball one, cute little thing. It's interesting, do something nice like feeding the birds (it has been a cold winter here) and soon the rats show up, then the weasel shows up and no more rats. Shame that it doesn't work that way with Assange.
How about the wealthiest 6 Americans? Seems that 8 people own more wealth then the bottom 50% of humanity and they're acquiring more as quick as they can.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press...
And all those laws are unconstitutional. The 2nd amendment is pretty simple, as long as you're a person, you're right to have a gun is not to be infringed. Unluckily when the government does illegal stuff, it's hard to do anything about it besides ignore them if possible.