"In my own area, a Judge has ruled they are not legal."
If "they" means red light cameras, they probably should not be legal.
I did a bit of internet research last year, and found out that of the U.S. cities that surveyed the results of their red-light-camera use, many of them (a majority) found that they actually increased both the number and average severity of collisions.
How is that possible? Some of the reasons are complex, but others are simple. For example: instead of just cruising through an iffy judgment call when the light is about to change, motorists now (fearing a traffic ticket that can be $100 + in some places) slam on their brakes, and get rear-ended by the inattentive driver behind them.
Others cities have been caught deliberately shortening the duration of their yellow lights to create more ticket revenue.
Absolutely. One of the biggest pieces of BS I still keep hearing about job interviews is to "look the interviewer in the eyes." But psychologists have long known that DISHONEST people maintain eye contact more than honest people do.
Certainly you want to look the person in the eye, but only for a brief moment. Holding eye contact becomes uncomfortable in a very short time. And sadly, many interviewers also still believe that lots of eye contact is a good thing. Fail.
"... (don't need suspicion of terrorist activity anymore to search through someone's files)..."
This is BLATANTLY unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled that we do, in fact, have a RIGHT of privacy, because without one, our other "rights" would be unenforceable.
"Passing laws against guns and only using the laws against blacks has been tried, but it wasn't an attempt to actually ban guns from areas (which would require checkpoints in and out and such). Actual control has never been done."
"Based on the statistics, gun control saves lives."
You haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about. For just one glaring example, handguns were completely banned from the District of Columbia for many years (unless you managed to get an expensive and rather rare permit), until the Supreme Court recently overturned the ban.
But more to the point: the U.S. Department of Justice's own statistics contradict you. For another glaring example: per-capita crime (and in particular major crimes) have been going steadily DOWN in the U.S. for about 30 years now. Yet during that entire same period, per-capita firearm ownership has been going steadily UP. If there is any correlation at all, it is negative.
Historically, areas that had strict gun-control laws that later loosened those laws saw crime go DOWN. And the areas of the country with the highest crime rate continue to be precisely those areas with the strictest firearms control legislation.
Sorry, dude, but the ACTUAL statistics are all against you. Read the definitive and never-successfully-refuted studies by Gary Kleck and John Lott. Note that they started out as self-proclaimed liberals, who intended to show that gun control actually saves lives. What they actually found out was the opposite. Kleck is currently a University professor in Florida, and still claims to be a liberal. But when asked about gun control, he said, "You can't argue with the truth. It doesn't work." Lott continues to research and write about the issue.
To be fair, Lott has been criticized for using a sock-puppet account in Internet forums to support his own work. However, none of that work has so far been shown to be false or in error. Further, while records of one survey were reportedly lost in a hard drive crash, to his credit Lott conducted the survey all over again and published the results.
"Meanwhile, the USA has officially been metric for years but posts speeds in mph."
You didn't say Imperial was metric, but you kind of implied it, intentionally or not. Which might confuse people. So, to clarify:
"Imperial" units have nothing whatever to do with the metric system, just as the old U.S. SAE system also had little to do with the metric system. Imperial units are a third measurement system, separate from both U.S. and metric.
"Well the TSA/DHS are working on that by setting up random checkpoints at train and bus stations, as well as setting up random checkpoints on major roadways. Just search YouTube."
They can set up checkpoints all they want (although I think it's both useless and tyrannical and would rather see them go away)... but if it is legal to carry a weapon TSA has no power to prevent it. This is State-level law, not Federal.
Absolute nonsense. Over the last couple of hundred years, "gun control" has been tried by various states and localities in ALL of its possible forms: everything from mild regulation to restriction to outright bans. And there are various kinds of Federal "gun control" that are in effect right now.
And the statistics very solidly show that it has never worked to any significant degree. If the statistics "prove" anything anything at all, it is that in the United States, "gun control" promotes crime.
"
Yeah because a deregulated financial services industry is working out so well for us..."
The "financial services industry" is not "free market". It doesn't produce anything except bloated numbers of imaginary dollars which our government, in its fever-fantasy, insists on calling our "economy". When in fact Wall Street has very little to do with America's actual, productive economy.
But even with all that aside, outsourcing manufacturing is STILL not "free trade" because you are dealing with dissimilar economies without the benefit of an exchange rate.
Example: say there's an international programming job up for bid. A North American worker bids $20 / hour for the job. (Just example numbers for illustration; they are not intended to be necessarily realistic.) Some person or firm from a "developing nation" called Wtfistan bids $5 for the job. Now, all other things being equal (though often they are not), the company is likely to hire the Wtfistani. However, consider this: in Wtfistan, $5 USD buys 50 pounds of rice. While in the U.S., $20 only buys about 20 lbs. of rice. So in real economic terms, the Wtfistani is being paid, in purchasing power, the same as a North American making $50 per hour.
So, no. There's nothing "free" about it. This so-called "free trade" is highly stacked against the "developed" nations.
" Within the U.S., you are -- as a matter of crime statistics -- safer in areas where civilians are legally allowed to own and carry firearms then in areas with strong gun control laws."
Yay. Somebody speaks the truth.
I have a hard time imagining how all this "gun control" rhetoric keeps cropping up even though many decades of solid statistics show us that at least in the U.S., it simply does not work.
"Forcing the link to the home page doesn't fix anything."
If fixes things from the point of view of the actual content provider, which is what this discussion is all about.
Why should I, as a provider, care about your "convenience" if you are linking in from some other site that doesn't have my permission to link? It may be legal, but I am not obligated to help their revenue model at the expense of my own.
"Traditionally, newspapers survived on advertising-- local advertising. The internet ripped apart this cushy model."
I agree with the other responder. Local advertising is still there.
Of course, part of the problem is that many businesses still do not know how to advertise on the internet; this complicates things somewhat. But there is no reason it has to be any different from the print model of advertising.
"Any dead tree newspaper that fails to make the transition to new media is just as dead as Encyclopedia Brittanica, regardless of the quality of its journalism. "
You implied but did not say "transitioning to new media" does not automatically mean paywall.
I'll stick with the "free" services for now. I might not get some of the news until half a day later than some who pay, but I hardly care. I stopped watching the news on television 3 years ago, and don't much miss it. And that was "free".
"Short answer: because the employees are not trusted to do their job."
Funny. I worked once in a small satellite office for a company in another state. Even though the few of us in this office were effectively telecommuting into the big office anyway, we were still expected to be at that little office every day.
"There's no air on the moon, so all ths "dust" will just stay on the ground unless it is disturbed (in which case it will drop back down just as fast as a hammer would because there's no air to keep it buoyant)."
The dust was in fact a very large problem for the Apollo missions. It clung to everything electrostatically, and got into just about everything.
That is not to say it could not be planned for, and a de-dusting station built into airlocks. It is only a problem when one is outside, or brings it inside.
"So, according to this nebulous definition of yours, "back radiation" does not include radiation returned by reflection, but only radiation returned by absorption and re-emission."
What makes you think it's MY definition? Jesus. Google "Hansen back radiation". Get a clue.
" I'd rather it be replaced with sales tax that way the burden isn't only shouldered by homeowners but is instead shouldered by everyone in the state."
The sales-tax-vs-use-tax problem is one that has been going on for more than 100 years. It is hardly new. But a sales tax is not the answer. In fact it sets a very dangerous precedent.
The courts established two things very long ago. The first, is that states have no power to tax transactions that happen in other states. Period. Second -- and this was important because without it this kind of business would never be functional -- mail-order transactions are deemed to occur at the physical location of the seller. So if you lived in Kansas, and mail-ordered from Sears and Roebuck in New York or wherever it was, the transaction was deemed to have been made in New York. Therefore Kansas could not legally collect sales tax on it.
This is actually a good thing, because as soon as you give states the power to tax transactions that happen in other states, all hell will break loose.
The states then came up with the "use tax" scheme. Rather than taxing the transaction itself, they taxed the use of the goods that were purchased in that transaction. In practice, it is an amount equivalent to the sales tax. This is reasonable. But, of course, mostly unenforceable.
The problem is that even today, and for the same reasons, the states STILL have no power to tax transactions in other states. And online transactions, just like mail-order transactions, are deemed to take place at the location of the seller. Because that's the ONLY way it can work. If you deemed the transaction to take place at the location of the buyer, each seller would have to keep tabs on every combination of federal, state, and local taxes that exist in the United States. That is anything but reasonable. Only the biggest players would be able to afford to put their businesses online.
Just as with mail-order and other kinds of sales, if the selling company maintains "a substantial physical presence" in the state of the person making the transaction, then the state CAN enforce sales tax, otherwise not.
There is nothing new here. Nothing has changed. There is no reason for the laws to change. There is no reason to give states dangerous taxation power they have never had before.
Slashdot Mirror
"In my own area, a Judge has ruled they are not legal."
If "they" means red light cameras, they probably should not be legal.
I did a bit of internet research last year, and found out that of the U.S. cities that surveyed the results of their red-light-camera use, many of them (a majority) found that they actually increased both the number and average severity of collisions.
How is that possible? Some of the reasons are complex, but others are simple. For example: instead of just cruising through an iffy judgment call when the light is about to change, motorists now (fearing a traffic ticket that can be $100 + in some places) slam on their brakes, and get rear-ended by the inattentive driver behind them.
Others cities have been caught deliberately shortening the duration of their yellow lights to create more ticket revenue.
"I implied nothing of the sort, so I'll just ignore the rest of your comment for being completely irrelevant."
You brought up metric in a discussion about Imperial. To many people, this could imply a connection. I was simply trying to un-muddy the waters.
Whether the implication was intentional is what is irrelevant.
" I'll also look you straight in the eyes."
Absolutely. One of the biggest pieces of BS I still keep hearing about job interviews is to "look the interviewer in the eyes." But psychologists have long known that DISHONEST people maintain eye contact more than honest people do.
Certainly you want to look the person in the eye, but only for a brief moment. Holding eye contact becomes uncomfortable in a very short time. And sadly, many interviewers also still believe that lots of eye contact is a good thing. Fail.
... who was the first to discover it?
"Hey Ogg!!! This milk is kind of... old. And hard. And it's got some kind of mold on it. Let's eat it."
For that matter, how many erstwhile cow milkers got their heads kicked in until someone finally got t right?
"... (don't need suspicion of terrorist activity anymore to search through someone's files)..."
This is BLATANTLY unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled that we do, in fact, have a RIGHT of privacy, because without one, our other "rights" would be unenforceable.
"Passing laws against guns and only using the laws against blacks has been tried, but it wasn't an attempt to actually ban guns from areas (which would require checkpoints in and out and such). Actual control has never been done."
"Based on the statistics, gun control saves lives."
You haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about. For just one glaring example, handguns were completely banned from the District of Columbia for many years (unless you managed to get an expensive and rather rare permit), until the Supreme Court recently overturned the ban.
But more to the point: the U.S. Department of Justice's own statistics contradict you. For another glaring example: per-capita crime (and in particular major crimes) have been going steadily DOWN in the U.S. for about 30 years now. Yet during that entire same period, per-capita firearm ownership has been going steadily UP. If there is any correlation at all, it is negative.
Historically, areas that had strict gun-control laws that later loosened those laws saw crime go DOWN. And the areas of the country with the highest crime rate continue to be precisely those areas with the strictest firearms control legislation.
Sorry, dude, but the ACTUAL statistics are all against you. Read the definitive and never-successfully-refuted studies by Gary Kleck and John Lott. Note that they started out as self-proclaimed liberals, who intended to show that gun control actually saves lives. What they actually found out was the opposite. Kleck is currently a University professor in Florida, and still claims to be a liberal. But when asked about gun control, he said, "You can't argue with the truth. It doesn't work." Lott continues to research and write about the issue.
To be fair, Lott has been criticized for using a sock-puppet account in Internet forums to support his own work. However, none of that work has so far been shown to be false or in error. Further, while records of one survey were reportedly lost in a hard drive crash, to his credit Lott conducted the survey all over again and published the results.
"Meanwhile, the USA has officially been metric for years but posts speeds in mph."
You didn't say Imperial was metric, but you kind of implied it, intentionally or not. Which might confuse people. So, to clarify:
"Imperial" units have nothing whatever to do with the metric system, just as the old U.S. SAE system also had little to do with the metric system. Imperial units are a third measurement system, separate from both U.S. and metric.
"Well the TSA/DHS are working on that by setting up random checkpoints at train and bus stations, as well as setting up random checkpoints on major roadways. Just search YouTube."
They can set up checkpoints all they want (although I think it's both useless and tyrannical and would rather see them go away)... but if it is legal to carry a weapon TSA has no power to prevent it. This is State-level law, not Federal.
"Gun control has never been tried in the US."
Absolute nonsense. Over the last couple of hundred years, "gun control" has been tried by various states and localities in ALL of its possible forms: everything from mild regulation to restriction to outright bans. And there are various kinds of Federal "gun control" that are in effect right now.
And the statistics very solidly show that it has never worked to any significant degree. If the statistics "prove" anything anything at all, it is that in the United States, "gun control" promotes crime.
"Actually, your point was "redirect any outside referrals to your home page.""
No, that was my statement. It isn't the point behind my statement.
"Nobody wants to talk about the miss-regulated financial industry."
Mod this one up too.
/. for a change.
It is very refreshing to see people actually talking economic sense on
" Yeah because a deregulated financial services industry is working out so well for us..."
The "financial services industry" is not "free market". It doesn't produce anything except bloated numbers of imaginary dollars which our government, in its fever-fantasy, insists on calling our "economy". When in fact Wall Street has very little to do with America's actual, productive economy.
Mod up.
But even with all that aside, outsourcing manufacturing is STILL not "free trade" because you are dealing with dissimilar economies without the benefit of an exchange rate.
Example: say there's an international programming job up for bid. A North American worker bids $20 / hour for the job. (Just example numbers for illustration; they are not intended to be necessarily realistic.) Some person or firm from a "developing nation" called Wtfistan bids $5 for the job. Now, all other things being equal (though often they are not), the company is likely to hire the Wtfistani. However, consider this: in Wtfistan, $5 USD buys 50 pounds of rice. While in the U.S., $20 only buys about 20 lbs. of rice. So in real economic terms, the Wtfistani is being paid, in purchasing power, the same as a North American making $50 per hour.
So, no. There's nothing "free" about it. This so-called "free trade" is highly stacked against the "developed" nations.
" Within the U.S., you are -- as a matter of crime statistics -- safer in areas where civilians are legally allowed to own and carry firearms then in areas with strong gun control laws."
Yay. Somebody speaks the truth.
I have a hard time imagining how all this "gun control" rhetoric keeps cropping up even though many decades of solid statistics show us that at least in the U.S., it simply does not work.
"The whole point is that they annoy me at their own expense if they are ad supported."
No, my point is: As long as they are not intrusive, "targeted" ads, why should internet ads bother you any more than print ads do?
"Forcing the link to the home page doesn't fix anything."
If fixes things from the point of view of the actual content provider, which is what this discussion is all about.
Why should I, as a provider, care about your "convenience" if you are linking in from some other site that doesn't have my permission to link? It may be legal, but I am not obligated to help their revenue model at the expense of my own.
"And you don't REALLY think I own a news paper, do you?"
No, of course not. But you were using first-person, I just went with it.
"Traditionally, newspapers survived on advertising-- local advertising. The internet ripped apart this cushy model."
I agree with the other responder. Local advertising is still there.
Of course, part of the problem is that many businesses still do not know how to advertise on the internet; this complicates things somewhat. But there is no reason it has to be any different from the print model of advertising.
"Put these mean people are linking directly to my news stories so they don't see the front page. I don't know why, but that pisses me off."
And of course, being a lowly news service, it never occurred to you to redirect any outside referrals to your home page.
"Any dead tree newspaper that fails to make the transition to new media is just as dead as Encyclopedia Brittanica, regardless of the quality of its journalism. "
You implied but did not say "transitioning to new media" does not automatically mean paywall.
I'll stick with the "free" services for now. I might not get some of the news until half a day later than some who pay, but I hardly care. I stopped watching the news on television 3 years ago, and don't much miss it. And that was "free".
"Short answer: because the employees are not trusted to do their job."
Funny. I worked once in a small satellite office for a company in another state. Even though the few of us in this office were effectively telecommuting into the big office anyway, we were still expected to be at that little office every day.
It made no sense whatever.
"There's no air on the moon, so all ths "dust" will just stay on the ground unless it is disturbed (in which case it will drop back down just as fast as a hammer would because there's no air to keep it buoyant)."
The dust was in fact a very large problem for the Apollo missions. It clung to everything electrostatically, and got into just about everything.
That is not to say it could not be planned for, and a de-dusting station built into airlocks. It is only a problem when one is outside, or brings it inside.
"There, you may resume."
This conclusion was actually published months ago. But the article was still a good bit of history (and a lesson about data preservation).
"So, according to this nebulous definition of yours, "back radiation" does not include radiation returned by reflection, but only radiation returned by absorption and re-emission."
What makes you think it's MY definition? Jesus. Google "Hansen back radiation". Get a clue.
" I'd rather it be replaced with sales tax that way the burden isn't only shouldered by homeowners but is instead shouldered by everyone in the state."
The sales-tax-vs-use-tax problem is one that has been going on for more than 100 years. It is hardly new. But a sales tax is not the answer. In fact it sets a very dangerous precedent.
The courts established two things very long ago. The first, is that states have no power to tax transactions that happen in other states. Period. Second -- and this was important because without it this kind of business would never be functional -- mail-order transactions are deemed to occur at the physical location of the seller. So if you lived in Kansas, and mail-ordered from Sears and Roebuck in New York or wherever it was, the transaction was deemed to have been made in New York. Therefore Kansas could not legally collect sales tax on it.
This is actually a good thing, because as soon as you give states the power to tax transactions that happen in other states, all hell will break loose.
The states then came up with the "use tax" scheme. Rather than taxing the transaction itself, they taxed the use of the goods that were purchased in that transaction. In practice, it is an amount equivalent to the sales tax. This is reasonable. But, of course, mostly unenforceable.
The problem is that even today, and for the same reasons, the states STILL have no power to tax transactions in other states. And online transactions, just like mail-order transactions, are deemed to take place at the location of the seller. Because that's the ONLY way it can work. If you deemed the transaction to take place at the location of the buyer, each seller would have to keep tabs on every combination of federal, state, and local taxes that exist in the United States. That is anything but reasonable. Only the biggest players would be able to afford to put their businesses online.
Just as with mail-order and other kinds of sales, if the selling company maintains "a substantial physical presence" in the state of the person making the transaction, then the state CAN enforce sales tax, otherwise not.
There is nothing new here. Nothing has changed. There is no reason for the laws to change. There is no reason to give states dangerous taxation power they have never had before.