This is probably not wise.
on
More A's, More Pay
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Probably not a smart idea. Even at first glance, either 1) tests will not be standardized and all this will do will distort what constitutes an "A" or 2) tests will be standardized and this will create widespread "Teaching to the Test."
In scenario 1, this is bad because it creates an obvious incentive to grade very kindly. People can try to test for that influence to prevent it all they want, but if they create a market out of good grades, the market is going to react.
Scenario 2 doesn't fair much better, as anyone who has seen first hand the results of teachers teaching to, for example, the AP tests. Test scores will improve, knowledge will actually tend to decrease as original and creative thinking is discouraged in favor of simply being told the types of answers testers are looking for, rather than having to learn how to get there yourself. It's sort of the opposite of the Socratic teaching method.
If someone wanted to raise salaries to increase the size of the pool of teacher candidates, fine. But if a bonus is what's really changing someone's attitude, I think we all know greed isn't conducive to working with people well (and yes kids are people). Despite the flaws in our school system, I'm pretty sure I feel better knowing my kids teachers are there to educate because that's what they enjoy, and not there to try to get a certain set of letters or numbers associated with them so they get a bunch of cash, regardless of the actual amount of knowledge attained.
Well you're right in theory, but in practice if their is an overuse of force, circustances can and should mitigate (or not) the severity of the offense. As a civilian, it's not my right to dispense punishment either. But, I think we can all agree that it's reasonable that I would be treated differently if I hit punched someone after they hit my daughter than if I punched them after they called me an asshole. It doesn't mean I didn't commit a crime, same with the officer, but it does mean I get a far smaller sentence.
First of all as someone already pointed out, this type of suit would be the realm of the DoJ, which you can bet not only doesn't care, but moreover would have to have their heads completely up their asses to do something as controversial as suing Microsoft when they're already on the run from bigger things like torture and Abu Ghraib.
Second of all, people need to remember that Average Joe likes windows, and likes microsoft. The last thing the democrats want to do is confuse a large number of voters and take the limelight away from their bigger winners, namely GOP corruption and the Iraq war. Something all rules and numbers like fighting big business would not be a boon in 2008 in these ideological, partisan times.
So let's see... DDOS takes down a site for a period of time (maybe more if its a shared server). And so we respond with 10 years in jail?
First of all, economically that's a moronic decision. Jail costs the state between 20-30 thousand dollars a year depending on where it is. Unless someone is DDosing Amazon, and here's where the vague wording of the law is an important shortfall, we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars punishing someone who did perhaps a few thousand dollars worth of damage. That's bad economics, and I'm sure that money could be better used say, feeding the starving or allowing someone to go to college who otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Second of all, the kind of person you're going to be able to catch is not the person you want to throw in jail. We already have laws to punish people who run large botnets, and moreover by and large experienced blackhats won't be caught because they administrate their nets from countries ending in -stan. So the people who this legislation will put in jail will by and large be stupid college kids and people making a bad, poorly thought out decision as evidenced by the fact that they're using their home computer. These people need to be slapped with a big fine to they smarten them up, and then allowed to contribute to society.
This should be a poster case of a crime that should not carry criminal penalty.
In his defense, I assume, it is in fact illegal to plan crimes if you _intend_ (key word) to carry them out.
An example:
Possession of implements of crime -
Elements are:
1. The defendant possessed an instrument, tool or implement designed or intended for picking locks or pockets, to wit: [insert implement]; 2. The defendant had the specific intent to use such implement in the commission of the crime.
---------
Straight from DC's public defender service database. And to some extent you should know better than to post that tired slashdot claim about "what about movies then." Planning does not mean thinking about.
In fact, because I'm realizing right now that I'm tired of our pro civil liberties side being discredited because we say "hear hear" to crap like this, let me give another example that should make it obvious. Suicide is a crime. Thinking about it is not. Writing books about it is not. Gathering materials for it and setting a date to do it (this would be planning) will infact earn you public intevention. I think everyone can agree this is entirely reasonable, and no way implies that we need to arrest people for having down days.
Granted the article doesn't say, but come on. You really can't tell if people are blind unless they tell you?
Same thing with mice... they could tell because they responded to visual stimulae. Again, granted the article didn't say that explicitly, but really that should be obvious.
When we run a deficit... where do you think the money comes from then? We just print the money in the basement?
Is this really that complicated?
The government doesn't stop paying for projects because they don't have enough money. So that say $3,000 you used to fork over isn't there, it comes from foreign loans. Therefore, the money you save in tax cuts, when we run a deficit, is being payed for by foreign banks. Sheesh.
Yes it would be a lot worse. Do you know how much of a productivity drain it would be on america if the average citizen had to inform himself and then vote on every little crap piece of legislation that came up?
Worse yet, it would be a huge blow to minority rights, which are in fact a bedrock of democracy. Look at some polls for the idiotic things that 51% or more of the populace are against. I'll give you a hint, they're things like evolution.
It's like hiring lawyers. Yes it's shitty, yes there's corruption that goes along with the legal system, but abolishing them doesn't make any sense. Try representing yourself in court. I haven't but I've been told it doesn't work out very well.
You know, I agree to some degree with your sentiment, but football logic like this isn't really helping america either. Yes there is a republican party. It, however, is not filled with constitution burning satanist clones. Vote for and against individuals and their policies, not against parties because some in their leadership are very bad.
If intelligent americans decide to vote against all republicans because the rnc engages in immoral and (frankly) illegal tactics, that gives the Democrats a blank check to not solve problems, make decisions, or build a better america. Because, hey, they've already won by not being Republican.
So please, issues and indivuals, not teams. We're all americans.
Here's an easy way to make the problem obvious even intuitively. When tax cuts create a deficit, the extra money you "save" isn't being given to you by the government anymore. It's being given to you by say, a chinese banker. IF you think that your investment benefits outweigh the detriments of paying interest to that chinese banker, then guess what, that option has already been available to you for years.
There's a good reason everyone doesn't take out huge loans to invest whenever they can. Because it's not safe, and its generally not profitable. You _may_ get 10% return on stock investments funded by a 7% apr loan, but its not a reliable policy. If it was, the banks would be investing that money themselves, not giving it to you.
I too watched that movie... talk about ignorant fear mongering. I can't tell if its desire for fame or stupidity that causes people to make "documentaries" about this, but just because there are enough videos over a decade to fill 2 hours doesn't mean that the world is filled with terrorists and holy crap they're coming to get us and OMGZBBQ this is war!
Yes there are some islamist wack-jobs out there. But seriously. The US for instance has had one terror attack in the past 5 years. Thats about the rate we seem to get them. Not very scary. And if there is a war against the west, whoever is waging it really sucks at it.
For some reason he seemed to think that a higher price would reflect pain on the part of sellers. I still can't believe economics isn't a required course.
It was a good read, as is generally the case for bruce, but this sentence he quoted to seemed like it could have been written better. And by written better I mean I think it scalded my flesh:
The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get.
About the logging off thing, does logging off not limit the number of running exploitable programs?
I'm not reccommending it is a policy, because that would be like racing to shut off your computer the second you finished with it, which is obviously stupid. But someone could save me some google work if they'd give me a quick yes or no.
You're right about economic sanctions hurting the people, but not about them destabalizing the region. In fact, in a point that Ian Bremmer recently reiterated, isolating regimes tends to actually keep them pretty stable.
Keeping a country destitute through sanctions when it has a totalitarian goverment has a strong tendency to completely destroy the middle class. The middle class is where the change comes from because they aren't too fat and happy like the upper class nor too powerless and tied up with simply surviving to make change.
Iraq was actually a pretty good example of this. Saddam was a bad guy, but there was a reason we supported him for so long: Dictators that keep their generals happy and their people scared and in poverty run stable states.
So, ironically, dropping economic and political sanctions, if they were to create a middle class, would make the region less stable, rather than more. What that would mean in terms of their nukes, no one knows.
Mmmm... No I think using analogies actually makes a rather clear cut issue confusing. Like making analogies about auto theft with copyright infringment. If we had to make an analogy, I'd say it's more like you only let people into your house when they wear a special hat that you make out of newspaper, and this guy starts making the same hat.
He's not creating a loophole, which would be handing out keys to a lock which was only supposed to have one key (yours), he's making obvious the already present existence of a loophole, namely that any retard with a bit of computer knowledge can make the so called key.
In your defense though, it does seem like people must really be closing their eyes and yelling when they illustrate security holes with exploits, but trust me, a whitepaper about airport security would be ignored by the government so fast you wouldn't believe. I mean they're not going to admit they're just putting on a show unless they _really_ have to.
The point isn't whether you think bush, as a singular individual, is going to be the man that breaks american democracy. The point is:
If we had another 9/11, and _a_ president said (doesn't need to be bush) huge national emergency, we think they're about to strike again far worse (Which is a claim that would need no real evidence to make, as we've seen), and on these grounds I'm declaring martial law nationwide until we can clamp down on this threat(indeterminate length of time), would we have to all sit down and say, well I'll be damned, I guess he's allowed to do that?
What if they just kept saying martial law needs to continue?
It's not a problem because bush is somehow obviously going to do this, its a problem because we'd like our democracy and way of life to be a little less fragile than this. Remember, that's what the constitution was for. Let's not erode that any more than we already have.
The whole thing about terrorists needing to somehow fraudulently ninja their way past security is dumb anyway. The 9/11 hijackers all bought real tickets. They didn't hide in suitcases, they just walked on like everyone else.
Known terrorists do not carry out suicide missions. If they did they would be dead, and that would get them off the no-fly list rather efficiently. Therefore, almost by definition, the people trying to hijack and destroy planes are not going to be people who are known terrorists (generally speaking), and they aren't going to need to lie about who they are.
It's not a question of greater or lesser penalty, even though it comes off that way because all of us slashdotters would rather sell our houses than go to jail. Sending people to jail was never intended to be just a punishment (altough it is a pretty good one), it was intended to remove people from society that posed a significant enough threat to justify the expense of locking them up until they can behave better. Murderers, people who commit assault, etc obviously fit the bill.
I hope we haven't reached the point were copyright infringement is considered a "menace to society."
I think the way judges are coming down on this indicate that there is some ratio of legitimate use to illigitimate use that you need to satisfy. I'm not saying the law is great, and I'm certainly not saying that copyright infringement should carry a criminal penalty, but the way the rulings are coming out make it pretty obvious that without a fair ammount of legal use, anything that is used for significant amounts of copyright infringement is illegal.
So to your analogies, again reiterating that I don't think this guy should have gone to jail, his site was not the same as google or a car. His site was nearly to exclusion for the purpose of warez. Google can be used to find warez, but that is a small amount of its actual use. Similarly, despite their utilitiy in running people over, most people use cars for other purposes! So like I said, bad ratio.
I appreciate your general disillusion and disgust with copyright law, but lets not lose _all_ focus here. Fact number 1: The average slashdotter is not a physically impressive specimen. Fact number 2: most of us live in the wealthiest nations in the world.
Yes, you are born in to certain circumstances. But really, in a world where people only felt they needed to follow laws they personally approved, the music you could download legally would not be a fair trade for how often you would get the shit beaten out of you by people stronger than you. Established law and order is a Good Thing.
And second of all, in terms of being born in to certain circumstances, its not like you were born in Niger, or rural China, or Afghanistan. You did not, I repeat, did not get the short end of the stick because there are some shitty laws on the books. So lets be upset, but lets not lose our heads.
9. Amphetamines/Meth -- See #1 (doing crime to no one else).
It's a pretty good point with marijuana, and I'd let it slide for heroin (people on smack just want to be left alone), if you knew _anything_ about meth you wouldn't say that. If you've seen someoen tweaked out on meth, it's quite scary. Think very energetic, very irritable, very disinhibited.
What you said is tantamount to no laws against drunk driving, because hey, no one's gotten hurt yet. Meth is bad stuff, and the world would be a better place without it.
Fwiw that's not what I was saying about WTC at all, but it doesn't matter.
Ditto cars, knives, guns, sharp sticks, bad words, unkind thoughts, forgetting birthdays and anniversaries, etc.
I know this is give me liberty or give me death slashdot, but there is a debate here, and it isn't between whether people want a fascist dictatorship or not. For instance, you'd have to be pretty ignorant to suggest that neither guns nor cars should be regulated. License plates? Minimum age to move 2000 pounds of metal at 70 mph? Fuck that. Register to own something as dangerous as a firearm? Not unless this is Nazi Germany.
We can be a little more reasonable than that.
The point I was trying to make is that, at least in the US, and yes the debate should extend beyond this one UK town, alcohol is involved in a large proportion of domestic abuse cases, auto accidents, and general community ruining rowdiness. Since we know that to be true, maybe some loss of liberty in association with it is a good idea. Ben Franklin wasn't an annarchist. He was trying to tell people to make smart trades, and careful trades, when liberty and personal freedom were being sacrificed. That doesn't mean that good sacrifices don't exist, and I think the right to drink alcohol anonymously might be one of them. Maybe its not. But alcohol, unlike terrorism (Which is why I brought up the WTC), can be a serious issue, particularly in smaller communities. So a debate does exist.
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Probably not a smart idea. Even at first glance, either 1) tests will not be standardized and all this will do will distort what constitutes an "A" or 2) tests will be standardized and this will create widespread "Teaching to the Test."
In scenario 1, this is bad because it creates an obvious incentive to grade very kindly. People can try to test for that influence to prevent it all they want, but if they create a market out of good grades, the market is going to react.
Scenario 2 doesn't fair much better, as anyone who has seen first hand the results of teachers teaching to, for example, the AP tests. Test scores will improve, knowledge will actually tend to decrease as original and creative thinking is discouraged in favor of simply being told the types of answers testers are looking for, rather than having to learn how to get there yourself. It's sort of the opposite of the Socratic teaching method.
If someone wanted to raise salaries to increase the size of the pool of teacher candidates, fine. But if a bonus is what's really changing someone's attitude, I think we all know greed isn't conducive to working with people well (and yes kids are people). Despite the flaws in our school system, I'm pretty sure I feel better knowing my kids teachers are there to educate because that's what they enjoy, and not there to try to get a certain set of letters or numbers associated with them so they get a bunch of cash, regardless of the actual amount of knowledge attained.
Well you're right in theory, but in practice if their is an overuse of force, circustances can and should mitigate (or not) the severity of the offense. As a civilian, it's not my right to dispense punishment either. But, I think we can all agree that it's reasonable that I would be treated differently if I hit punched someone after they hit my daughter than if I punched them after they called me an asshole. It doesn't mean I didn't commit a crime, same with the officer, but it does mean I get a far smaller sentence.
First of all as someone already pointed out, this type of suit would be the realm of the DoJ, which you can bet not only doesn't care, but moreover would have to have their heads completely up their asses to do something as controversial as suing Microsoft when they're already on the run from bigger things like torture and Abu Ghraib.
Second of all, people need to remember that Average Joe likes windows, and likes microsoft. The last thing the democrats want to do is confuse a large number of voters and take the limelight away from their bigger winners, namely GOP corruption and the Iraq war. Something all rules and numbers like fighting big business would not be a boon in 2008 in these ideological, partisan times.
So no, I wouldn't count on it.
So let's see... DDOS takes down a site for a period of time (maybe more if its a shared server). And so we respond with 10 years in jail?
First of all, economically that's a moronic decision. Jail costs the state between 20-30 thousand dollars a year depending on where it is. Unless someone is DDosing Amazon, and here's where the vague wording of the law is an important shortfall, we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars punishing someone who did perhaps a few thousand dollars worth of damage. That's bad economics, and I'm sure that money could be better used say, feeding the starving or allowing someone to go to college who otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Second of all, the kind of person you're going to be able to catch is not the person you want to throw in jail. We already have laws to punish people who run large botnets, and moreover by and large experienced blackhats won't be caught because they administrate their nets from countries ending in -stan. So the people who this legislation will put in jail will by and large be stupid college kids and people making a bad, poorly thought out decision as evidenced by the fact that they're using their home computer. These people need to be slapped with a big fine to they smarten them up, and then allowed to contribute to society.
This should be a poster case of a crime that should not carry criminal penalty.
In his defense, I assume, it is in fact illegal to plan crimes if you _intend_ (key word) to carry them out.
An example:
Possession of implements of crime -
Elements are:
1. The defendant possessed an instrument, tool or implement designed or intended for picking locks or pockets, to wit: [insert implement];
2. The defendant had the specific intent to use such implement in the commission of the crime.
---------
Straight from DC's public defender service database. And to some extent you should know better than to post that tired slashdot claim about "what about movies then." Planning does not mean thinking about.
In fact, because I'm realizing right now that I'm tired of our pro civil liberties side being discredited because we say "hear hear" to crap like this, let me give another example that should make it obvious. Suicide is a crime. Thinking about it is not. Writing books about it is not. Gathering materials for it and setting a date to do it (this would be planning) will infact earn you public intevention. I think everyone can agree this is entirely reasonable, and no way implies that we need to arrest people for having down days.
See the difference?
I dunno, but score! I have the bump. Neener neener to all you second class non-bump heads.
Granted the article doesn't say, but come on. You really can't tell if people are blind unless they tell you?
Same thing with mice... they could tell because they responded to visual stimulae. Again, granted the article didn't say that explicitly, but really that should be obvious.
When we run a deficit... where do you think the money comes from then? We just print the money in the basement?
Is this really that complicated?
The government doesn't stop paying for projects because they don't have enough money. So that say $3,000 you used to fork over isn't there, it comes from foreign loans. Therefore, the money you save in tax cuts, when we run a deficit, is being payed for by foreign banks. Sheesh.
Yes it would be a lot worse. Do you know how much of a productivity drain it would be on america if the average citizen had to inform himself and then vote on every little crap piece of legislation that came up?
Worse yet, it would be a huge blow to minority rights, which are in fact a bedrock of democracy. Look at some polls for the idiotic things that 51% or more of the populace are against. I'll give you a hint, they're things like evolution.
It's like hiring lawyers. Yes it's shitty, yes there's corruption that goes along with the legal system, but abolishing them doesn't make any sense. Try representing yourself in court. I haven't but I've been told it doesn't work out very well.
More like or if anyone was going to purchase a fucking zune. I mean seriously its a non-issue on so many levels.
You know, I agree to some degree with your sentiment, but football logic like this isn't really helping america either. Yes there is a republican party. It, however, is not filled with constitution burning satanist clones. Vote for and against individuals and their policies, not against parties because some in their leadership are very bad.
If intelligent americans decide to vote against all republicans because the rnc engages in immoral and (frankly) illegal tactics, that gives the Democrats a blank check to not solve problems, make decisions, or build a better america. Because, hey, they've already won by not being Republican.
So please, issues and indivuals, not teams. We're all americans.
Here's an easy way to make the problem obvious even intuitively. When tax cuts create a deficit, the extra money you "save" isn't being given to you by the government anymore. It's being given to you by say, a chinese banker. IF you think that your investment benefits outweigh the detriments of paying interest to that chinese banker, then guess what, that option has already been available to you for years.
There's a good reason everyone doesn't take out huge loans to invest whenever they can. Because it's not safe, and its generally not profitable. You _may_ get 10% return on stock investments funded by a 7% apr loan, but its not a reliable policy. If it was, the banks would be investing that money themselves, not giving it to you.
I too watched that movie... talk about ignorant fear mongering. I can't tell if its desire for fame or stupidity that causes people to make "documentaries" about this, but just because there are enough videos over a decade to fill 2 hours doesn't mean that the world is filled with terrorists and holy crap they're coming to get us and OMGZBBQ this is war!
Yes there are some islamist wack-jobs out there. But seriously. The US for instance has had one terror attack in the past 5 years. Thats about the rate we seem to get them. Not very scary. And if there is a war against the west, whoever is waging it really sucks at it.
Thankyou!
For some reason he seemed to think that a higher price would reflect pain on the part of sellers. I still can't believe economics isn't a required course.
It was a good read, as is generally the case for bruce, but this sentence he quoted to seemed like it could have been written better. And by written better I mean I think it scalded my flesh:
Ugh.
About the logging off thing, does logging off not limit the number of running exploitable programs?
I'm not reccommending it is a policy, because that would be like racing to shut off your computer the second you finished with it, which is obviously stupid. But someone could save me some google work if they'd give me a quick yes or no.
Cheers.
You're right about economic sanctions hurting the people, but not about them destabalizing the region. In fact, in a point that Ian Bremmer recently reiterated, isolating regimes tends to actually keep them pretty stable.
Keeping a country destitute through sanctions when it has a totalitarian goverment has a strong tendency to completely destroy the middle class. The middle class is where the change comes from because they aren't too fat and happy like the upper class nor too powerless and tied up with simply surviving to make change.
Iraq was actually a pretty good example of this. Saddam was a bad guy, but there was a reason we supported him for so long: Dictators that keep their generals happy and their people scared and in poverty run stable states.
So, ironically, dropping economic and political sanctions, if they were to create a middle class, would make the region less stable, rather than more. What that would mean in terms of their nukes, no one knows.
Mmmm... No I think using analogies actually makes a rather clear cut issue confusing. Like making analogies about auto theft with copyright infringment. If we had to make an analogy, I'd say it's more like you only let people into your house when they wear a special hat that you make out of newspaper, and this guy starts making the same hat.
He's not creating a loophole, which would be handing out keys to a lock which was only supposed to have one key (yours), he's making obvious the already present existence of a loophole, namely that any retard with a bit of computer knowledge can make the so called key.
In your defense though, it does seem like people must really be closing their eyes and yelling when they illustrate security holes with exploits, but trust me, a whitepaper about airport security would be ignored by the government so fast you wouldn't believe. I mean they're not going to admit they're just putting on a show unless they _really_ have to.
The point isn't whether you think bush, as a singular individual, is going to be the man that breaks american democracy. The point is:
If we had another 9/11, and _a_ president said (doesn't need to be bush) huge national emergency, we think they're about to strike again far worse (Which is a claim that would need no real evidence to make, as we've seen), and on these grounds I'm declaring martial law nationwide until we can clamp down on this threat(indeterminate length of time), would we have to all sit down and say, well I'll be damned, I guess he's allowed to do that?
What if they just kept saying martial law needs to continue?
It's not a problem because bush is somehow obviously going to do this, its a problem because we'd like our democracy and way of life to be a little less fragile than this. Remember, that's what the constitution was for. Let's not erode that any more than we already have.
The whole thing about terrorists needing to somehow fraudulently ninja their way past security is dumb anyway. The 9/11 hijackers all bought real tickets. They didn't hide in suitcases, they just walked on like everyone else.
Known terrorists do not carry out suicide missions. If they did they would be dead, and that would get them off the no-fly list rather efficiently. Therefore, almost by definition, the people trying to hijack and destroy planes are not going to be people who are known terrorists (generally speaking), and they aren't going to need to lie about who they are.
It's not a question of greater or lesser penalty, even though it comes off that way because all of us slashdotters would rather sell our houses than go to jail. Sending people to jail was never intended to be just a punishment (altough it is a pretty good one), it was intended to remove people from society that posed a significant enough threat to justify the expense of locking them up until they can behave better. Murderers, people who commit assault, etc obviously fit the bill.
I hope we haven't reached the point were copyright infringement is considered a "menace to society."
I think the way judges are coming down on this indicate that there is some ratio of legitimate use to illigitimate use that you need to satisfy. I'm not saying the law is great, and I'm certainly not saying that copyright infringement should carry a criminal penalty, but the way the rulings are coming out make it pretty obvious that without a fair ammount of legal use, anything that is used for significant amounts of copyright infringement is illegal.
So to your analogies, again reiterating that I don't think this guy should have gone to jail, his site was not the same as google or a car. His site was nearly to exclusion for the purpose of warez. Google can be used to find warez, but that is a small amount of its actual use. Similarly, despite their utilitiy in running people over, most people use cars for other purposes! So like I said, bad ratio.
I appreciate your general disillusion and disgust with copyright law, but lets not lose _all_ focus here. Fact number 1: The average slashdotter is not a physically impressive specimen. Fact number 2: most of us live in the wealthiest nations in the world.
Yes, you are born in to certain circumstances. But really, in a world where people only felt they needed to follow laws they personally approved, the music you could download legally would not be a fair trade for how often you would get the shit beaten out of you by people stronger than you. Established law and order is a Good Thing.
And second of all, in terms of being born in to certain circumstances, its not like you were born in Niger, or rural China, or Afghanistan. You did not, I repeat, did not get the short end of the stick because there are some shitty laws on the books. So lets be upset, but lets not lose our heads.
It's a pretty good point with marijuana, and I'd let it slide for heroin (people on smack just want to be left alone), if you knew _anything_ about meth you wouldn't say that. If you've seen someoen tweaked out on meth, it's quite scary. Think very energetic, very irritable, very disinhibited.
What you said is tantamount to no laws against drunk driving, because hey, no one's gotten hurt yet. Meth is bad stuff, and the world would be a better place without it.
Cheers.
Fwiw that's not what I was saying about WTC at all, but it doesn't matter.
I know this is give me liberty or give me death slashdot, but there is a debate here, and it isn't between whether people want a fascist dictatorship or not. For instance, you'd have to be pretty ignorant to suggest that neither guns nor cars should be regulated. License plates? Minimum age to move 2000 pounds of metal at 70 mph? Fuck that. Register to own something as dangerous as a firearm? Not unless this is Nazi Germany.
We can be a little more reasonable than that.
The point I was trying to make is that, at least in the US, and yes the debate should extend beyond this one UK town, alcohol is involved in a large proportion of domestic abuse cases, auto accidents, and general community ruining rowdiness. Since we know that to be true, maybe some loss of liberty in association with it is a good idea. Ben Franklin wasn't an annarchist. He was trying to tell people to make smart trades, and careful trades, when liberty and personal freedom were being sacrificed. That doesn't mean that good sacrifices don't exist, and I think the right to drink alcohol anonymously might be one of them. Maybe its not. But alcohol, unlike terrorism (Which is why I brought up the WTC), can be a serious issue, particularly in smaller communities. So a debate does exist.