...is to volunteer to do tech for local theatres and music venues.
But if you want to actually do computer work, all your local non-profits could stand to have someone come in and work on their computers. Seriously. Half their security software will be expired, their systems will be loaded with spyware, it's a mess, even worse than a random individual computer's. They have no IT, they do not train their workers, and they have a large amount of people using each computer. It's a recipe for disaster.
They almost always already have someone doing their website, which is usually a local webdesign firm doing it for free for PR and it's always somewhat half-assed because the non-profit isn't a 'real' customer. So it's hard to convince them to use you instead.
As for teaching, contact your local library. They hold classes on basic computer usage, although only do this if you're incredibly patient. These are essentially people with no computer skills at all who want to know how to do 'email'.
There's actually a way to do this completely legally. Attach the killswitch to the inside of your door such that if people break it down, it trips.
Thanks to the government's increased reliance on no-knock warrants, they will break down your door while yelling 'police'.
Meanwhile, you should yell back, as soon as you hear them, that breaking down the door will wipe your data...they won't believe you, but legally you've done all you need to do to cover yourself.
It's not your fault if the police damage evidence, while you're standing there telling them to stop as soon as you realize what they're doing. In fact, if they charge you with something anyway, you can assert that there was evidence that would have cleared you, and they destroyed it over your objections.
Yes, there are plenty of CPUs and instruction sets that do not need this trick.
However, 85% of home computers are, in fact, using the x86 instruction set. Arguing that there's a CPU that would have been better for this one application, vs. one that can actually run Windows and all their applications, is sorta stupid.
Something can't be more or less Turing complete. It either is or isn't.
And all people are Turing complete, in that they can simulate a universal Turing machine. (Well, with external memory of some sort. So people plus a piece of a paper are Turing complete.)
Hopefully, by 'you' in that paragraph, you usually mean 'the compiler'. People shouldn't be keeping memory locations out of the cache any more than they should be assigning them to registers, that's work for the compiler. You'll just get in its way.
I know that's almost certainly what you mean, I just thought I'd mention it for all the people who might read your post and start thinking this is something that programmers should worry about.
Although obviously encryption programmers have to worry about it to some extent, as they don't want their keys thrown around more than they have to be.
And, incidentally, I'm always amazed at how crappy the x86 instruction set is. Although jibjibjib is right, you can use MTRRs to stop the cache, and the new PATs are apparently the same things per-page. What x86 doesn't have, however, is any method to read or write to or from the cache independent of memory. You can mark segments of memory as uncachable, or write-thru, or whatever, but you can't mark them 'cache only', nor is there any way to access the cache outside of memory access.
Which is where, apparently, this 'freezing' trick comes in, which does it backwards by writing the data you want in the cache to memory, freezing the cache, and then erasing it from memory.
The CPU resets the cache before it reads the BIOS' instructions. It has to, because when it accesses the BIOS, like it does when accessing any memory location, it checks the cache first.
Also, while you could logically remove the BIOS from a running computer (After all, you can flash it, and that's the same thing.), you could not safely physically do that, as you'd almost certainly cause some sort of power glitch.
Yeah, while the latches might actually come up the way they were before (1), it doesn't appear that there would be any way to that information, considering the CPU is almost certainly going to wipe it as one of the first things it does on starting up, even before it touched the BIOS or any external instructions.
Otherwise would first look in the cache for said external instruction, and if the cache was nonsense it would crash.
No, it has to clear it as part of 'internal BIOS' or whatever it's called, the tiny set of instructions that run before the CPU talks to anyone at all, even the actual BIOS, that set things like processor states and stuff, and then finally runs the BIOS.
And, obviously, it would not be possible to dismantle a CPU fast enough to recover the cache.
1) Has there been any testing on that? When I built them using gigantic AND and OR gates in high school, they'd always come up the same way when powered on, in a random pattern that I assumed had to do with the length of wiring and whatnot.
That experience probably doesn't carry over to semiconductors, but I was under the impression that latches tended to come up random.
You are 100% completely and totally accurate as to what the Geneva convention requires.
Although you're still getting an imaginary mention of an extra set of people, because apparently you've somehow decided that Common Article 3 applies only to detainees. That is utterly wrong. It applies to, and I quote, 'Persons taking no active part in the hostilities'. That is essentially anyone not firing a weapon at the moment. Like random civilians walking down the street.
Asserting that the Geneva convention has some sort of concept of people fighting unlawfully, or people detained who aren't POWs, is just plain incorrect. It has, roughly, a concept of 'surrendered soldiers wearing uniforms', and 'everyone else not actively shooting'. The later can be detained or not, and that has nothing to do with anything. It does say that they get trials, however.
This is made much more clear if people would actually read the Fourth Convention, which actually is about all people who are not POWs. It is very clearly talking about the entire population of people, not just 'detained' people. It actually states what those short blurbs in Common Article 3 mean.
Many, many people are very confused by this, but I challenge anyone to come up with a hypothetical person who's covered under Common Article 3 who isn't a 'protected person' under the Fourth Convention's Article 4, as Bush has decided to assert 'unlawful combatants' are. For some reason, every single person has decided to stop reading at the Third Convention, and reached the definition of POW and decided to stop there. Um, no. There's a whole nother Convention that applies to everyone, POW or not.
Or I could just quote the International Committee of the Red Cross: 'Every person in enemy hands must have some status under international law: he is either a prisoner of war and, as such, covered by the Third Convention, a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention, [or] a member of the medical personnel of the armed forces who is covered by the First Convention. There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can fall outside the law.'
Anyway, even pretending there was such a classification as 'unlawful combatant' under the Geneva convention, it is confusing as to how this could possibly apply to, for example, a British citizen seized in Pakistan, like Moazzam Begg, considering we aren't at war with either of those countries.
He couldn't fall under a hypothetical 'unlawful combatant' category of Geneva anymore than he could fall under the POW category, because the US isn't at war with any of those countries, or having a war in any of those countries. There is no Geneva application at all, and hence the 'unlawful combatant' designation can't possible be something that exists as part of the Geneva Convention.
Now, if you want to argue it existed as part of US law. You're right, 'it' did. Shooting people is illegal. Which the violation of was a crime and thus people got tried in court, even if they did it during a war. It isn't some crazy detention system that has anything to do with a war at all. Oh, and you can't kidnap people from other countries to stick them in it, anymore than you could kidnap someone from other countries if they've been charged with murder. (Which is, in fact, what you'd be charging 'unlawful combatants' with.)
Merely reusing a term in a completely different context doesn't mean the new concept is an old one. And, incidentally, it is sheer nonsense, and quite possibly is slander, to call someone's behavior 'unlawful' when they have not been found guilty of criminal activity.
You can't steal people, as people are not ownable in societies where slavery is illegal. You can't steal things that are not the property of someone (or some legal entity that can own property). For example, you cannot steal leafs blowing down the street. You cannot steal air. You cannot steal ocean water. No one owns those things, taking possession of them is not theft.
Likewise, attempting to take possession of an 'unowned' person is not 'theft'.
You can't actually make a slave that way, even in places where slavery is legal, because people aren't magically slaves cause you say so. But it's not theft.
If you try to make the philosophical point that, in societies without slavery, free people are owned by 'themselves', well, people cannot actually be deprived of themselves, so cannot be 'stolen' from themselves. You cannot remove a person from said person.
In societies where slavery is legal, it is ipso facto not theft to own a slave, as the very concept of 'theft' requires some sort of unlawful action to occur. (Of course, you can steal slaves from other people, but that is not slavery being theft.)
This is not to imply that slavery is some morally okay thing, but every immoral/illegal action is not the same as theft, despite what libertarian silly people seem to think. Theft requires depriving the correct owner of the property in some manner.
Slavery is goddamn kidnapping compounded by assault. Or, if you prefer, 'false imprisonment'. It ain't 'theft'.
If taxpayers are going to spend a trillion dollars one way or another, I'd rather see there be tangible infrastructure improvements that are too heavy to be flown to china, than money in random corporate coffers.
Ha, good point. Be somewhat silly if we spent a lot of money helping relocate jobs here, only to watch a weak dollar result in us selling half the stuff to other countries and not getting much in return.
The danger in supporting corporations per se is that they aren't tied to the US. The average large corporation is very much an international affair. At my fortune 500 company I've noticed diversity initiatives that are geared to making the company seem very much non-US-centric. Now, to the extent that this is more inclusive of overseas employees, I'm fine with that. However, the problem is that it also means that when there is a problem with the US economy the company isn't interested in helping to fix it - they're more interested in seeing whether this creates some opportunity elsewhere.
It's not really the US vs. the World that's harming us, oddly enough. It's the Western World vs. the Third World. But you're right, we shouldn't 'help' companies, we should simply punish them for making things elsewhere.
I think we need a tariff based on the standard of living in the other county. For example, with Canada, we'd have a fairly light tariff on stuff made there. Or even have a NAFTA-like agreement with them and their unique situation...a lot of money flows back and forth across the border so fast it actually makes sense to treat us as one economic entity with two governments. (Mexico, however, needs removing from NAFTA, or dissolving it and make a new agreement.)
Europe, OTOH, we need some tariffs with, but not much. Same with Japan, which counts as 'the Western World' for all intents and purposes.
Because the point would be to drive jobs back here. Jobs that actually make things. Things like chairs and washing machines and remote controls and duct tape. Things that currently cost more to ship here than to pay the workers, but that's still cheaper than paying Americans. We need to (slowly) add enough tariffs that it isn't cheaper.
Free trade is, indeed, the worse modern idea even. It is a horrid concept, and has done more to destroy the US economy than anything else. Sure, multinational corporations make out like bandits, but no one else benefits, not Americans, who get stuff for really cheap, but get paid even less, relatively speaking. Meanwhile, it doesn't help people in poor countries...they just end up working for cheap.
The housing thing just hid the damage for years, it didn't actually cause the current problem. The problem was wages staying the same while prices rose normally, but everyone borrowed from their houses so that was okay, until it wasn't. And wages stayed the same why, exactly? Yup...offshoring competition.
And, incidentally, you might have noticed I've actually included basically all the places making cars as 'low tariff'. That's not a mistake...the car companies' problem is not that cars are being manufactured for cheap in Korea. Heck, they're making cars for cheap in Mexico. It's that they're total incompetents who have no planning skills. Or, as I liked to call them, 'American business executives'.
The Geneva Convention gives us no abilities or rights we had before in our treatment of anyone who is detained. It gave us obligations, nothing else. We already could have done everything required without signing it.
And hence anyone arguing something is legal or constitutional because the Geneva convention allows it is seriously confused. Countries do not magically get the ability to detain opposing soldiers because of it. Countries pretty much have the ability to do whatever the heck they want when interacting with the outside world, and even interally.
However, countries have unique rules they must follow created internally, flowing downward from whatever the 'origin' point of the government is. Like the constitution.
The point I was making is that we introduced a new idea in American law, called 'unlawful combatants'. Of course this is 'allowed' under the Geneva convention...detaining and slowly torturing to death all red headed citizens is allowed under the Geneva convention. The Geneva convention only pertains to specific behavior, and doesn't pretend to regulate anything else.
Unfortunately, DavidTC, I think you'll find that Geneva very clearly contemplates a class of detainees who are not classified as POWs. Read any of the four conventions, Common Article 3. It sets out a minimum standard for all detainees, POWs or not.
Um, no. It contemplates a class of people who are not POWs, or even 'detainees' at all. Or who are POWs, too. It includes every single person not taking active part in hostilities, and has nothing to do with people being detained at all. (Except it would also apply to people being detained, as they are not exempted.)
However, what it clearly does say is that no one can be can be sentenced by anything but a 'regularly constituted court'.
The convention on POWs additionally addresses determining POW status, saying you should assume POW status until you're sure they're not deserving of such privileged status.
Which, I might add, we didn't bother to do.
POW status is a privilege afforded to detainees who followed the laws of war. It is not the only classification of detainees.
Well, no. As I said, there are also criminals and people on trial. And mentally unstable people who are a danger to themselves and others, and wards of the state, and people here illegally we're removing from the country but have not actually charged with a crime...all sorts of things.
Countries have all sorts of reasons, and ways, to detain people, and the Geneva convention is a requirement that specific people are detained in a special, fairly-nice way. That's it.
The fact that there are other ways to detain people that the Geneva convention doesn't touch on doesn't have anything to do with the fact that, under US law, there's no such thing as 'unlawful combatants', or at least wasn't until the Supreme Court started raising questions about their detainment seven years ago.
I didn't assert that detaining people was a violation of Geneva. It's not, although strictly speaking they should have had a standard military tribunal decide if they were POWs at the start. Most of them wouldn't be, for the simple fact that a good many of them are the wrong goddamn people in the first place, and hence, legally, are not any sort of soldiers deserving of protection. (An argument can be made that they are still entitled to be tried by a 'regularly constituted court', but that has little to do with detaining them.)
What I asserted is that, in addition to the prison system, the POW system, and various other ways we detain people, we've now invented a new group of detainees called 'unlawful combatants', which we have not had previously. (And, for that matter, neither do most countries, sticking people fighting wars outside the protection of uniform into their normal prison system.)
This is perfectly legal under the Geneva conventions. Under the Geneva convention treatment of POWs, we could have detained the entire population of Iraq in Nebraska for fifty year. (That would be illegal under Fourth Geneva Article 49 about 'occupying nations', but that's neither here nor there.)
However, in this country, we also have something call the Constitution which means that we actually have to have specific reasons for detaining people, which that behavior might be in violation of. We're not actually allowed to detain anyone here without some sort of trial, thanks to the Constitution, not the Geneva convention. By ratifying the Geneva convention, we just gave people who qualify for POW a way where they can opt into the POW system instead of the court system.
The issue here is the treatment of unlawful combatants (who are, by our own treaties, entitled to a bare minimum of Common Article 3 protections), not the "made up" term. Hell, our Supreme Court has even discussed this issue recently in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld [wikipedia.org] (2006).
The court addressed the brand new military tribunals created to handle the brand new category of 'unlawful combatants'.
I didn't say we should tax based on income, just that income tax should be. Or, duh, we're talking about some other form of taxation, cause that's not income tax.
Likewise, sales tax should be based on sales, and head tax should based on the number of people. That's not any sort of moral judgment, that's the definition. That's the baseline, that's what you compare it to.
If I were to complain that the sales tax one county brought in only half the revenue as another country with the same amount of income, it would be just as misleading. Same with talking about how highest income earners pay almost no the head tax, proportionally speaking to their income. Um, duh. We're not taxing their fucking income with those things.
And only reason to speak about the 'income tax' paid by a 'specific of number people' is to mislead others. Something like 'The 1% top income earners pay 40% of the collected income tax but only make 20% of the total income in the country.' would work, as would the way I stated it above 'The top 1% are playing about twice as much taxes on every dollar of income compared to the bottom 99%.'
The way it was stated, however, makes people leap to the idea that somehow the rich are taxed 40 times as much as everyone else. This is obviously impossible so people correct it downward, but have no idea how far.
It is a textbook example of how to lie with statistics, and it is designed to make people over-estimate how much the rich are taxed, because people don't know how much the rich earn. Any statistic talking about income tax levels without mentioning income levels is incredibly misleading.
Here's a question for you: Would it be misleading to state that you are in the top 2% of people who did not pay the correct amount of income taxes? Because you are.
This is because almost everyone in the US who pays taxes pays the wrong amount, and most of the rest of the world, and children and other non-taxed people, of course, pay the correct amount. But I compared the wrong thing.
And, incidentally, rich people tend to own all the crap in this country, which would be sole reason to, you know, invade it. Ergo, basically all military and police spending is to protect the assets of rich people from both other countries and poor people.
I don't care what 'the point' is, my issue is with the constant misrepresentation of statistics to make it look like the top 1% are paying some absurd percentage of taxes.
The correct way, the understandable way, to state it: The top 1% are playing about twice as much taxes on every dollar of income compared to the bottom 99%. The top 5% are paying about 50% more taxes on every dollar of income compared to the bottom 95%.
But that looks much less unfair, because people actually come to the correct conclusions. Instead of '1% are paying 40% of the taxes', which is attempting to deliberately mislead people.
And most people don't mind people making $150,000 (top 5%) or $390,000 (top 1%) paying more income tax. Which is why the right has to lie with statistics to make it seem like they're paying some absurd amount more.
22%, incidentally, is the lowest tax rate the top 1% has paid in 28 years. Before 2003, it was above 25% for all but four years, and above 27% for all but six.
Although, ironically, they were paying less total percentage of taxes, because they were making much less and the Great Wealth Transfer hadn't kicked in yet.
I've actually said something like this, as a response to the 'Fair Tax' loons.
My idea is to tax assets. Not all assets, but basically ones that are registered with the government anyway.
Land, houses, boats, cars, airplanes, collect all taxes that way. As a bonus, those things are already taxed so there's no additional paperwork...we just take a good deal more.
And we introduce a 'progressive' tax system. Your first $10,000 worth of car isn't taxed, the next $90,000 worth of car is taxed at one rate, and anything over that is taxed much more.
Same with property taxes, although we'd need a standard of living adjustment by location for that scale.
I'm also tempted to tax stocks, which would change the value of stocks from their near nonsensical value to however much they actually pay in dividends. And stop all day trading. There's probably a reason that's a bad idea.
Although one thing I will mention is that various government contractors like to hire Americans as foreign workers in places like Iraq and assert they don't owe payroll taxes on them.
Yeah, the 'cut taxes' or 'give people stimulus money' is just an inherently stupid idea when people are this far in debt. People will use that money to pay off their debts. Which sounds good, but doesn't actually stimulate the economy.
The only way to stimulate this economy is to create jobs. There are two ways to do that, and I'm in favor of doing both:
1) Reduce the appeal of offsourcing via tarrifs and taxes, which would bring jobs back here.
2) The government actually constructs some stuff. To get out of the Great Depression, we constructed tanks and whatnot, but nothing says we can't construct railroads and solar farms or whatever.
The second of those, of course, would require even more deficient spending. The first doesn't, but doing it too fast might result in some American companies going under if they can't adapt fast enough.
People are given an incentive to save, to build up their nest egg so they can spend more down the line.
Which is one of those new-fangled way to stop a recession, apparently.
Oh, wait, no it's not. It is, in fact, the opposite of one.
More seriously, Fair Tax is a fucking moronic idea in general. Almost everyone would end up paying more taxes under it, except for the rich, who would end up paying less. There is simply no way to avoid that very simple fact. In fact, poor people spend more of their income.
And there are aspects of it that would be horribly bad ideas right now, like the aforementioned encouragement of lack of spending, and the fact it would raise house purchase prices by 30%. Oh, and screw up social security.
Sales taxes are incredibly stupid ideas to start with, and have always been stupid ideas. They are automatically regressive as poor people spend more of their income, they introduce drags on the economy, they drive spending to other locales, etc. 'Sin taxes' makes sense when discouraging bad/expensive-for-the-government behavior, no other sales taxes are good ideas. It's just, in general, they're so low they don't matter.
The idea that someone would run to run our entire government on sales taxes is just a mind-boggling example of naivete/brainwashing.
I have a question for you: Why do it with sales tax, which have such obvious problems? Why not simply do it the other way around, and make the 'fair tax' entirely income tax? Get rid of all other taxes, get rid of all deductibles, make the companies pay it instead of the individuals.
The answer: Because the supporters of 'Fair Tax' wish to stop having progressive taxation, where the rich can sit and accumulate riches for decades. And pay people to wait on them hand and foot without paying a penny of taxes on that, and vacation in Aruba without paying a penny of taxes on that.
I love how crazy people talk about how much percentage of taxes a percentage of people should pay, like that has anything to do with anything. We are taxed on income here, not per person.
Those 1% earned 22% of all income. Hence at the very least they should have paid 22% of all income tax, in a crazy world where everyone pays exactly the same proportion of income tax.
But no, loons like you like to imply they're paying a huge huge huge burden by using '1%' and '40%', instead of twice as much proportionally.
Same with the top 5%, which earned 37% of all income, and hence should have paid at least 37% of all income taxes. So 60% is not some amazing step, that's only about 50% more than they should be paying in a completely 'fair' system.
But I'm sure if it was like that, people like you would be whining that the top 1% paid 22% of all income tax.
It is perfectly normal in a time of war to hold prisoners (or "unlawful combatants") outside of the regular prison system. Torture is a completely separate issue.
Um, no, it's not. It's perfectly normal to hold POWs outside the prison system.
It is not normal to make up a category called 'unlawful combatants' and hold them both outside the POW and prison system.
Just because the price of electricity varies by time doesn't mean it makes any logical sense to talk to neighbor's fridges.
It does make logical sense to wait until the price of electricity drops, and then 'store up' some cold by cooling it a bit better. Or, even better, wait until right before it's about to rise again and do that.
There's no logical reason this requires communication with anyone. Except possibly if the price of electricity varies randomly, which just means you need one-way communication from the electric company.
We do have electricity control laws, you loon. We require circuit breakers, so that people sticking things in outlets or touching frayed cords usually don't get electrocuted, just shocked. In bathrooms, we require ground-fault outlets that stop people from electrocuting themselves while in water.
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...is to volunteer to do tech for local theatres and music venues.
But if you want to actually do computer work, all your local non-profits could stand to have someone come in and work on their computers. Seriously. Half their security software will be expired, their systems will be loaded with spyware, it's a mess, even worse than a random individual computer's. They have no IT, they do not train their workers, and they have a large amount of people using each computer. It's a recipe for disaster.
They almost always already have someone doing their website, which is usually a local webdesign firm doing it for free for PR and it's always somewhat half-assed because the non-profit isn't a 'real' customer. So it's hard to convince them to use you instead.
As for teaching, contact your local library. They hold classes on basic computer usage, although only do this if you're incredibly patient. These are essentially people with no computer skills at all who want to know how to do 'email'.
There's actually a way to do this completely legally. Attach the killswitch to the inside of your door such that if people break it down, it trips.
Thanks to the government's increased reliance on no-knock warrants, they will break down your door while yelling 'police'.
Meanwhile, you should yell back, as soon as you hear them, that breaking down the door will wipe your data...they won't believe you, but legally you've done all you need to do to cover yourself.
It's not your fault if the police damage evidence, while you're standing there telling them to stop as soon as you realize what they're doing. In fact, if they charge you with something anyway, you can assert that there was evidence that would have cleared you, and they destroyed it over your objections.
Yes, there are plenty of CPUs and instruction sets that do not need this trick.
However, 85% of home computers are, in fact, using the x86 instruction set. Arguing that there's a CPU that would have been better for this one application, vs. one that can actually run Windows and all their applications, is sorta stupid.
Something can't be more or less Turing complete. It either is or isn't.
And all people are Turing complete, in that they can simulate a universal Turing machine. (Well, with external memory of some sort. So people plus a piece of a paper are Turing complete.)
Hopefully, by 'you' in that paragraph, you usually mean 'the compiler'. People shouldn't be keeping memory locations out of the cache any more than they should be assigning them to registers, that's work for the compiler. You'll just get in its way.
I know that's almost certainly what you mean, I just thought I'd mention it for all the people who might read your post and start thinking this is something that programmers should worry about.
Although obviously encryption programmers have to worry about it to some extent, as they don't want their keys thrown around more than they have to be.
And, incidentally, I'm always amazed at how crappy the x86 instruction set is. Although jibjibjib is right, you can use MTRRs to stop the cache, and the new PATs are apparently the same things per-page. What x86 doesn't have, however, is any method to read or write to or from the cache independent of memory. You can mark segments of memory as uncachable, or write-thru, or whatever, but you can't mark them 'cache only', nor is there any way to access the cache outside of memory access.
Which is where, apparently, this 'freezing' trick comes in, which does it backwards by writing the data you want in the cache to memory, freezing the cache, and then erasing it from memory.
You could probably type 'How do I search the internet?' in your address bar and get something useful.
The CPU resets the cache before it reads the BIOS' instructions. It has to, because when it accesses the BIOS, like it does when accessing any memory location, it checks the cache first.
Also, while you could logically remove the BIOS from a running computer (After all, you can flash it, and that's the same thing.), you could not safely physically do that, as you'd almost certainly cause some sort of power glitch.
Yeah, while the latches might actually come up the way they were before (1), it doesn't appear that there would be any way to that information, considering the CPU is almost certainly going to wipe it as one of the first things it does on starting up, even before it touched the BIOS or any external instructions.
Otherwise would first look in the cache for said external instruction, and if the cache was nonsense it would crash.
No, it has to clear it as part of 'internal BIOS' or whatever it's called, the tiny set of instructions that run before the CPU talks to anyone at all, even the actual BIOS, that set things like processor states and stuff, and then finally runs the BIOS.
And, obviously, it would not be possible to dismantle a CPU fast enough to recover the cache.
1) Has there been any testing on that? When I built them using gigantic AND and OR gates in high school, they'd always come up the same way when powered on, in a random pattern that I assumed had to do with the length of wiring and whatnot.
That experience probably doesn't carry over to semiconductors, but I was under the impression that latches tended to come up random.
You are 100% completely and totally accurate as to what the Geneva convention requires.
Although you're still getting an imaginary mention of an extra set of people, because apparently you've somehow decided that Common Article 3 applies only to detainees. That is utterly wrong. It applies to, and I quote, 'Persons taking no active part in the hostilities'. That is essentially anyone not firing a weapon at the moment. Like random civilians walking down the street.
Asserting that the Geneva convention has some sort of concept of people fighting unlawfully, or people detained who aren't POWs, is just plain incorrect. It has, roughly, a concept of 'surrendered soldiers wearing uniforms', and 'everyone else not actively shooting'. The later can be detained or not, and that has nothing to do with anything. It does say that they get trials, however.
This is made much more clear if people would actually read the Fourth Convention, which actually is about all people who are not POWs. It is very clearly talking about the entire population of people, not just 'detained' people. It actually states what those short blurbs in Common Article 3 mean.
Many, many people are very confused by this, but I challenge anyone to come up with a hypothetical person who's covered under Common Article 3 who isn't a 'protected person' under the Fourth Convention's Article 4, as Bush has decided to assert 'unlawful combatants' are. For some reason, every single person has decided to stop reading at the Third Convention, and reached the definition of POW and decided to stop there. Um, no. There's a whole nother Convention that applies to everyone, POW or not.
Or I could just quote the International Committee of the Red Cross: 'Every person in enemy hands must have some status under international law: he is either a prisoner of war and, as such, covered by the Third Convention, a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention, [or] a member of the medical personnel of the armed forces who is covered by the First Convention. There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can fall outside the law.'
Anyway, even pretending there was such a classification as 'unlawful combatant' under the Geneva convention, it is confusing as to how this could possibly apply to, for example, a British citizen seized in Pakistan, like Moazzam Begg, considering we aren't at war with either of those countries.
He couldn't fall under a hypothetical 'unlawful combatant' category of Geneva anymore than he could fall under the POW category, because the US isn't at war with any of those countries, or having a war in any of those countries. There is no Geneva application at all, and hence the 'unlawful combatant' designation can't possible be something that exists as part of the Geneva Convention.
Now, if you want to argue it existed as part of US law. You're right, 'it' did. Shooting people is illegal. Which the violation of was a crime and thus people got tried in court, even if they did it during a war. It isn't some crazy detention system that has anything to do with a war at all. Oh, and you can't kidnap people from other countries to stick them in it, anymore than you could kidnap someone from other countries if they've been charged with murder. (Which is, in fact, what you'd be charging 'unlawful combatants' with.)
Merely reusing a term in a completely different context doesn't mean the new concept is an old one. And, incidentally, it is sheer nonsense, and quite possibly is slander, to call someone's behavior 'unlawful' when they have not been found guilty of criminal activity.
You can't steal people, as people are not ownable in societies where slavery is illegal. You can't steal things that are not the property of someone (or some legal entity that can own property). For example, you cannot steal leafs blowing down the street. You cannot steal air. You cannot steal ocean water. No one owns those things, taking possession of them is not theft.
Likewise, attempting to take possession of an 'unowned' person is not 'theft'.
You can't actually make a slave that way, even in places where slavery is legal, because people aren't magically slaves cause you say so. But it's not theft.
If you try to make the philosophical point that, in societies without slavery, free people are owned by 'themselves', well, people cannot actually be deprived of themselves, so cannot be 'stolen' from themselves. You cannot remove a person from said person.
In societies where slavery is legal, it is ipso facto not theft to own a slave, as the very concept of 'theft' requires some sort of unlawful action to occur. (Of course, you can steal slaves from other people, but that is not slavery being theft.)
This is not to imply that slavery is some morally okay thing, but every immoral/illegal action is not the same as theft, despite what libertarian silly people seem to think. Theft requires depriving the correct owner of the property in some manner.
Slavery is goddamn kidnapping compounded by assault. Or, if you prefer, 'false imprisonment'. It ain't 'theft'.
If taxpayers are going to spend a trillion dollars one way or another, I'd rather see there be tangible infrastructure improvements that are too heavy to be flown to china, than money in random corporate coffers.
Ha, good point. Be somewhat silly if we spent a lot of money helping relocate jobs here, only to watch a weak dollar result in us selling half the stuff to other countries and not getting much in return.
The danger in supporting corporations per se is that they aren't tied to the US. The average large corporation is very much an international affair. At my fortune 500 company I've noticed diversity initiatives that are geared to making the company seem very much non-US-centric. Now, to the extent that this is more inclusive of overseas employees, I'm fine with that. However, the problem is that it also means that when there is a problem with the US economy the company isn't interested in helping to fix it - they're more interested in seeing whether this creates some opportunity elsewhere.
It's not really the US vs. the World that's harming us, oddly enough. It's the Western World vs. the Third World. But you're right, we shouldn't 'help' companies, we should simply punish them for making things elsewhere.
I think we need a tariff based on the standard of living in the other county. For example, with Canada, we'd have a fairly light tariff on stuff made there. Or even have a NAFTA-like agreement with them and their unique situation...a lot of money flows back and forth across the border so fast it actually makes sense to treat us as one economic entity with two governments. (Mexico, however, needs removing from NAFTA, or dissolving it and make a new agreement.)
Europe, OTOH, we need some tariffs with, but not much. Same with Japan, which counts as 'the Western World' for all intents and purposes.
Because the point would be to drive jobs back here. Jobs that actually make things. Things like chairs and washing machines and remote controls and duct tape. Things that currently cost more to ship here than to pay the workers, but that's still cheaper than paying Americans. We need to (slowly) add enough tariffs that it isn't cheaper.
Free trade is, indeed, the worse modern idea even. It is a horrid concept, and has done more to destroy the US economy than anything else. Sure, multinational corporations make out like bandits, but no one else benefits, not Americans, who get stuff for really cheap, but get paid even less, relatively speaking. Meanwhile, it doesn't help people in poor countries...they just end up working for cheap.
The housing thing just hid the damage for years, it didn't actually cause the current problem. The problem was wages staying the same while prices rose normally, but everyone borrowed from their houses so that was okay, until it wasn't. And wages stayed the same why, exactly? Yup...offshoring competition.
And, incidentally, you might have noticed I've actually included basically all the places making cars as 'low tariff'. That's not a mistake...the car companies' problem is not that cars are being manufactured for cheap in Korea. Heck, they're making cars for cheap in Mexico. It's that they're total incompetents who have no planning skills. Or, as I liked to call them, 'American business executives'.
To recap for the confused:
The Geneva Convention gives us no abilities or rights we had before in our treatment of anyone who is detained. It gave us obligations, nothing else. We already could have done everything required without signing it.
And hence anyone arguing something is legal or constitutional because the Geneva convention allows it is seriously confused. Countries do not magically get the ability to detain opposing soldiers because of it. Countries pretty much have the ability to do whatever the heck they want when interacting with the outside world, and even interally.
However, countries have unique rules they must follow created internally, flowing downward from whatever the 'origin' point of the government is. Like the constitution.
The point I was making is that we introduced a new idea in American law, called 'unlawful combatants'. Of course this is 'allowed' under the Geneva convention...detaining and slowly torturing to death all red headed citizens is allowed under the Geneva convention. The Geneva convention only pertains to specific behavior, and doesn't pretend to regulate anything else.
Unfortunately, DavidTC, I think you'll find that Geneva very clearly contemplates a class of detainees who are not classified as POWs. Read any of the four conventions, Common Article 3. It sets out a minimum standard for all detainees, POWs or not.
Um, no. It contemplates a class of people who are not POWs, or even 'detainees' at all. Or who are POWs, too. It includes every single person not taking active part in hostilities, and has nothing to do with people being detained at all. (Except it would also apply to people being detained, as they are not exempted.)
However, what it clearly does say is that no one can be can be sentenced by anything but a 'regularly constituted court'.
The convention on POWs additionally addresses determining POW status, saying you should assume POW status until you're sure they're not deserving of such privileged status.
Which, I might add, we didn't bother to do.
POW status is a privilege afforded to detainees who followed the laws of war. It is not the only classification of detainees.
Well, no. As I said, there are also criminals and people on trial. And mentally unstable people who are a danger to themselves and others, and wards of the state, and people here illegally we're removing from the country but have not actually charged with a crime...all sorts of things.
Countries have all sorts of reasons, and ways, to detain people, and the Geneva convention is a requirement that specific people are detained in a special, fairly-nice way. That's it.
The fact that there are other ways to detain people that the Geneva convention doesn't touch on doesn't have anything to do with the fact that, under US law, there's no such thing as 'unlawful combatants', or at least wasn't until the Supreme Court started raising questions about their detainment seven years ago.
I didn't assert that detaining people was a violation of Geneva. It's not, although strictly speaking they should have had a standard military tribunal decide if they were POWs at the start. Most of them wouldn't be, for the simple fact that a good many of them are the wrong goddamn people in the first place, and hence, legally, are not any sort of soldiers deserving of protection. (An argument can be made that they are still entitled to be tried by a 'regularly constituted court', but that has little to do with detaining them.)
What I asserted is that, in addition to the prison system, the POW system, and various other ways we detain people, we've now invented a new group of detainees called 'unlawful combatants', which we have not had previously. (And, for that matter, neither do most countries, sticking people fighting wars outside the protection of uniform into their normal prison system.)
This is perfectly legal under the Geneva conventions. Under the Geneva convention treatment of POWs, we could have detained the entire population of Iraq in Nebraska for fifty year. (That would be illegal under Fourth Geneva Article 49 about 'occupying nations', but that's neither here nor there.)
However, in this country, we also have something call the Constitution which means that we actually have to have specific reasons for detaining people, which that behavior might be in violation of. We're not actually allowed to detain anyone here without some sort of trial, thanks to the Constitution, not the Geneva convention. By ratifying the Geneva convention, we just gave people who qualify for POW a way where they can opt into the POW system instead of the court system.
The issue here is the treatment of unlawful combatants (who are, by our own treaties, entitled to a bare minimum of Common Article 3 protections), not the "made up" term. Hell, our Supreme Court has even discussed this issue recently in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld [wikipedia.org] (2006).
The court addressed the brand new military tribunals created to handle the brand new category of 'unlawful combatants'.
I didn't say we should tax based on income, just that income tax should be. Or, duh, we're talking about some other form of taxation, cause that's not income tax.
Likewise, sales tax should be based on sales, and head tax should based on the number of people. That's not any sort of moral judgment, that's the definition. That's the baseline, that's what you compare it to.
If I were to complain that the sales tax one county brought in only half the revenue as another country with the same amount of income, it would be just as misleading. Same with talking about how highest income earners pay almost no the head tax, proportionally speaking to their income. Um, duh. We're not taxing their fucking income with those things.
And only reason to speak about the 'income tax' paid by a 'specific of number people' is to mislead others. Something like 'The 1% top income earners pay 40% of the collected income tax but only make 20% of the total income in the country.' would work, as would the way I stated it above 'The top 1% are playing about twice as much taxes on every dollar of income compared to the bottom 99%.'
The way it was stated, however, makes people leap to the idea that somehow the rich are taxed 40 times as much as everyone else. This is obviously impossible so people correct it downward, but have no idea how far.
It is a textbook example of how to lie with statistics, and it is designed to make people over-estimate how much the rich are taxed, because people don't know how much the rich earn. Any statistic talking about income tax levels without mentioning income levels is incredibly misleading.
Here's a question for you: Would it be misleading to state that you are in the top 2% of people who did not pay the correct amount of income taxes? Because you are.
This is because almost everyone in the US who pays taxes pays the wrong amount, and most of the rest of the world, and children and other non-taxed people, of course, pay the correct amount. But I compared the wrong thing.
And, incidentally, rich people tend to own all the crap in this country, which would be sole reason to, you know, invade it. Ergo, basically all military and police spending is to protect the assets of rich people from both other countries and poor people.
You are wrong. There is a constitutional amendment allowing income taxation, and constitutional amendments are part of 'the constitution'.
And slavery isn't fucking theft either. It's goddamn kidnapping, assault, probably some rape, all sorts of other crimes, but it's not theft.
I don't care what 'the point' is, my issue is with the constant misrepresentation of statistics to make it look like the top 1% are paying some absurd percentage of taxes.
The correct way, the understandable way, to state it:
The top 1% are playing about twice as much taxes on every dollar of income compared to the bottom 99%.
The top 5% are paying about 50% more taxes on every dollar of income compared to the bottom 95%.
But that looks much less unfair, because people actually come to the correct conclusions. Instead of '1% are paying 40% of the taxes', which is attempting to deliberately mislead people.
And most people don't mind people making $150,000 (top 5%) or $390,000 (top 1%) paying more income tax. Which is why the right has to lie with statistics to make it seem like they're paying some absurd amount more.
22%, incidentally, is the lowest tax rate the top 1% has paid in 28 years. Before 2003, it was above 25% for all but four years, and above 27% for all but six.
Although, ironically, they were paying less total percentage of taxes, because they were making much less and the Great Wealth Transfer hadn't kicked in yet.
I've actually said something like this, as a response to the 'Fair Tax' loons.
My idea is to tax assets. Not all assets, but basically ones that are registered with the government anyway.
Land, houses, boats, cars, airplanes, collect all taxes that way. As a bonus, those things are already taxed so there's no additional paperwork...we just take a good deal more.
And we introduce a 'progressive' tax system. Your first $10,000 worth of car isn't taxed, the next $90,000 worth of car is taxed at one rate, and anything over that is taxed much more.
Same with property taxes, although we'd need a standard of living adjustment by location for that scale.
I'm also tempted to tax stocks, which would change the value of stocks from their near nonsensical value to however much they actually pay in dividends. And stop all day trading. There's probably a reason that's a bad idea.
I don't know what the parent is asserting, but I know that the IRS says there are quite a lot of businesses that simply don't pay taxes.
Here's one example.
Although one thing I will mention is that various government contractors like to hire Americans as foreign workers in places like Iraq and assert they don't owe payroll taxes on them.
Yeah, the 'cut taxes' or 'give people stimulus money' is just an inherently stupid idea when people are this far in debt. People will use that money to pay off their debts. Which sounds good, but doesn't actually stimulate the economy.
The only way to stimulate this economy is to create jobs. There are two ways to do that, and I'm in favor of doing both:
1) Reduce the appeal of offsourcing via tarrifs and taxes, which would bring jobs back here.
2) The government actually constructs some stuff. To get out of the Great Depression, we constructed tanks and whatnot, but nothing says we can't construct railroads and solar farms or whatever.
The second of those, of course, would require even more deficient spending. The first doesn't, but doing it too fast might result in some American companies going under if they can't adapt fast enough.
People are given an incentive to save, to build up their nest egg so they can spend more down the line.
Which is one of those new-fangled way to stop a recession, apparently.
Oh, wait, no it's not. It is, in fact, the opposite of one.
More seriously, Fair Tax is a fucking moronic idea in general. Almost everyone would end up paying more taxes under it, except for the rich, who would end up paying less. There is simply no way to avoid that very simple fact. In fact, poor people spend more of their income.
And there are aspects of it that would be horribly bad ideas right now, like the aforementioned encouragement of lack of spending, and the fact it would raise house purchase prices by 30%. Oh, and screw up social security.
Sales taxes are incredibly stupid ideas to start with, and have always been stupid ideas. They are automatically regressive as poor people spend more of their income, they introduce drags on the economy, they drive spending to other locales, etc. 'Sin taxes' makes sense when discouraging bad/expensive-for-the-government behavior, no other sales taxes are good ideas. It's just, in general, they're so low they don't matter.
The idea that someone would run to run our entire government on sales taxes is just a mind-boggling example of naivete/brainwashing.
I have a question for you: Why do it with sales tax, which have such obvious problems? Why not simply do it the other way around, and make the 'fair tax' entirely income tax? Get rid of all other taxes, get rid of all deductibles, make the companies pay it instead of the individuals.
The answer: Because the supporters of 'Fair Tax' wish to stop having progressive taxation, where the rich can sit and accumulate riches for decades. And pay people to wait on them hand and foot without paying a penny of taxes on that, and vacation in Aruba without paying a penny of taxes on that.
I love how crazy people talk about how much percentage of taxes a percentage of people should pay, like that has anything to do with anything. We are taxed on income here, not per person.
Those 1% earned 22% of all income. Hence at the very least they should have paid 22% of all income tax, in a crazy world where everyone pays exactly the same proportion of income tax.
But no, loons like you like to imply they're paying a huge huge huge burden by using '1%' and '40%', instead of twice as much proportionally.
Same with the top 5%, which earned 37% of all income, and hence should have paid at least 37% of all income taxes. So 60% is not some amazing step, that's only about 50% more than they should be paying in a completely 'fair' system.
But I'm sure if it was like that, people like you would be whining that the top 1% paid 22% of all income tax.
It is perfectly normal in a time of war to hold prisoners (or "unlawful combatants") outside of the regular prison system. Torture is a completely separate issue.
Um, no, it's not. It's perfectly normal to hold POWs outside the prison system.
It is not normal to make up a category called 'unlawful combatants' and hold them both outside the POW and prison system.
Just because the price of electricity varies by time doesn't mean it makes any logical sense to talk to neighbor's fridges.
It does make logical sense to wait until the price of electricity drops, and then 'store up' some cold by cooling it a bit better. Or, even better, wait until right before it's about to rise again and do that.
There's no logical reason this requires communication with anyone. Except possibly if the price of electricity varies randomly, which just means you need one-way communication from the electric company.
We do have electricity control laws, you loon. We require circuit breakers, so that people sticking things in outlets or touching frayed cords usually don't get electrocuted, just shocked. In bathrooms, we require ground-fault outlets that stop people from electrocuting themselves while in water.