Women entering the workplace, while needed for equality, allowed businesses to pull the biggest con in history.
One full time job is supposed to pay for a family and a retirement. This full time job can either be the man or the woman, I don't give a damn, or they can be really clever and both work part-time jobs and have a lot more family time.
Instead, now both of them work to provide for their family. It was a damn clever way to slowly cut wages almost in half without anyone noticing.
Even the most incompetent and unskilled people should be able to feed a husband and wife and a kid with grand total of 50-60 hours a week work, and the average in a moderately skilled job, like clerical work, should be around 40. Instead, they're both averaging 50, and some unskilled couples are working almost 70 hours each flipping burgers and mopping floors.
I mean, look at the French. They manage it just fine, with higher taxes, and their standard of living is the same as ours, and they all get health care, to boot. Consider they have less natural resources to start with (Like no huge open prairies to grow food on.) we really need to look at ourselves and say 'WTF are we doing wrong?'.
The answer of course, but I don't expect anyone to believe this, is: We allow executives to siphon money straight out of the tops of businesses and straight out of society in the taxes they don't pay. That is, literally, the entire problem, although I'm sure half of you have just dismissed me as some crazed socialist.
Feel free to come up with some other explanation as to why an equal amount of time at work results in pay that gets you less good and services, because I'm pretty certain the actual amount of time required to make those goods and services also went down. (Which means they got us coming and going.) There are a very few things, like gasoline, where it's explainable in that the actual cost of manufacturing the item went up, but very few.
He's not saying that disabled kids should be denied education. He's saying that school districts should not have to pay for special needs out of the same "general fund" that funds education for all of the students. The disproportionately greater resources needed for the disabled students means that such a funding strategy shortchanges everyone. The mainline kids get shafted because the disabled kids take a disproportionate share. The disabled kids get shafted, because the school is now expected to meet extraordinary needs with ordinary resources. Much of this issue would go away if Congress simply funded the education and testing mandates that they pass down.
Except, of course, they are funded separately, based on the number and functioning level of students. My mother's a special ed teacher, I actually know how this works, as opposed to, apparently, everyone else here. There's a whole separate county-wide 'special ed office' that my mother interacts with almost as much as she has to interact with her school's administration, and special ed teachers at other schools as much as other teachers at her school. It's almost like there's an entire hidden 'school' that slices through all other K-12 schools that is special ed.
I live in Georgia, and it could be different in other states. But I doubt it.
Congress not funding mandates is another problem altogether. Congress mainly ignores special ed, thank God, so in many places the special ed program actually works.
It is when I see schools paying tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars on a level of care for individual students that I start to wonder how that money might be better spent.
Everyone else, of course, wonders what country you're in.
My mother's a special ed teacher, and you're, frankly, full of crap. Special ed students costs three or four times normal students. Maybe ten times for the several and profoundly disabled. And that doesn't come out of the school's budget at all, but an entirely different budget for special ed.
The problem with schools isn't a lack of funding. It's insane people operate the system at the top and trying to 'benchmark' and 'rate' everything, which works even worse than counting paperclips and pens in a business environment.
Smart kids need one-on-one education as much as any other "special needs" class.
A hell of a lot of them would settle for being left the hell alone.
Seriously. If some kid is reading the damn textbook in class, maybe the teacher should, you know, not pretend like that's some sort of challenge to his authority.
As someone who got dropped from the gifted program because his grades were bad because he didn't do homework, I'd have loved a specialized tutor, but I'd have settled for a school system that was willing to let me learn whatever, and in whatever way I wanted, as long as I could demonstrate I knew the stuff I was supposed to know in addition to that.
Instead, school was a constant battle between teachers who were offended at my mere existence and me trying to learn stuff I wanted to learn. In every class but math, I basically passed every test by reading the entire book before the end of the first week, and then rereading each chapter as we reached it. This meant, of course, that I consistently made Bs and Cs because I didn't do homework, in addition to having me labeled as a 'discipline problem' by several teachers because I didn't pay attention in class.
Yeah, it's the students fault that the the school operates like a prison and they they don't like it.
It's TRIVIAL for schools to stop getting sued over dress codes. All they have to do is not have them. Um, duh.
Anyone who actually disrupts class can be dealt with like anyone else who disrupts class. Anyone actually naked will, of course, be arrested.
Yes, some students will dress like hookers. Some students will wear offensive things.
Oddly enough, they can do that on the street, too, and yet society still manages to survive.
And codes about earrings and hair are completely fucking absurd. I'm sorry, but they are. I can slightly see the concept that some girl in a bikini top is going to distract the males, but long hair and earrings? What is this, 1950? No teenager is going to be 'distracted' by a classmate with long hair.
Spend another $3/hr on low-end benefits like 80% coverage cheapo insurance and the Big Mac might cost you $2.99. Why can't we afford this?
We can. In about six months we will. Why?
Democrats raising minimum wage and fixing, at least in some sense, the health care mess. (That last may take ayear or so.)
That's what happened to all the low end jobs in this country. Minimum wage kept getting lower, relatively, and the ten million service jobs that teenagers used to do went to immigrants and other people who are willing to live on that.
That's fine for the businesses. Immigrants can certainly do the work. The problem is that it leaves teenagers with no jobs at all. I would suggest it would be better for society as a whole to have teenagers, who want to have a job, have one, than to have to import people.
No kidding. The judge didn't 'define' email to include IMs, he decided that the law's definition of email included IMs.
Frankly, it'd be very hard to write a legal distinction between IM and email without making either email SMTP-specific or IM protocol-specific. It's one-to-one or selected-few-to-selected-few, as opposed to chatrooms and IRC and MUDs and whatnot where 'the public' can connect into your conversation. (OTOH, think DCC or password protected chat or private rooms on MUDs.)
It's relayed through servers of which there may be one or two or even more, with a client app at each end. (Yes, IM usually has one server and email usually has two, but email can be intra-server and IM can cross servers, think Jabber bridges and local servers and stuff like that.)
There are free public accounts you can get, in addition to pay accounts, in additions to servers you can run yourself that may or may not be able to communicate with the outside world.
There are clients for both that pop the messages up on the screen in real time and allow you to reply, in addition to the servers having the ability to store messages for later if you are offline.
Seriously, someone define the difference email and IMs without talking about port 25 and UDP and other protocol stuff. It's hard enough excluding IRC and not, for example, excluding mailing lists.
Of course, this raises the question of why the hell you'd want a law to only cover 'email' and not, say, 'electronic messages'. Probably because you are a stupid legislator who apparently isn't aware of his lack of knowledge in that area.
I really wish the government would start doing what they do for, say, building codes, and realize they need to come to the technical community and say 'This is what we want the law to do. What should the law say, technically-wise, to make that happen?' and we can explain that 'email' is not a meaningful distinction, and try to figure out if they're deliberately trying to exclude, for example, IM or multi-user discussion areas or what.
Instead, they do the equivalent of saying 'All walls must have wooden support thingies in them'.
I think we just have to acknowldge at that price its more of a middle class thing..
The laptop is not intended for people.
It's intended for villages.
And the villages already do things like share a single car and two refrigerators and stuff like that.
And every village that's going to get one of these already has cell phones, at least a few of them. At a certain village size, there's not a lot of point in giving everyone a phone, just like there's not a lot of point in everyone having a car when four automotive trips get made a month by the entire village.
There is, however, a very large point in having an internet-enabled laptop in the village where anyone can look up how to, for example, repair that car they have.
Warning: It was not just the coffee. When I didn't drink the coffee they poisoned my lunch in the fridge, with the same slow acting poison. Someone is trying to (and has) murdered me unless you don't eat your sandwich, either.
When you figure out what the hell is going on, send another message back in time.
Cordially, Future Lord Kano.
P.S. If there's not another message from you, assume the worse and don't go into work today.
I pointed that out, too, but that's only true if time travel can change the past.
Go check out the 'transactional' interpretation of QM if you want to see messages echoing back and forward in time and disallowing alteration of the past by interference. (I.e., causality violations have 0% probability of existing.)
It's not to hard to come up with the idea that you can communicate with the past, but only in ways that cause the existing present to exist. Anything else would not make it into the past, or make it into the past altered.
Basically, think of it like the two slits experiment. Paradoxes are the dark areas, reality cannot happen that way. Your time machine will blow up, or malfunction, or just simply refuse to work.
Connie Willis has a time travel series like this, where reality actively conspires to keep the past from being changed, by, for example, slightly altering the time traveler's destination in both time and space. (Although it seems oddly unmalicious. You try to assassinate Hitler, you end up in Montana, whereas I'd suggest a closer place where you couldn't do that from would be arriving about three hundred feet straight up or forty feet straight down.)
Because, however, the series is soft sci-fi, it has a limited amount of 'slippage' it can actually do, and then starts making coincidences and all sort of weird things happen, so there's actually a plot. But you could make quite believe hard sci-fi out of the concept.
Which begs the question, are you really sending information back in time, or are you actually, in fact, sending information forward in time to the particle you are measuring 'first', by measuring the particle in the 'past'?
Neither. You are deciding which way the photon always was, which dates back not to the first measurement, but when it was twinned with its partner.
As some sci-fi writer pointed out, I forget who but I'm thinking Niven:
If it is possible to change the past, the universe will constantly be altered until it is altered to a point that no one invents time travel, and then it will stop. Ergo, if it is possible to alter the past, no one will ever figure out how. (Or this timeline is going to be erased, and it doesn't matter what the hell we figure out.)
It's like a roulette wheel with fifty trillion slots, and you stop rolling when the ball lands in 'zero', otherwise you roll again. After an infinite amount of time, where did the ball land last?
A scary addendum of mine: The easiest way to have a universe where no one invents a time machine is a universe where no humans ever existed, or they all get killed before that level of technology.
Quite a lot of places are incredibly fucking stupid with their cookies. They'll have the login form on one domain name, the 'bounce through if logged in' page on another domain, and you'll end up at yet another if logged in or back at the login form if not. It's completely impossible to try to allow cookies from those idiot using the Cookie Button or any per-site method.
You can switch to 'Prompt for cookies' to get through them and then switch back.
Um, that's stupid. It would imply that no one could ever switch distributors.
Your 'anonymous market' is called multiple suppliers of the same product and it's how capitalism fucking works. I would like to be able to walk into Target and purchase the same things that I could purchase at Walmart, or purchase it online, and know it was the actual same thing.
Under your system, you've make the manufacturers anonymous, and have to trust distributors, which means we're basically stuck with purchasing from one store, instead of the real world, where we know both the manufacturers and the distributors, and can trivially purchase the same product from anywhere, or, if we so choose, trust a store instead.
However, you're even dumber than that. Because, under your system, stores would just start advertising their products.
If I offer to sell you a grapefruit, and sell you an orange instead, I can't defend myself on charges of fraud that oranges are, in fact, more popular. If I claim to be 'Jesse McDonald', and enter into a contract with someone, I can't defend myself on the grounds that people in general would rather be working with me than with 'Jesse McDonald', so all I did was make it harder for me to land the contract.
Fraud is not decided by popular vote. Fraud is making factually incorrect statements to gain to gain someone's money.
And I fail to see how what you talk about makes things less confusing to anyone! Randomly changing ownership of trademarks because some people misuse them is not a good idea. And, I note, we already do that when they reach a certain level, anyway, or at least we public domain the trademark.
And I'm baffled as to why you think someone pretending to be me in an interaction with someone else isn't harming me. My reputation will suffer, there could be misdirected bills and lawsuits, all sorts of bad things could happen. Same thing if pretend-Toshiba laptop batteries explode.
It's not technically 'fraud', it's some sort of libel or slander. It's misrepresentation, it's 'identity theft' and it would be actionable even if it there was no trademark law at all. Trademark law just provides a framework for made up names to exist. (And while I think companies deserve almost none of the rights of human beings, 'Having a name' is a right I'm quite willing to grant them. In fact, sometimes I think we shouldn't let them change their name.)
Before every site was covered in AdSense. When MySpace was the glimmer in some nerds eye. Before every moron lip-synced horrible songs on YouTube.
Your examples are stupid.
No, seriously. You could have just described when every site was covered in popups and popunders, when everyone was on Geocities, and, wasn't more, cramming up the search engines with talk about their cats and boats, and when every idiot was sharing random_popular_song.mp3 on Napster.
And we still got the same percentage of spam, but we only got like six emails a day, so it was okay that five of them were spam.
And no one has used correct English on the internet since 1994.
This internet isn't perfect, but I like it a lot better. Everyone blogging and livejournaling, but at least I know where they are and can ignore them. Google's trivial to block, and text ads are a lot better than the fucking Java-Flash-Popup-Popunder-Animated GIF insanity that was 2001. And do you know how easy it is to never visit YouTube?
You don't need that. What you need is 'Cookie Button'.
It lets you surf with cookies completely off, and turn them on for sites that need them. You can even turn them on as session cookies even if they don't want to be.
And, as an added bonus, you can make it delete cookies from all blocked sites with a switch, so once you get the dozen or so site you want to set cookies allowed, you just flip that switch on and, poof, all your cookies are gone. (Well, they aren't actually gone till you surf to the sites, but whatever.)
Trademarks don't 'artifically limit' the supply of anything. Trademarks make it so you can trust the product.
Without enforced trademarks, all products are the lowest possible quality, because there's no point in making something better than that, because no one can say 'Hey, that worked well, I'll buy another one of those.' or 'Well, that fell apart immediately, i won't buy that kind anymore.'.
Trademarks are merely artifical signatures. Just like someone shouldn't be able to walk up to a hospital and say he's you and request your medical records, someone shouldn't be able to sell something he claims was manufactured by you if it wasn't. Trademark law is, at root, a specific form of fraud prevention.
That's not say trademarks haven't been abused, and that selling the brand instead of the product is stupid, and I realize there's sort of a knee-jerk reaction against 'intellectual property' here, and I agree with a lot of it, but anyone who thinks society would be better off if people had no way to tell the difference between a Toshiba laptop and some craptacular Korean brand designed to look like one with a Toshiba labeled slapped on it is an idiot.
Sci-fi exists solely so you can have 'non-real' things happen to the characters. Period. Which is also why alternate histories is under the 'spec-fi' umbrella.
People who try to make a distinction between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi, or sci-fi and fantasy, are just being obtuse. It doesn't matter how plausible, based on the world we know, your trip to the stars, or meeting a duplicate of yourself, or traveling through time, or whatever. It's something that does not 'really' happen, and hence is sci-fi, or, as Heinlein preferred, spec-fi.
Anyone who thinks that book is serious isn't paying attention when the characters are talking about science fiction, and how they get 'edited out' of their original universe.
NotB isn't a book. It's a meta-book. I mean, Lazarus Long said it was unbelievable when he was reading the first half, and Lazarus is Heinlein's voice.
Oh, and, incidentally, NotB is also the best argument for shorter copyright terms I've ever seen. Imagine if Heinlein had been able to play with stories from the 40s and 50s.
It's not just Life-Line. He's got another short story, with the invention of 'sunscreens'. Basically, they were trying to invent a 'cold light', instead of wasting energy on heat (1), and manage to do so, but also realize it works backwards and converts light to electricity with near 100% efficiency and it's extremely cheap to make. (Some sort of artifical clay, IIRC.)
In that case, everyone tries to shut them down, and they do exactly what every person who actually finds themselves in that situation should do...they patented it, and released the plans to all newspapers they could, and barely managed to get out alive, and, of course, millionaires with the royalties.
1) Damn, Heinlein thought of almost every single damn technological breakthrough, didn't he? Look at the current push to replace incandescent with less wasteful bulbs.
In this context, and in every one of his non-dystopian visions of the future, one of the most despicable things any man can do is to force his views (and/or actions) on a woman.
To be fair, in his non-dystopian futures, one of the most despicable things any man can do is to force his views (and/or actions) on anyone. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress society is just only halfway there.
However, you're right about his treatment of women. They are the basis of society, and it's okay for men to protect them, although often those men will find they don't need protecting. (Aka, Hazel in The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, where her and Colin end up 'protecting' each other to the point of silliness in the first third of the book because he thinks she's just some random woman while she's seen more action than he ever has.)
There are only three kinds of women in Heinlein books:
1. Ones that are weak, but learn not to be.
2. Ones that pretend to be weak, but aren't.
3. Ones that never appear to be weak in the first place.
None of them actually are weak (Unlike a few men), and they're all very competent (Like most major characters.). Good men try to protect them, and bad men don't, but the best women don't need it. I can't think of a single female villain.
That story is called 'The Time Traveler', which is funny because, duh, it has no 'time travelers' in it.
I think it loses some of the power now, but someone who skipped from, what, 1962 to 1973? really would get hit with as much future shock as someone who traveled from 1900 to 1960. The social changes were just crazy, and frankly that's one of the best 'dealing with time displacement' story I've ever seen.
I don't really like any of his work except the Callahan stories and novels, because, frankly, I can't relate to the characters. Jake (and Joe and Maureen) are real people, and the futuristic people don't jibe.
That's actually sort of the reason I'm not a big fan of 'Callahan's Key', because Erin is too damn hard to relate to in the first place, we last saw her when she was the equivalent, maturity-wise, of maybe an eight year old, and now she's basically an adult(1), and the story concept basically made it impossible for us to get to know her.
1) Yes, I know, respectively, she was two and, what, fifteen or so? Not the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Women entering the workplace, while needed for equality, allowed businesses to pull the biggest con in history.
One full time job is supposed to pay for a family and a retirement. This full time job can either be the man or the woman, I don't give a damn, or they can be really clever and both work part-time jobs and have a lot more family time.
Instead, now both of them work to provide for their family. It was a damn clever way to slowly cut wages almost in half without anyone noticing.
Even the most incompetent and unskilled people should be able to feed a husband and wife and a kid with grand total of 50-60 hours a week work, and the average in a moderately skilled job, like clerical work, should be around 40. Instead, they're both averaging 50, and some unskilled couples are working almost 70 hours each flipping burgers and mopping floors.
I mean, look at the French. They manage it just fine, with higher taxes, and their standard of living is the same as ours, and they all get health care, to boot. Consider they have less natural resources to start with (Like no huge open prairies to grow food on.) we really need to look at ourselves and say 'WTF are we doing wrong?'.
The answer of course, but I don't expect anyone to believe this, is: We allow executives to siphon money straight out of the tops of businesses and straight out of society in the taxes they don't pay. That is, literally, the entire problem, although I'm sure half of you have just dismissed me as some crazed socialist.
Feel free to come up with some other explanation as to why an equal amount of time at work results in pay that gets you less good and services, because I'm pretty certain the actual amount of time required to make those goods and services also went down. (Which means they got us coming and going.) There are a very few things, like gasoline, where it's explainable in that the actual cost of manufacturing the item went up, but very few.
He's not saying that disabled kids should be denied education. He's saying that school districts should not have to pay for special needs out of the same "general fund" that funds education for all of the students. The disproportionately greater resources needed for the disabled students means that such a funding strategy shortchanges everyone. The mainline kids get shafted because the disabled kids take a disproportionate share. The disabled kids get shafted, because the school is now expected to meet extraordinary needs with ordinary resources. Much of this issue would go away if Congress simply funded the education and testing mandates that they pass down.
Except, of course, they are funded separately, based on the number and functioning level of students. My mother's a special ed teacher, I actually know how this works, as opposed to, apparently, everyone else here. There's a whole separate county-wide 'special ed office' that my mother interacts with almost as much as she has to interact with her school's administration, and special ed teachers at other schools as much as other teachers at her school. It's almost like there's an entire hidden 'school' that slices through all other K-12 schools that is special ed.
I live in Georgia, and it could be different in other states. But I doubt it.
Congress not funding mandates is another problem altogether. Congress mainly ignores special ed, thank God, so in many places the special ed program actually works.
It is when I see schools paying tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars on a level of care for individual students that I start to wonder how that money might be better spent.
Everyone else, of course, wonders what country you're in.
My mother's a special ed teacher, and you're, frankly, full of crap. Special ed students costs three or four times normal students. Maybe ten times for the several and profoundly disabled. And that doesn't come out of the school's budget at all, but an entirely different budget for special ed.
The problem with schools isn't a lack of funding. It's insane people operate the system at the top and trying to 'benchmark' and 'rate' everything, which works even worse than counting paperclips and pens in a business environment.
Smart kids need one-on-one education as much as any other "special needs" class.
A hell of a lot of them would settle for being left the hell alone.
Seriously. If some kid is reading the damn textbook in class, maybe the teacher should, you know, not pretend like that's some sort of challenge to his authority.
As someone who got dropped from the gifted program because his grades were bad because he didn't do homework, I'd have loved a specialized tutor, but I'd have settled for a school system that was willing to let me learn whatever, and in whatever way I wanted, as long as I could demonstrate I knew the stuff I was supposed to know in addition to that.
Instead, school was a constant battle between teachers who were offended at my mere existence and me trying to learn stuff I wanted to learn. In every class but math, I basically passed every test by reading the entire book before the end of the first week, and then rereading each chapter as we reached it. This meant, of course, that I consistently made Bs and Cs because I didn't do homework, in addition to having me labeled as a 'discipline problem' by several teachers because I didn't pay attention in class.
Yeah, it's the students fault that the the school operates like a prison and they they don't like it.
It's TRIVIAL for schools to stop getting sued over dress codes. All they have to do is not have them. Um, duh.
Anyone who actually disrupts class can be dealt with like anyone else who disrupts class. Anyone actually naked will, of course, be arrested.
Yes, some students will dress like hookers. Some students will wear offensive things.
Oddly enough, they can do that on the street, too, and yet society still manages to survive.
And codes about earrings and hair are completely fucking absurd. I'm sorry, but they are. I can slightly see the concept that some girl in a bikini top is going to distract the males, but long hair and earrings? What is this, 1950? No teenager is going to be 'distracted' by a classmate with long hair.
Spend another $3/hr on low-end benefits like 80% coverage cheapo insurance and the Big Mac might cost you $2.99. Why can't we afford this?
We can. In about six months we will. Why?
Democrats raising minimum wage and fixing, at least in some sense, the health care mess. (That last may take ayear or so.)
That's what happened to all the low end jobs in this country. Minimum wage kept getting lower, relatively, and the ten million service jobs that teenagers used to do went to immigrants and other people who are willing to live on that.
That's fine for the businesses. Immigrants can certainly do the work. The problem is that it leaves teenagers with no jobs at all. I would suggest it would be better for society as a whole to have teenagers, who want to have a job, have one, than to have to import people.
No kidding. The judge didn't 'define' email to include IMs, he decided that the law's definition of email included IMs.
Frankly, it'd be very hard to write a legal distinction between IM and email without making either email SMTP-specific or IM protocol-specific. It's one-to-one or selected-few-to-selected-few, as opposed to chatrooms and IRC and MUDs and whatnot where 'the public' can connect into your conversation. (OTOH, think DCC or password protected chat or private rooms on MUDs.)
It's relayed through servers of which there may be one or two or even more, with a client app at each end. (Yes, IM usually has one server and email usually has two, but email can be intra-server and IM can cross servers, think Jabber bridges and local servers and stuff like that.)
There are free public accounts you can get, in addition to pay accounts, in additions to servers you can run yourself that may or may not be able to communicate with the outside world.
There are clients for both that pop the messages up on the screen in real time and allow you to reply, in addition to the servers having the ability to store messages for later if you are offline.
Seriously, someone define the difference email and IMs without talking about port 25 and UDP and other protocol stuff. It's hard enough excluding IRC and not, for example, excluding mailing lists.
Of course, this raises the question of why the hell you'd want a law to only cover 'email' and not, say, 'electronic messages'. Probably because you are a stupid legislator who apparently isn't aware of his lack of knowledge in that area.
I really wish the government would start doing what they do for, say, building codes, and realize they need to come to the technical community and say 'This is what we want the law to do. What should the law say, technically-wise, to make that happen?' and we can explain that 'email' is not a meaningful distinction, and try to figure out if they're deliberately trying to exclude, for example, IM or multi-user discussion areas or what.
Instead, they do the equivalent of saying 'All walls must have wooden support thingies in them'.
I think we just have to acknowldge at that price its more of a middle class thing..
The laptop is not intended for people.
It's intended for villages.
And the villages already do things like share a single car and two refrigerators and stuff like that.
And every village that's going to get one of these already has cell phones, at least a few of them. At a certain village size, there's not a lot of point in giving everyone a phone, just like there's not a lot of point in everyone having a car when four automotive trips get made a month by the entire village.
There is, however, a very large point in having an internet-enabled laptop in the village where anyone can look up how to, for example, repair that car they have.
Warning: It was not just the coffee. When I didn't drink the coffee they poisoned my lunch in the fridge, with the same slow acting poison. Someone is trying to (and has) murdered me unless you don't eat your sandwich, either.
When you figure out what the hell is going on, send another message back in time.
Cordially, Future Lord Kano.
P.S. If there's not another message from you, assume the worse and don't go into work today.
I pointed that out, too, but that's only true if time travel can change the past.
Go check out the 'transactional' interpretation of QM if you want to see messages echoing back and forward in time and disallowing alteration of the past by interference. (I.e., causality violations have 0% probability of existing.)
It's not to hard to come up with the idea that you can communicate with the past, but only in ways that cause the existing present to exist. Anything else would not make it into the past, or make it into the past altered.
Basically, think of it like the two slits experiment. Paradoxes are the dark areas, reality cannot happen that way. Your time machine will blow up, or malfunction, or just simply refuse to work.
Connie Willis has a time travel series like this, where reality actively conspires to keep the past from being changed, by, for example, slightly altering the time traveler's destination in both time and space. (Although it seems oddly unmalicious. You try to assassinate Hitler, you end up in Montana, whereas I'd suggest a closer place where you couldn't do that from would be arriving about three hundred feet straight up or forty feet straight down.)
Because, however, the series is soft sci-fi, it has a limited amount of 'slippage' it can actually do, and then starts making coincidences and all sort of weird things happen, so there's actually a plot. But you could make quite believe hard sci-fi out of the concept.
You don't have to write that story, you can just build a receiver for messages from the future, and it will one of the things to come in.
Which begs the question, are you really sending information back in time, or are you actually, in fact, sending information forward in time to the particle you are measuring 'first', by measuring the particle in the 'past'?
Neither. You are deciding which way the photon always was, which dates back not to the first measurement, but when it was twinned with its partner.
As some sci-fi writer pointed out, I forget who but I'm thinking Niven:
If it is possible to change the past, the universe will constantly be altered until it is altered to a point that no one invents time travel, and then it will stop. Ergo, if it is possible to alter the past, no one will ever figure out how. (Or this timeline is going to be erased, and it doesn't matter what the hell we figure out.)
It's like a roulette wheel with fifty trillion slots, and you stop rolling when the ball lands in 'zero', otherwise you roll again. After an infinite amount of time, where did the ball land last?
A scary addendum of mine: The easiest way to have a universe where no one invents a time machine is a universe where no humans ever existed, or they all get killed before that level of technology.
Sadly, no.
Quite a lot of places are incredibly fucking stupid with their cookies. They'll have the login form on one domain name, the 'bounce through if logged in' page on another domain, and you'll end up at yet another if logged in or back at the login form if not. It's completely impossible to try to allow cookies from those idiot using the Cookie Button or any per-site method.
You can switch to 'Prompt for cookies' to get through them and then switch back.
Um, that's stupid. It would imply that no one could ever switch distributors.
Your 'anonymous market' is called multiple suppliers of the same product and it's how capitalism fucking works. I would like to be able to walk into Target and purchase the same things that I could purchase at Walmart, or purchase it online, and know it was the actual same thing.
Under your system, you've make the manufacturers anonymous, and have to trust distributors, which means we're basically stuck with purchasing from one store, instead of the real world, where we know both the manufacturers and the distributors, and can trivially purchase the same product from anywhere, or, if we so choose, trust a store instead.
However, you're even dumber than that. Because, under your system, stores would just start advertising their products.
Um...huh?
That's not how fraud is decided at all.
If I offer to sell you a grapefruit, and sell you an orange instead, I can't defend myself on charges of fraud that oranges are, in fact, more popular. If I claim to be 'Jesse McDonald', and enter into a contract with someone, I can't defend myself on the grounds that people in general would rather be working with me than with 'Jesse McDonald', so all I did was make it harder for me to land the contract.
Fraud is not decided by popular vote. Fraud is making factually incorrect statements to gain to gain someone's money.
And I fail to see how what you talk about makes things less confusing to anyone! Randomly changing ownership of trademarks because some people misuse them is not a good idea. And, I note, we already do that when they reach a certain level, anyway, or at least we public domain the trademark.
And I'm baffled as to why you think someone pretending to be me in an interaction with someone else isn't harming me. My reputation will suffer, there could be misdirected bills and lawsuits, all sorts of bad things could happen. Same thing if pretend-Toshiba laptop batteries explode.
It's not technically 'fraud', it's some sort of libel or slander. It's misrepresentation, it's 'identity theft' and it would be actionable even if it there was no trademark law at all. Trademark law just provides a framework for made up names to exist. (And while I think companies deserve almost none of the rights of human beings, 'Having a name' is a right I'm quite willing to grant them. In fact, sometimes I think we shouldn't let them change their name.)
Before every site was covered in AdSense. When MySpace was the glimmer in some nerds eye. Before every moron lip-synced horrible songs on YouTube.
Your examples are stupid.
No, seriously. You could have just described when every site was covered in popups and popunders, when everyone was on Geocities, and, wasn't more, cramming up the search engines with talk about their cats and boats, and when every idiot was sharing random_popular_song.mp3 on Napster.
And we still got the same percentage of spam, but we only got like six emails a day, so it was okay that five of them were spam.
And no one has used correct English on the internet since 1994.
This internet isn't perfect, but I like it a lot better. Everyone blogging and livejournaling, but at least I know where they are and can ignore them. Google's trivial to block, and text ads are a lot better than the fucking Java-Flash-Popup-Popunder-Animated GIF insanity that was 2001. And do you know how easy it is to never visit YouTube?
You don't need that. What you need is 'Cookie Button'.
It lets you surf with cookies completely off, and turn them on for sites that need them. You can even turn them on as session cookies even if they don't want to be.
And, as an added bonus, you can make it delete cookies from all blocked sites with a switch, so once you get the dozen or so site you want to set cookies allowed, you just flip that switch on and, poof, all your cookies are gone. (Well, they aren't actually gone till you surf to the sites, but whatever.)
So, your complaint is that...you're a moron who doesn't know how to change the channel?
Why the hell would anyone assume a Super Bowl halftime show would be okay for all ages?
You dumbass.
Trademarks don't 'artifically limit' the supply of anything. Trademarks make it so you can trust the product.
Without enforced trademarks, all products are the lowest possible quality, because there's no point in making something better than that, because no one can say 'Hey, that worked well, I'll buy another one of those.' or 'Well, that fell apart immediately, i won't buy that kind anymore.'.
Trademarks are merely artifical signatures. Just like someone shouldn't be able to walk up to a hospital and say he's you and request your medical records, someone shouldn't be able to sell something he claims was manufactured by you if it wasn't. Trademark law is, at root, a specific form of fraud prevention.
That's not say trademarks haven't been abused, and that selling the brand instead of the product is stupid, and I realize there's sort of a knee-jerk reaction against 'intellectual property' here, and I agree with a lot of it, but anyone who thinks society would be better off if people had no way to tell the difference between a Toshiba laptop and some craptacular Korean brand designed to look like one with a Toshiba labeled slapped on it is an idiot.
Sci-fi exists solely so you can have 'non-real' things happen to the characters. Period. Which is also why alternate histories is under the 'spec-fi' umbrella.
People who try to make a distinction between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi, or sci-fi and fantasy, are just being obtuse. It doesn't matter how plausible, based on the world we know, your trip to the stars, or meeting a duplicate of yourself, or traveling through time, or whatever. It's something that does not 'really' happen, and hence is sci-fi, or, as Heinlein preferred, spec-fi.
Anyone who thinks that book is serious isn't paying attention when the characters are talking about science fiction, and how they get 'edited out' of their original universe.
NotB isn't a book. It's a meta-book. I mean, Lazarus Long said it was unbelievable when he was reading the first half, and Lazarus is Heinlein's voice.
Oh, and, incidentally, NotB is also the best argument for shorter copyright terms I've ever seen. Imagine if Heinlein had been able to play with stories from the 40s and 50s.
It's not just Life-Line. He's got another short story, with the invention of 'sunscreens'. Basically, they were trying to invent a 'cold light', instead of wasting energy on heat (1), and manage to do so, but also realize it works backwards and converts light to electricity with near 100% efficiency and it's extremely cheap to make. (Some sort of artifical clay, IIRC.)
In that case, everyone tries to shut them down, and they do exactly what every person who actually finds themselves in that situation should do...they patented it, and released the plans to all newspapers they could, and barely managed to get out alive, and, of course, millionaires with the royalties.
1) Damn, Heinlein thought of almost every single damn technological breakthrough, didn't he? Look at the current push to replace incandescent with less wasteful bulbs.
In this context, and in every one of his non-dystopian visions of the future, one of the most despicable things any man can do is to force his views (and/or actions) on a woman.
To be fair, in his non-dystopian futures, one of the most despicable things any man can do is to force his views (and/or actions) on anyone. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress society is just only halfway there.
However, you're right about his treatment of women. They are the basis of society, and it's okay for men to protect them, although often those men will find they don't need protecting. (Aka, Hazel in The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, where her and Colin end up 'protecting' each other to the point of silliness in the first third of the book because he thinks she's just some random woman while she's seen more action than he ever has.)
There are only three kinds of women in Heinlein books:
1. Ones that are weak, but learn not to be.
2. Ones that pretend to be weak, but aren't.
3. Ones that never appear to be weak in the first place.
None of them actually are weak (Unlike a few men), and they're all very competent (Like most major characters.). Good men try to protect them, and bad men don't, but the best women don't need it. I can't think of a single female villain.
That story is called 'The Time Traveler', which is funny because, duh, it has no 'time travelers' in it.
I think it loses some of the power now, but someone who skipped from, what, 1962 to 1973? really would get hit with as much future shock as someone who traveled from 1900 to 1960. The social changes were just crazy, and frankly that's one of the best 'dealing with time displacement' story I've ever seen.
I don't really like any of his work except the Callahan stories and novels, because, frankly, I can't relate to the characters. Jake (and Joe and Maureen) are real people, and the futuristic people don't jibe.
That's actually sort of the reason I'm not a big fan of 'Callahan's Key', because Erin is too damn hard to relate to in the first place, we last saw her when she was the equivalent, maturity-wise, of maybe an eight year old, and now she's basically an adult(1), and the story concept basically made it impossible for us to get to know her.
1) Yes, I know, respectively, she was two and, what, fifteen or so? Not the point.