You're pointing out implementation errors, whereas I'm pointing out conceptual errors.
In theory, they could indeed do what you suggest, even though they don't.
Whereas the idea of profiling is just a stupid idea, period.
I notice this a lot. Everyone sees problems in how they do what they do, (Which they are indeed crappy at.) failing to notice that even if they did what they did perfectly, they'd still fail.
I.e., their 'limit on amount of liquids can be bring in' could be bypassed if they were omnipotent and could perfectly see how much liquid you had on you, via the simple procedure I described above. In fact, if I and a group of friends were planning on never flying again, I'd get a dozen of us to go through with an empty bucket and the max amount of liquids, and then blatantly pour all the liquids together immediately after we got through security. Bonus points for including some dry ice so it smokes. In full view of everyone being forced to carry though tiny shampoo bottles.
I do have to give them credit for not implementing profiling, despite calls by stupid people to do so. I suspect it was more out of concerns about looking racist than the actual fact it wouldn't work, though.
But generally, to paraphrase Douglas Adam, the TSA's fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. You don't notice how stupid their actual plans are, because they have blatantly failed to implement those plans correctly.
I would argue that the government should be able to restrict the use of giant piece of speeding metal.
But as we do have a common law and incidentally, recognized by the Supreme Court right to travel, exactly like you said, the government must provide some sort of reasonably priced alternate transit that everyone can use if the government is going to restrict operation of cars. Like buses or trains or something.
The government can put 'reasonable restrictions' on rights. For example, it can demand you not hold a protest rally in the middle of a courtroom during court.
But if the active courtroom, and nowhere else, is only public property that a large section of the population can get to, something has gone horrible wrong and the government can't really restrict protests there, because there is the only public place that functionally exists. The solution is to provide some other public lands, so there is a reasonable alternative.
Likewise, the solution to the 'citizen right to travel' vs. 'government power to keep people from driving cars recklessly' is to have other ways to travel that do not require people, who have demonstrated they are reckless with the operation of motor vehicles, operate said vehicles. These other ways to travel must at least be somewhat comparable to automobiles in price and convenience, let's say within the same order of magnitude.
Which we utterly and completely have failed to do.
Let me guess...'around here' you actually have mass transit or at least some sort of taxi system, right?
Here in the US, 20% of the population lives in rural areas, and I would estimate that 75% of that population, 15% total, literally has no way to get to work or the grocery store without driving. And for the other 80%, probably 25% of them is in the same boat, so 20% of total.
So let's say 35% total population literally cannot survive without their cars, without either moving or changing jobs. No, there aren't even taxis to call.
You see, here, we don't actually believe that things should be possible without a car. Only in major cities, and even then, only in some of them. (Good luck in LA or Atlanta.)
So taking away someone's driver license permanently is a bit more serious here.
Please note I'm not presenting any of this as a good thing, I'm just mentioning it because often foreigners have no idea how dependent we are on cars here. There's not a bus coming down the road, there's not a local market to buy stuff from, there's not a train station, there's nothing at all but getting in the car and driving there, or at least getting in the car and driving most of the way there and then getting on mass transit halfway.
Meanwhile, Americans (Except for New Yorkers, who can, and often do, live without cars.) don't quite see how other countries can be so blithe about taking away licenses. Hell, we let incredibly old people drive here, who can barely see and have a reaction time measured in minutes, simply because we can't figure out how they're supposed to get anywhere otherwise.
You know, the government should actually have to pay people when it arrest people on no grounds at all. It's utterly absurd they're able to get away with that. It's not a damn DNA test, alcohol tests are instantaneous.
I did a quick google and couldn't find it, but I read a well documented story about some people who got thrown in jail for weeks because of cocaine possession, and asserted continually it was flour, and it was finally tested for their court case...and it was flour. This is not some urban legend, I'm not making it up, it actually happened, and pretty recently, too.
We're supposed to be provided with lawyers who do this shit, but we've decided to so seriously underfund the free legal system that it takes weeks and months to do things that the rich, who can afford their own lawyers, do in an hour.
The legal system is pretty well tilted in the favor of the defendant, believe it or not...but only the defendant who has a lawyer running around actually doing things.
Everyone else, even if they get a competent public defender who defends them as well as a high-priced lawyer, which is unlikely but possible...even if that happens, it's still going to take much, much longer, which means they'll will be much more harmed by the prosecution as it's drawn out, and have to sit in jail on charges that are literally unsupported by any evidence at all.
There really is only one actual fair way to fix this problem, and that's to ban the private practice of criminal law utterly, at which point the goddamn rich might get off their ass enough to actually fix the system.
Well there you go, then. India apparently profiles against people of Pakistan descent, guy says 'Hey, wait a second, how do they know I'm of Pakistan descent if I just change my name?' and proceeds to do so.
It's worth pointed out all the things that let him do that...US passports not having the original name on them and them not having his father's name of them, which some passports have, would be utterly useless anyway if it was his mother from Pakistan and he'd had a different first name. (I.e, profiling based on names is doomed to fail anyway.)
And that's someone with a real US passport...how easy would it be for someone from Yemen to forge a passport from, say, India, along with a Hindu name?
Or, hell, pretend to be Hispanic. 'Race' is a pretty vague and nonsensical science in the first place, no one's going to go up to a Juan Hernedez on a Mexican passport and assert he's really from Pakistan.
Maybe we could implement some sort of skin tone tests, I'm sure that would go over well. Perhaps we could have a whites line and a coloreds line. (White people apparently can't be Muslim...and the Iranians are laughing their ass off.)
Saying you will looked at people harder based on certain things they can fake and lie about is exactly the same as saying you will go easier on people if they willing to spend the time faking certain things.
That is literally what 'we should do profiling' idiots are suggesting: 'We should inspect certain people less, so that those people, if they happen to be terrorists, or if terrorists just pretend to be those people, can easily succeed.'
That is what they just said, and they're proud of it, like dogs that just shit in the middle of the floor. Oh, but they're 'not PC', which obviously makes them right, because the only problems anyone has with their fucking idiotic idea is that it's blatantly racist.
No, you morons, we have a problem with it because, in addition to the other objection that treating all Muslims like terrorists is not really the face we want to present to the Muslim world, it's an idea that cannot possibly work either.
Hell, it looks like she wasn't even on the no fly list.
And thanks to the incredibly stupid way the security area is set up, you can just have her do it multiple times, so that even if she does get caught bringing something in, she's just got one knife and looks like an honest mistake.
It's so trivial it's absurd: If you have need six people to take over a plane (And that is, for some reason, what we're actually defending against.), and you have her and five dangerous looking Arab men with Saudi passwords or whatever. And let's say we've implemented this 'profiling', and those five guys aren't managing to get a single thing on the plane.
Let us say they're based out of Atlanta, which I will use because it's the airport I know best.
So the guys are flying in, obviously. As they arrive, the blonde woman books an outgoing flight, and arrives at the airport with a single box cutter. (Hey, honest mistake, right?)
Four of the men leave the airport. One does not. She hands him the box cutter.
She flies to Tampa or something, comes back the next day, with another box cutter. Once she lands, she hands it to the same guy, who's been moving from terminal to terminal. (Thanks to layovers, it's not really that suspicious for people to hang around for a day in the airport. In an airport like Atlanta, you honestly could remain unnoticed by moving from terminal to terminal.)
She repeats this two times. Perhaps the guy staying in the airport would be swapped out for another guy, which can be done by someone else buying a ticket. Might want to buy a ticket out, and a ticket back, and then just not leave, as missing the flight after clearing security might be suspicious. (As an added bonus, this tells them if they're on the no fly list.)
Then they've got six box cutters in, and can do whatever the hell they want.
This is why we have random searches, which, in theory, actually protect us from this better.
In practice, they don't protect us at all, as they are a) very shitty, and b) we just let people through after taking their stuff with no punishment.
"pro-profiling" people are advocating behavioral profiling
No, they really aren't.
I know you want to assume the best of people, but almost everyone who complains that we don't 'profile', without any sort of modifier, means we should idiotically focus on Arabs (Which is idiotic, as the last two people to attempt to blow up airplanes were black and half-black half-white.) or Muslims (Which is equally idiotic, as we do not magically know what people are.).
I just knew someone would mention Israeli -style profiling.
That doesn't have anything to do with the person I was responding to, who apparently has forgotten the last two terrorists (Shoe and underwear bomber) were, in fact, neither Arab or from Muslim countries.
Have you not been paying any attention to actual terrorist attacks on planes recently?
Well, there's Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, he is half black, half white, and English. Seems like any sort of profiling based on race or national origin might, I dunno, miss him.
Oh, and there's the shoe bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is black and from Nigerian. While his name might cause some profiling, as he's not even a US citizen, there's no way to stop him from flying under fake ID, and half of Nigerians are Christian.
Those are, specifically, the last two people to smuggle weapons on planes. So any focus on Arabs or people from Muslim countries would, you know, have made their job easier.
Except, as has been pointed out repeatedly, concentrating on specific people by definition leaves other areas less inspected.
So all you really need is a guy who has stolen someone else's identity to carry all the damn knives, and you can have 5 'obvious' (In your universe) Jihadists and that guy take a plane.
Hell, if you're really clever, take a tour group of innocent Muslims, from one of these countries. Have thirty obviously suspicious Muslims board the plane, get searched as thoroughly as possible...and then have a black guy from the US who converted to Islam fly under some other guy's name and carry the knives to give to five of those guys. (The other twenty five being innocent Muslims who got a discount on a trip to the US.)
Are you 'pro-profiling' people really so stupid that you can't grasp 'If we search group X more than group Y, terrorists will make sure to be in group Y, or hell, just make sure one member of their group can fake being in group Y and have them carry the stuff.'?
This is, of course, pretending that that 'hijacking a plane' is even vaguely possible, or that the security stuff is even slightly a good idea...but no matter how dumb the security theatre is now, your suggestion makes it worse.
You realize that 'an affirmative defense' actually needs for you to be charged with possessing child porn, and go to court, and have a lawyer competently present that argument, right?
Affirmative defenses don't make things 'stuff you can't be arrested for', they make things 'if you can prove this in court, you're innocent'. Do not ignore the 'if you can prove this in court'.
The question isn't what normally happens, the question is what the police can choose to do.
No, Republican's don't trust Democrats because of condescending libtard douchebags, like you. We don't seek, nor do we need your approval of our beliefs.
Says the person who, in every political discussion, tries to assert he's a 'sane Republican'. Yeah, that's not an attempt to get approval.
The goddamn 'sane' Republicans are the problem. You just keep pretending everything's nice and good over there and it's only a few crazies that you want nothing to do with, but we're not morons...we see how Republicans use crazies to get elected.
You are oh so desperate for us to know you don't have anything to do with that, but you don't get to be part of that without having the taint rub off on you,
You claim that it's not important, but it's important enough for your side to fight for it.
No one 'fought' for abortion in this bill, you loon. There is no abortion in the bill.
If anyone had a problem with any hypothetical abortion in the bill they should have amended one of the bills so as to exclude it. (Not that the bill actually funds any health care at all.)
And before you mention that there wasn't time, or it couldn't be done under suspension of the rules...there wasn't time because the Republicans decides to have near continual filibusters in the Senate, and only stopped them when Reid made it clear the Senate was going to stay there until it actually voted on some damn stuff. (Or Republicans could leave at which point Democrats would happily vote without them.)
At which point the Senate bill passed finally (unanimously, I must add) and the House tried to hurry it through (instead of going to committee) because there was no time and it was, apparently, a massively popular bill. At which point the abortion issue magically somehow appeared for the very first time, invented out of thin air by paranoid lunatics who read 'women having access to health care' as pro-abortion. (Or, even more worrying, read 'women having access to education' as pro-abortion.)
Of course, under your interesting logic, THE SENATE VOTED UNANIMOUSLY FOR GOVERNMENT FUNDING OF ABORTIONS, and it took the House to shoot it down. Holy. Crap. Do Republicans know every single Senator is now pro-choice? Not even 'pro-choice', but actively in favor of abortions? (Hell, do Democrats know that?)
The reading of "direct tax" that was taken by the US government 70+ years after the constitution was written waters the taxation clause down to the point of being no restriction at all.
The US government always taxing things throughout its history. Please google 'Whiskey Rebellion', which was about a tax in 1791, which is two years after the constitution was signed.
But I'm sure it was all 'watered down' by that point, and none of the founding fathers were around. I mean, it's not like Washington wasn't still in his first term or anything.
Oh, but that must only apply to taxes on 'things'. Surely no one one back then would try to tax 'income'...and they didn't. No one suggested taxing income until the war of 1812. Wow, that's more than two decades after the constitution was signed.
But person in power was President James Madison, who didn't know anything about the Constitution. Yeah, yeah, sure, he wrote the Constitution, but that was 20+ years ago, I don't know how he's supposed to remember what he put down. So he had his Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Dallas draft and propose an income tax modeled on the British, in clear violation of his own intent when he penned the clause forbidding direct taxes. (The reason we didn't get that tax, BTW, was because the war ended, not because there were any hypothetical constitutional problems with it.)
I know that fools teach that the Federal government couldn't tax income until the 16th amendment, and thus when it's pointed out that incomes clearly were taxed before then, that magically is somehow unconstitutional and no one noticed, but that is an utterly incorrect reading of the constitution, period.
What the constitution bans are 'Capitation, or other direct, Taxes' that aren't appropriated equally. Capitation is a head tax, a tax per person, and 'direct taxes' are taxes on mere ownership of stuff. That's it. That's what that means.
The clauses has never included the taxation of monetary transactions, which the Federal government can tax however it wants, and has taxed its entire history. The Supreme Court confusingly once said that 'direct tax' might sorta include income from property, but quickly backed away from that, and have never even slightly indicated that an income tax was a 'direct tax'.
Firstly, no, states have always been in charge of marriage, so the Federal government banning it would be a massive power grab.
Second, the Supreme Court has actually recognized marriage as a fundamental right, and it's unlikely they'd let the Federal government take it away.
Thirdly, states would just rename it something else and keep issuing licenses to exactly the same people they issued licenses to before, and no one else.
If you're about to say 'there could be a law about that'...there actually is a law about that. It's illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender without an 'exceedingly persuasive justification'.
Without said justification, it is illegal to, for example, ban a man from doing something a women can do...like marry a man. Marriage laws that do not allow same sex marriage are already illegal, and have been so since the 'Intermediate scrutiny' test required for discrimination based on sex set in 1976. It's just that no one noticed this until recently.
Erasing all the laws about marriage and attempting to make the states start over would just piss everyone off, quite possibly not legally work, and certainly wouldn't require the states to start letting people write contracts that allow people to visit them in hospitals as 'family'.
The entire idea is preposterous from start to end.
I always thought a good language to start with would be PHP.
It has all the language conventions that BASIC skips, like var++, it has looping constructs that actually are used in the real world, not GOTO, it has variables marked (With a $) like in most modern languages, it doesn't require compiling, it doesn't require pointer knowledge.
And you can start off simple and go all the way to OOP.
Note I mean 'command line PHP', not web stuff.
Ruby would also be a reasonable alternative, as the other response said. (Although I think the do....while thing would be horribly confusing later.)
Older BASIC just teaches bad practices, and newer BASIC is all sorts of weird retrofitting of stuff onto a language that's not designed for. And don't even get me started on VB. No introductory programming course should be cluttered up with having to write programs that have a GUI.
Child porn is not used to commit harm, like plutonium would probably be. Child porn is evidence of already committed harm.
Outlawing the possession of evidence of a crime is so nonsensical as to be actually harmful to investigating crimes.
I mean, if I was on some of the...um...less legal torrent sites, and instead of showing naked adults, they started showing naked children, what would I do?
Well, in a universe where we had sane laws, I might report it.
In this universe, I'm clearing my cache and history, closing my browser, and wiping my hard drive's free space. Because I am, in actual fact, in violation of the law until I do that. And I certainly won't report it, as I am not omnipotent and have no idea if I missed something and are still in violation of the law. Hell, even if I was no longer in possession, telling the police would be a confession I was in possession.
The law literally says 'If you have evidence of child abuse, you are committing a felony until it is destroyed.'. That is the actual law.
It is really insane that people think this somehow protects children.
In fact, I'm really surprised when I hear that 'someone was turned in when a computer shop discovered child porn on his computer'. I just want to ask the TV 'So you're saying that the computer shop was in possession of child porn and told the police that? Real real smart. Good thing the police like you and didn't charge you with that felony.'
Please don't try to portray it as Jesus wanted people to be slaves (even monetarily) to the church.
I really wouldn't get into whether or not Jesus 'wanted people to be slaves', considering he had no problem with, you know, actual slaveowners.
He also got angry and overturned the tables used for ripping off people buying sacrifices for the altar being sold at the temple.
Yes, but those weren't operated by the temple. Those were just hucksters taking advantage of people who'd come long distances to pay their respects at the temple, and didn't have the right sacrifice or symbolic coinage. They were the modern equivalent of ticket scalpers.
A problem with them does not indicate a problem with the temple or the government. (Admittedly, they were being operated on temple grounds, but it's not like there were modern police forces and trespassing laws. This was the 'you can set up a booth on any area of public space and sell stuff from it' mentality, which still exists in the lot of countries.)
He did it because it would help build it up and help allow people be more free, not to bind them down. Only by sowing the seeds do you get the harvest.
Are you objecting to what I said, or not? Because I agree with that.
There was a tax involved, but not the way you think. Originally, colonists were taxed to pay their own (English) governors, an arrangement they had no problem at all. However, the English crown decided that this might make the governors loyal to the colonists, not the crown, so changed the arrangement...the colonists would pay the crown, and the crown would pay the governors.
As English citizens, they could only be taxed by the crown with the consent of the their parliamentary representatives...and they had none. Before, the taxation to pay for governors was arguably also illegal, but everyone seemed okay with it.
The English, however, had a plan to make the colonies pay as much in taxes as they cost, so started taxing imports, and creating monopoly importers to assure taxes were paid. By the time of the Boston Tea Party, however, this had gone so hilariously wrong that all the taxes had essentially gone away due to political pressure, and the only thing left was the monopoly shipping.
And now the major problem was smuggling of tea. Legal tea was a) actually cheaper, and b) had no taxes on it. Please read that sentence again. In fact, England was subsiding the shipment of the tea...via the pockets of people in England, as they couldn't manage to collect any tax revenue from the colonies.
However, the tea monopoly was seen as the last remnant of the previously illegal taxes, and a heck of a lot of people made their living off smuggling tea.
So people interested in getting representation in parliament (As English people were granted the right to under English law) continued to not purchase the tea. Or even allow it to be offloaded, which would allow the shipping company to collect their rebate back in England.
A large portion of the people participating in the Boston tea party, in fact, were smugglers who would be put out of a job by the tea.
No one in American was being taxed for the tea. It did not cost any extra due to taxes. The monopoly of the East India Company was simply a reminded that England thought it could tax colonists without representation in parliament. (Please note that while I called it 'illegal', in actuality, imports could be taxes like that, just not taxes on specific people. The colonists, however, pointed out that it was only tea to them that was originally taxed, thus making it a tax on them in practice.)
Did you notice that we needed a constitutional amendment to have an income tax?
No we did not. That amendment does not do what people think it does.
Taxing the income of people has, under the constitution, always been legal. Period. It is an indirect tax, it is, and always has been, legal.
For 100 years or so, so was taxing property and real estate and rent. Then, in 1985, the Supreme Court decided those were direct taxes, and hence could not be made without being appropriated between the states equally. Then, the 16th amendment undid that ruling. It allowed the Federal government to tax money produced from ownership of stuff, and to tax the actual ownership too.
In other words, the 16th amendment allows Federal property tax, Federal income tax was already allowed. I point you to The Revenue Act of 1861.
Also note that, later, the Supreme Court changed its position on property taxes, stating that they never were direct taxes, that was a mistake, and thus the 16th amendment wasn't needed at all.
Oh, look, it's you, a level 13 Justifier of Republicans with +3 armor against anyone pointing out misbehavior of Republicans
The reason 'Republicans don't trust Democrats.' is that Republican yammerers like Limbaugh and Beck, for the past two decades, have constantly invented conspiratorial nonsense about Democrats, and the people who've been listening to them for two decades have now gotten elected to office.
Which is entirely the fault of people like you, supposedly 'sane' conservatives, who've put up with their crap as useful tools, and then lost control of the party thanks to your massive fuckup named Bush, so now we've got actual elected members of Congress who are birthers, and all it takes is the slightest whisper of 'This bill doesn't ban abortion' to make Republicans not attempt to stop massive worldwide rape.
You don't get to be a 'sane conservative'. That's like being a sane member of the Earth Liberation Front at this point.
I stand corrected about the Senate not passing it.
However, that bill did pass the House. It was the Senate bill I linked to that didn't pass in the House, even by people who'd voted for the House bill.
I have no idea what the heck was going on there, why Senate bill ended up in the House instead of them both going to committee, but I suspect it was due to this 'suspension of the rules' thing.
The bill was apparently so non-controversial that the House didn't even care what version passed, and was such an easy 'pass' that they did it under the manner which requires a 2/3 majority....until some Republican idiot invented some nonsense about abortion that isn't even vaguely in the bill, causing it not to get enough votes.
To make it clear: abortion has nothing to do with this. In places with child marriages like this, abortion isn't even legal. In many of these places, women don't even have doctors. (They are getting abortions...in back alleys, and dying from them.)
But the slightest hint that, somewhere, the US government might encourage the government of Mozambique to provide doctors for women, and that, somehow, abortion will become legal there, and that said doctor will introduce a woman to an abortion provider...
...that is worse than all the 'women', aka, teenagers, who die during childbirth because there are no damn obstetricians and teenage girls that age shouldn't be having children, and certainly without medical care. Hypothetical babies:1, actual dying women:-820 a year
And that's just the death during childbirth aspect of child marriages. Let's ignore the entire 'living a life of ignorance, slavery, and rape' aspect.
This is, frankly, idiotic. It's the sort of shit that happens when you have idiots repeating single wedge issues over and over for decades.
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You're pointing out implementation errors, whereas I'm pointing out conceptual errors.
In theory, they could indeed do what you suggest, even though they don't.
Whereas the idea of profiling is just a stupid idea, period.
I notice this a lot. Everyone sees problems in how they do what they do, (Which they are indeed crappy at.) failing to notice that even if they did what they did perfectly, they'd still fail.
I.e., their 'limit on amount of liquids can be bring in' could be bypassed if they were omnipotent and could perfectly see how much liquid you had on you, via the simple procedure I described above. In fact, if I and a group of friends were planning on never flying again, I'd get a dozen of us to go through with an empty bucket and the max amount of liquids, and then blatantly pour all the liquids together immediately after we got through security. Bonus points for including some dry ice so it smokes. In full view of everyone being forced to carry though tiny shampoo bottles.
I do have to give them credit for not implementing profiling, despite calls by stupid people to do so. I suspect it was more out of concerns about looking racist than the actual fact it wouldn't work, though.
But generally, to paraphrase Douglas Adam, the TSA's fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. You don't notice how stupid their actual plans are, because they have blatantly failed to implement those plans correctly.
I would argue that the government should be able to restrict the use of giant piece of speeding metal.
But as we do have a common law and incidentally, recognized by the Supreme Court right to travel, exactly like you said, the government must provide some sort of reasonably priced alternate transit that everyone can use if the government is going to restrict operation of cars. Like buses or trains or something.
The government can put 'reasonable restrictions' on rights. For example, it can demand you not hold a protest rally in the middle of a courtroom during court.
But if the active courtroom, and nowhere else, is only public property that a large section of the population can get to, something has gone horrible wrong and the government can't really restrict protests there, because there is the only public place that functionally exists. The solution is to provide some other public lands, so there is a reasonable alternative.
Likewise, the solution to the 'citizen right to travel' vs. 'government power to keep people from driving cars recklessly' is to have other ways to travel that do not require people, who have demonstrated they are reckless with the operation of motor vehicles, operate said vehicles. These other ways to travel must at least be somewhat comparable to automobiles in price and convenience, let's say within the same order of magnitude.
Which we utterly and completely have failed to do.
Let me guess...'around here' you actually have mass transit or at least some sort of taxi system, right?
Here in the US, 20% of the population lives in rural areas, and I would estimate that 75% of that population, 15% total, literally has no way to get to work or the grocery store without driving. And for the other 80%, probably 25% of them is in the same boat, so 20% of total.
So let's say 35% total population literally cannot survive without their cars, without either moving or changing jobs. No, there aren't even taxis to call.
You see, here, we don't actually believe that things should be possible without a car. Only in major cities, and even then, only in some of them. (Good luck in LA or Atlanta.)
So taking away someone's driver license permanently is a bit more serious here.
Please note I'm not presenting any of this as a good thing, I'm just mentioning it because often foreigners have no idea how dependent we are on cars here. There's not a bus coming down the road, there's not a local market to buy stuff from, there's not a train station, there's nothing at all but getting in the car and driving there, or at least getting in the car and driving most of the way there and then getting on mass transit halfway.
Meanwhile, Americans (Except for New Yorkers, who can, and often do, live without cars.) don't quite see how other countries can be so blithe about taking away licenses. Hell, we let incredibly old people drive here, who can barely see and have a reaction time measured in minutes, simply because we can't figure out how they're supposed to get anywhere otherwise.
tossed me in the tank for 8 hours
You know, the government should actually have to pay people when it arrest people on no grounds at all. It's utterly absurd they're able to get away with that. It's not a damn DNA test, alcohol tests are instantaneous.
I did a quick google and couldn't find it, but I read a well documented story about some people who got thrown in jail for weeks because of cocaine possession, and asserted continually it was flour, and it was finally tested for their court case...and it was flour. This is not some urban legend, I'm not making it up, it actually happened, and pretty recently, too.
We're supposed to be provided with lawyers who do this shit, but we've decided to so seriously underfund the free legal system that it takes weeks and months to do things that the rich, who can afford their own lawyers, do in an hour.
The legal system is pretty well tilted in the favor of the defendant, believe it or not...but only the defendant who has a lawyer running around actually doing things.
Everyone else, even if they get a competent public defender who defends them as well as a high-priced lawyer, which is unlikely but possible...even if that happens, it's still going to take much, much longer, which means they'll will be much more harmed by the prosecution as it's drawn out, and have to sit in jail on charges that are literally unsupported by any evidence at all.
There really is only one actual fair way to fix this problem, and that's to ban the private practice of criminal law utterly, at which point the goddamn rich might get off their ass enough to actually fix the system.
I don't care what you think, because I figured out something very important I am going to keep repeating.
THE 2010 SENATE REPUBLICANS VOTED UNANIMOUSLY FOR GOVERNMENT FUNDING OF ABORTIONS (According to many House Republicans, and Lord Kano.)
Well there you go, then. India apparently profiles against people of Pakistan descent, guy says 'Hey, wait a second, how do they know I'm of Pakistan descent if I just change my name?' and proceeds to do so.
It's worth pointed out all the things that let him do that...US passports not having the original name on them and them not having his father's name of them, which some passports have, would be utterly useless anyway if it was his mother from Pakistan and he'd had a different first name. (I.e, profiling based on names is doomed to fail anyway.)
And that's someone with a real US passport...how easy would it be for someone from Yemen to forge a passport from, say, India, along with a Hindu name?
Or, hell, pretend to be Hispanic. 'Race' is a pretty vague and nonsensical science in the first place, no one's going to go up to a Juan Hernedez on a Mexican passport and assert he's really from Pakistan.
Maybe we could implement some sort of skin tone tests, I'm sure that would go over well. Perhaps we could have a whites line and a coloreds line. (White people apparently can't be Muslim...and the Iranians are laughing their ass off.)
Saying you will looked at people harder based on certain things they can fake and lie about is exactly the same as saying you will go easier on people if they willing to spend the time faking certain things.
That is literally what 'we should do profiling' idiots are suggesting: 'We should inspect certain people less, so that those people, if they happen to be terrorists, or if terrorists just pretend to be those people, can easily succeed.'
That is what they just said, and they're proud of it, like dogs that just shit in the middle of the floor. Oh, but they're 'not PC', which obviously makes them right, because the only problems anyone has with their fucking idiotic idea is that it's blatantly racist.
No, you morons, we have a problem with it because, in addition to the other objection that treating all Muslims like terrorists is not really the face we want to present to the Muslim world, it's an idea that cannot possibly work either.
So it's racist and stupid.
Yup.
Hell, it looks like she wasn't even on the no fly list.
And thanks to the incredibly stupid way the security area is set up, you can just have her do it multiple times, so that even if she does get caught bringing something in, she's just got one knife and looks like an honest mistake.
It's so trivial it's absurd: If you have need six people to take over a plane (And that is, for some reason, what we're actually defending against.), and you have her and five dangerous looking Arab men with Saudi passwords or whatever. And let's say we've implemented this 'profiling', and those five guys aren't managing to get a single thing on the plane. Let us say they're based out of Atlanta, which I will use because it's the airport I know best.
So the guys are flying in, obviously. As they arrive, the blonde woman books an outgoing flight, and arrives at the airport with a single box cutter. (Hey, honest mistake, right?)
Four of the men leave the airport. One does not. She hands him the box cutter.
She flies to Tampa or something, comes back the next day, with another box cutter. Once she lands, she hands it to the same guy, who's been moving from terminal to terminal. (Thanks to layovers, it's not really that suspicious for people to hang around for a day in the airport. In an airport like Atlanta, you honestly could remain unnoticed by moving from terminal to terminal.)
She repeats this two times. Perhaps the guy staying in the airport would be swapped out for another guy, which can be done by someone else buying a ticket. Might want to buy a ticket out, and a ticket back, and then just not leave, as missing the flight after clearing security might be suspicious. (As an added bonus, this tells them if they're on the no fly list.)
Then they've got six box cutters in, and can do whatever the hell they want.
This is why we have random searches, which, in theory, actually protect us from this better.
In practice, they don't protect us at all, as they are a) very shitty, and b) we just let people through after taking their stuff with no punishment.
"pro-profiling" people are advocating behavioral profiling
No, they really aren't.
I know you want to assume the best of people, but almost everyone who complains that we don't 'profile', without any sort of modifier, means we should idiotically focus on Arabs (Which is idiotic, as the last two people to attempt to blow up airplanes were black and half-black half-white.) or Muslims (Which is equally idiotic, as we do not magically know what people are.).
I just knew someone would mention Israeli -style profiling.
That doesn't have anything to do with the person I was responding to, who apparently has forgotten the last two terrorists (Shoe and underwear bomber) were, in fact, neither Arab or from Muslim countries.
Have you not been paying any attention to actual terrorist attacks on planes recently?
Well, there's Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, he is half black, half white, and English. Seems like any sort of profiling based on race or national origin might, I dunno, miss him.
Oh, and there's the shoe bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is black and from Nigerian. While his name might cause some profiling, as he's not even a US citizen, there's no way to stop him from flying under fake ID, and half of Nigerians are Christian.
Those are, specifically, the last two people to smuggle weapons on planes. So any focus on Arabs or people from Muslim countries would, you know, have made their job easier.
I didn't just hallucinate those guys, did I?
Except, as has been pointed out repeatedly, concentrating on specific people by definition leaves other areas less inspected.
So all you really need is a guy who has stolen someone else's identity to carry all the damn knives, and you can have 5 'obvious' (In your universe) Jihadists and that guy take a plane.
Hell, if you're really clever, take a tour group of innocent Muslims, from one of these countries. Have thirty obviously suspicious Muslims board the plane, get searched as thoroughly as possible...and then have a black guy from the US who converted to Islam fly under some other guy's name and carry the knives to give to five of those guys. (The other twenty five being innocent Muslims who got a discount on a trip to the US.)
Are you 'pro-profiling' people really so stupid that you can't grasp 'If we search group X more than group Y, terrorists will make sure to be in group Y, or hell, just make sure one member of their group can fake being in group Y and have them carry the stuff.'?
This is, of course, pretending that that 'hijacking a plane' is even vaguely possible, or that the security stuff is even slightly a good idea...but no matter how dumb the security theatre is now, your suggestion makes it worse.
There wasn't even 'another' Edward Kennedy. It was just a fake name someone who was possibly a terrorist had used at some point.
You realize that 'an affirmative defense' actually needs for you to be charged with possessing child porn, and go to court, and have a lawyer competently present that argument, right?
Affirmative defenses don't make things 'stuff you can't be arrested for', they make things 'if you can prove this in court, you're innocent'. Do not ignore the 'if you can prove this in court'.
The question isn't what normally happens, the question is what the police can choose to do.
No, Republican's don't trust Democrats because of condescending libtard douchebags, like you. We don't seek, nor do we need your approval of our beliefs.
Says the person who, in every political discussion, tries to assert he's a 'sane Republican'. Yeah, that's not an attempt to get approval.
The goddamn 'sane' Republicans are the problem. You just keep pretending everything's nice and good over there and it's only a few crazies that you want nothing to do with, but we're not morons...we see how Republicans use crazies to get elected.
You are oh so desperate for us to know you don't have anything to do with that, but you don't get to be part of that without having the taint rub off on you,
You claim that it's not important, but it's important enough for your side to fight for it.
No one 'fought' for abortion in this bill, you loon. There is no abortion in the bill.
If anyone had a problem with any hypothetical abortion in the bill they should have amended one of the bills so as to exclude it. (Not that the bill actually funds any health care at all.)
And before you mention that there wasn't time, or it couldn't be done under suspension of the rules...there wasn't time because the Republicans decides to have near continual filibusters in the Senate, and only stopped them when Reid made it clear the Senate was going to stay there until it actually voted on some damn stuff. (Or Republicans could leave at which point Democrats would happily vote without them.)
At which point the Senate bill passed finally (unanimously, I must add) and the House tried to hurry it through (instead of going to committee) because there was no time and it was, apparently, a massively popular bill. At which point the abortion issue magically somehow appeared for the very first time, invented out of thin air by paranoid lunatics who read 'women having access to health care' as pro-abortion. (Or, even more worrying, read 'women having access to education' as pro-abortion.)
Of course, under your interesting logic, THE SENATE VOTED UNANIMOUSLY FOR GOVERNMENT FUNDING OF ABORTIONS, and it took the House to shoot it down. Holy. Crap. Do Republicans know every single Senator is now pro-choice? Not even 'pro-choice', but actively in favor of abortions? (Hell, do Democrats know that?)
The reading of "direct tax" that was taken by the US government 70+ years after the constitution was written waters the taxation clause down to the point of being no restriction at all.
The US government always taxing things throughout its history. Please google 'Whiskey Rebellion', which was about a tax in 1791, which is two years after the constitution was signed.
But I'm sure it was all 'watered down' by that point, and none of the founding fathers were around. I mean, it's not like Washington wasn't still in his first term or anything.
Oh, but that must only apply to taxes on 'things'. Surely no one one back then would try to tax 'income'...and they didn't. No one suggested taxing income until the war of 1812. Wow, that's more than two decades after the constitution was signed.
But person in power was President James Madison, who didn't know anything about the Constitution. Yeah, yeah, sure, he wrote the Constitution, but that was 20+ years ago, I don't know how he's supposed to remember what he put down. So he had his Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Dallas draft and propose an income tax modeled on the British, in clear violation of his own intent when he penned the clause forbidding direct taxes. (The reason we didn't get that tax, BTW, was because the war ended, not because there were any hypothetical constitutional problems with it.)
I know that fools teach that the Federal government couldn't tax income until the 16th amendment, and thus when it's pointed out that incomes clearly were taxed before then, that magically is somehow unconstitutional and no one noticed, but that is an utterly incorrect reading of the constitution, period.
What the constitution bans are 'Capitation, or other direct, Taxes' that aren't appropriated equally. Capitation is a head tax, a tax per person, and 'direct taxes' are taxes on mere ownership of stuff. That's it. That's what that means.
The clauses has never included the taxation of monetary transactions, which the Federal government can tax however it wants, and has taxed its entire history. The Supreme Court confusingly once said that 'direct tax' might sorta include income from property, but quickly backed away from that, and have never even slightly indicated that an income tax was a 'direct tax'.
And I think you missed that I wasn't talking about the priests. If anything, misbehavior by the priests makes my point stronger.
I was pointing out that Jesus had no problem with people paying 'tithes', aka, taxes, to those priests.
Firstly, no, states have always been in charge of marriage, so the Federal government banning it would be a massive power grab.
Second, the Supreme Court has actually recognized marriage as a fundamental right, and it's unlikely they'd let the Federal government take it away.
Thirdly, states would just rename it something else and keep issuing licenses to exactly the same people they issued licenses to before, and no one else.
If you're about to say 'there could be a law about that'...there actually is a law about that. It's illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender without an 'exceedingly persuasive justification'.
Without said justification, it is illegal to, for example, ban a man from doing something a women can do...like marry a man. Marriage laws that do not allow same sex marriage are already illegal, and have been so since the 'Intermediate scrutiny' test required for discrimination based on sex set in 1976. It's just that no one noticed this until recently.
Erasing all the laws about marriage and attempting to make the states start over would just piss everyone off, quite possibly not legally work, and certainly wouldn't require the states to start letting people write contracts that allow people to visit them in hospitals as 'family'.
The entire idea is preposterous from start to end.
I don't know how much we can say activities 2000 years ago were condoned by anyone, or just ignored.
The point is, regardless of how corrupt it was, Jesus had no problem with people continuing to tithe to them.
Shut the hell up, idiot.
I always thought a good language to start with would be PHP.
It has all the language conventions that BASIC skips, like var++, it has looping constructs that actually are used in the real world, not GOTO, it has variables marked (With a $) like in most modern languages, it doesn't require compiling, it doesn't require pointer knowledge.
And you can start off simple and go all the way to OOP.
Note I mean 'command line PHP', not web stuff.
Ruby would also be a reasonable alternative, as the other response said. (Although I think the do....while thing would be horribly confusing later.)
Older BASIC just teaches bad practices, and newer BASIC is all sorts of weird retrofitting of stuff onto a language that's not designed for. And don't even get me started on VB. No introductory programming course should be cluttered up with having to write programs that have a GUI.
Child porn is not used to commit harm, like plutonium would probably be. Child porn is evidence of already committed harm.
Outlawing the possession of evidence of a crime is so nonsensical as to be actually harmful to investigating crimes.
I mean, if I was on some of the...um...less legal torrent sites, and instead of showing naked adults, they started showing naked children, what would I do?
Well, in a universe where we had sane laws, I might report it.
In this universe, I'm clearing my cache and history, closing my browser, and wiping my hard drive's free space. Because I am, in actual fact, in violation of the law until I do that. And I certainly won't report it, as I am not omnipotent and have no idea if I missed something and are still in violation of the law. Hell, even if I was no longer in possession, telling the police would be a confession I was in possession.
The law literally says 'If you have evidence of child abuse, you are committing a felony until it is destroyed.'. That is the actual law.
It is really insane that people think this somehow protects children.
In fact, I'm really surprised when I hear that 'someone was turned in when a computer shop discovered child porn on his computer'. I just want to ask the TV 'So you're saying that the computer shop was in possession of child porn and told the police that? Real real smart. Good thing the police like you and didn't charge you with that felony.'
Please don't try to portray it as Jesus wanted people to be slaves (even monetarily) to the church.
I really wouldn't get into whether or not Jesus 'wanted people to be slaves', considering he had no problem with, you know, actual slaveowners.
He also got angry and overturned the tables used for ripping off people buying sacrifices for the altar being sold at the temple.
Yes, but those weren't operated by the temple. Those were just hucksters taking advantage of people who'd come long distances to pay their respects at the temple, and didn't have the right sacrifice or symbolic coinage. They were the modern equivalent of ticket scalpers.
A problem with them does not indicate a problem with the temple or the government. (Admittedly, they were being operated on temple grounds, but it's not like there were modern police forces and trespassing laws. This was the 'you can set up a booth on any area of public space and sell stuff from it' mentality, which still exists in the lot of countries.)
He did it because it would help build it up and help allow people be more free, not to bind them down. Only by sowing the seeds do you get the harvest.
Are you objecting to what I said, or not? Because I agree with that.
Wasn't there some party in Boston about taxes?
No, you moron.
There was a tax involved, but not the way you think. Originally, colonists were taxed to pay their own (English) governors, an arrangement they had no problem at all. However, the English crown decided that this might make the governors loyal to the colonists, not the crown, so changed the arrangement...the colonists would pay the crown, and the crown would pay the governors.
As English citizens, they could only be taxed by the crown with the consent of the their parliamentary representatives...and they had none. Before, the taxation to pay for governors was arguably also illegal, but everyone seemed okay with it.
The English, however, had a plan to make the colonies pay as much in taxes as they cost, so started taxing imports, and creating monopoly importers to assure taxes were paid. By the time of the Boston Tea Party, however, this had gone so hilariously wrong that all the taxes had essentially gone away due to political pressure, and the only thing left was the monopoly shipping.
And now the major problem was smuggling of tea. Legal tea was a) actually cheaper, and b) had no taxes on it. Please read that sentence again. In fact, England was subsiding the shipment of the tea...via the pockets of people in England, as they couldn't manage to collect any tax revenue from the colonies.
However, the tea monopoly was seen as the last remnant of the previously illegal taxes, and a heck of a lot of people made their living off smuggling tea.
So people interested in getting representation in parliament (As English people were granted the right to under English law) continued to not purchase the tea. Or even allow it to be offloaded, which would allow the shipping company to collect their rebate back in England.
A large portion of the people participating in the Boston tea party, in fact, were smugglers who would be put out of a job by the tea.
No one in American was being taxed for the tea. It did not cost any extra due to taxes. The monopoly of the East India Company was simply a reminded that England thought it could tax colonists without representation in parliament. (Please note that while I called it 'illegal', in actuality, imports could be taxes like that, just not taxes on specific people. The colonists, however, pointed out that it was only tea to them that was originally taxed, thus making it a tax on them in practice.)
Did you notice that we needed a constitutional amendment to have an income tax?
No we did not. That amendment does not do what people think it does.
Taxing the income of people has, under the constitution, always been legal. Period. It is an indirect tax, it is, and always has been, legal.
For 100 years or so, so was taxing property and real estate and rent. Then, in 1985, the Supreme Court decided those were direct taxes, and hence could not be made without being appropriated between the states equally. Then, the 16th amendment undid that ruling. It allowed the Federal government to tax money produced from ownership of stuff, and to tax the actual ownership too.
In other words, the 16th amendment allows Federal property tax, Federal income tax was already allowed. I point you to The Revenue Act of 1861.
Please read this for more information.
Also note that, later, the Supreme Court changed its position on property taxes, stating that they never were direct taxes, that was a mistake, and thus the 16th amendment wasn't needed at all.
Oh, look, it's you, a level 13 Justifier of Republicans with +3 armor against anyone pointing out misbehavior of Republicans
The reason 'Republicans don't trust Democrats.' is that Republican yammerers like Limbaugh and Beck, for the past two decades, have constantly invented conspiratorial nonsense about Democrats, and the people who've been listening to them for two decades have now gotten elected to office.
Which is entirely the fault of people like you, supposedly 'sane' conservatives, who've put up with their crap as useful tools, and then lost control of the party thanks to your massive fuckup named Bush, so now we've got actual elected members of Congress who are birthers, and all it takes is the slightest whisper of 'This bill doesn't ban abortion' to make Republicans not attempt to stop massive worldwide rape.
You don't get to be a 'sane conservative'. That's like being a sane member of the Earth Liberation Front at this point.
I stand corrected about the Senate not passing it.
However, that bill did pass the House. It was the Senate bill I linked to that didn't pass in the House, even by people who'd voted for the House bill.
I have no idea what the heck was going on there, why Senate bill ended up in the House instead of them both going to committee, but I suspect it was due to this 'suspension of the rules' thing.
The bill was apparently so non-controversial that the House didn't even care what version passed, and was such an easy 'pass' that they did it under the manner which requires a 2/3 majority....until some Republican idiot invented some nonsense about abortion that isn't even vaguely in the bill, causing it not to get enough votes.
To make it clear: abortion has nothing to do with this. In places with child marriages like this, abortion isn't even legal. In many of these places, women don't even have doctors. (They are getting abortions...in back alleys, and dying from them.)
But the slightest hint that, somewhere, the US government might encourage the government of Mozambique to provide doctors for women, and that, somehow, abortion will become legal there, and that said doctor will introduce a woman to an abortion provider...
And that's just the death during childbirth aspect of child marriages. Let's ignore the entire 'living a life of ignorance, slavery, and rape' aspect.
This is, frankly, idiotic. It's the sort of shit that happens when you have idiots repeating single wedge issues over and over for decades.