No, in this case, punishment absolutely has to be a concern. The next time another pompous asshole considers to perjure himself in front of Congress, I want him to remember this guy serving 5-10 years and then reconsider the real consequences of his actions.
But it ain't gonna happen. You know it, I know it, the world knows it. Congress holding liars accountable? Ha!
When you look at our history over the last fifteen years, we've learned that it's OK for the government to lie almost anything...data collection, terrorists, the economy, the banking industry, election financing, the health and general welfare of our armed forces personnel, who has yellowcake, aluminum tubes, and weapons of mass destruction...
It has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person.
Not quite. He is still a citizen of the United States and can contact the US Embassy for assistance to leave the country, though it would mean his surrender to the United States. If he publicly made that intent known, officials from the US Embassy in Russia could travel to the airport, use diplomatic powers to pass into where Snowden rests, issue him temporary travel documents to escort him out of the airport and to the embassy, and arrange for travel home.
He's not stateless, but I'm sure he likes to think of himself that way.
1) I completely concur on government staying out of marriage. For sake of argument, let's call "marriage recognized by the state" as "civil union". Two people who enter into a civil union are recognized by the state as having certain benefits, including tax and legal.
2) The question citizens should ask themselves is this: Does allowing homosexual unions into the definition of a "civil union" harm or benefit society? If there's clear evidence that homosexual unions harm society, then let's ban it. But, in the absense of such evidence, the state should not restrict liberties of its citizens.
The reason why I bring up the subject of harm is this: if we allow homosexual unions to be recognized as civil unions, then what is there to stop advocates of other taboo-unions from petitioning for the same opportunity, such as unions of incest or bestiality? Using harm to society as a metric for evaluating these other relationships allows us to allow the former while filtering out the latter. It can be easily argued that incest harm society by its affect on the human gene pool, and bestiality can be negated for either animal cruelty or risk of exposure to disease. But I have yet to see clear justification (beyond biblical refernece) as to harm inflicted upon a society for permitting homosexual unions. Norway and Sweden have allowed them for over a decade, and quality of life in both contries appears to be substantially high.
The problem with justice is determining who deserves it. Measuring culpability is no simple science.
If we're talking about murder, then let's consider motive. Who is more culpable: one who kills in cold blood or one who kills in passion? Let's be more specific: murderer A robs a bank, and during the robbery, shoots the teller; murderer B is a law-abiding citizen whose daughter was raped by a depraved individual, and in a moment of passion, he hunts down and kills the rapist. Both committed murder, but who deserves justice?
I think as a society we would agree that while both murderers are responsible for their actions, murderer B is less responsible than murderer A, as his emotional state, induced by a signifantly emotional and personal event, led to a crime of passion rather than murderer A's act of cold blood, and that murderer B is much less depraved than murderer A. As such, we would apply a significantly lower punishment on murderer B than on murderer A.
Now, no matter what the circumstances, murderer A's going down. But let's see how this plays out sans the 5th for murderer B. Without the Fifth Amendment, one of two things happen: Either he/she lies about committing the murder, or he/she tells the truth about committing the murder. And here's where the fifth amentment makes the difference...
Say murderer B lies about the killing, and is caught doing so. The act of committing a lie will very likely prejudice the measurement of their culpability by the judge or jury. (The human thought process would be something along the lines of: "If he's capable of lying under oath, what else is he capable of?") This would negatively impacting the sentence given.
On the other hand, say murderer B admits his guilt. Then there's no need for a prosecutor to measure culpability. Why does the state need to know why it happened, when it has an admission of guilt served up on a silver platter? The motive for the crime is now irrelevant and moot. While a plea deal might be worked out to reduce the sentence, murderer B will get stuck with likely the same punishment as murderer A. This then also negatively impacts the sentence given.
Pleading the fifth forces the state to carry out a trial, find facts, analyze them, and deliberate on them. This will provide a much more accurate measurement of culpability, allowing the state to offer murderer B a more appropriate punishment to best fit the individual's crimes.
No one said the machines didn't work. The point is that going back to old voting machines is an epic failure of the political system in the 21st century.
Electronic voting is very simple, as long as it follows one cardnal rule: include the paper trail.
1) Create a PoV (point-of-vote) touchscreen machine w/ touchscreen that's networkable. When the user is done voting, the machine sends an electronic tally to a state / national database to keep count. 2) PoV machine also prints out a receipt for every voter after voting is complete, with detailed results that the voter can read and visually verify. Receipt includes a machine-readible 2D barcode. 3) Receipt gets fed into an on-site audit machine that's not networked. It reads in all the paper receits, scans the barcodes, and keeps a separate count on-site. It's count is audited against the count in the state / national database as the first layer of verifying vote integrity. 4) A random sampling of polling places perform paper counts of the receipts, which are then matched with both the machine-audit count and state/national database count as a second layer of verifying vote integrity.
Bam, there you have it. Electronic voting with instantaneous results providing continual updates regarding vote counts which still require two levels of auditing including a paper-trail to preserve vote integrity. And all this could have been done with technology that's been around for 15 years.
But capitalism has messed it up. Diebold gets contracts, palms get greased, and citizens get screwed.
Allan Savory gave a really good Ted Talk a few months ago backing up that claim with a substantial amount of science and experience. I hope you're not too lazy to watch all twenty-two minutes of it, but if you are, let me give you a quick synopsis. Dr. Savory states that the majority of our global warming issues are due to desertification (the destruction of grasslands and their transformation into desert areas), and he claims that 50% of the CO2 in the atmosphere can be removed simply by ceasing unsustainable agriculture practices and converting these lands into grasslands for grazing.
sometimes the cheapest (and *correct*) option is to stay on an "outdated" platform.
Has anyone ever tried to leverage Microsoft into creating an IE6 emulation environment within Win7 & IE10? Wouldn't this do a better overall job of providing upgrade paths with a modern platform?
If Microsoft can keep adding newer.NET libraries without removing the older ones, why not just include old IE libraries and call on them when necessary from newer versions?
Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards.
Last November, I made my last $237/month student loan payment. Imagine how much money I could be saving now. In fact, I could've use a small portion of that money to help pay off my credit card.
Guess what I did in November? Bought a new car. $300/month payments.
You know very well where that money went. On other things. On new company cars, and other things. Lined a few pockets and greased a few palms too, I'm sure. Didn't get saved, though.
(For the record, I needed to replace my 96 Olds Ciera...237K was pushing it. Didn't need a car that expensive. Wanted it, though.)
Over the last eight years and my previous three ISPs, my router has never once received anything other than a 192.168.x.x or a 10.x.x.x IP address from my local ISP. Not once have I received a live & legit IPv4 address. I have to pay a lot more for those. What's the difference between this and CGNAT?
I can explain it with some data regarding my car, a 2011 Kia Sportage. Some would call it a crossover, other would call it a supersized hatchback.
2.4L 176hp four-banger w/ 6-speed transmission. EPA rated it at 21/28. It has an onboard mpg-meter that I've found to be pretty accurate. When cruising on the highway in optimal conditions (no wind, flat terrain, warm weather, inflated tires, etc.), I get:
In addition, the six speed transmission has *barely* enough power to maintain cruising speeds in its highest gear. Any time you accelerate, experience a headwind, go up any hill, drive with a cold car, or have a lot of weight in your vehicle, it doesn't use the highest gear and instead pushes back one or two gears for additional power, dropping your fuel efficiency further.
So, there are considerable variables there that will cause wide variation with highway driving. Grandma and grandpa will be very pleased that they get 32 mpg driving on the highway, while joe leadfoot will probably return the vehicle complaining it only gets 25 mpg (or less) on the highway.
In addition, I only get 12.5 mpg driving in the city. I live in a "city" of 5,000 people. My trek two-and-from work is 2 miles each way. I have six four-way stop signs between here and work. The fastest street I can drive on has a limit of 30 mph. My car is parked outside overnight, and I don't let my car warm up for more than one minute before driving it. Any other city driving is very similar. And that's all why I don't get the EPA-rated 21 mpg in the city.
Even the president has declared them guilty. Guess I should just throw in the towel.
“Whatever hateful agenda drove these men to such heinous acts will not, cannot, prevail. Whatever they thought they could achieve, they’ve already failed.” -- President Obama (http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/19/17823265-we-got-him-boston-bombing-suspect-captured-alive?lite)
For all we know, they were commiting a crime of an unrelated nature.
My point has not changed from my original post; I am tired of this bloody spectacle. The news has been fixated on this even for the past four days, and it has done nothing but reinforce fear and paranoia within our society. While the odds are high that these men are guilty, we should not let our personal opinions interfere with our judgement or our civility. I thought a little satire in my parent post would make this point, but I guess it didn't.
I mean, before this case is even brought before a courtroom, police have already done the finger pointing, and the court of public opinion has already found him guilty. And how could either of them be wrong?
How many water pipes reach your house? How many sewer pipes?
We got ourselves a city slicker here. Fella, don't know how long it's been since you've seen pasture, but I'm not quite sure you got yourself an understandin' of how things work out in the country. Lemme give ya' a little lesson.
Out in the country, we don't run water & sewer pipes. We drill wells for water, and we use septic tanks to keep our shit.
Now, unless you've found a way to shove a grounding rod in the dirt, jack it to your computer, and pick up internet access free of charge, your analogy's fallin' flatter than a flapjack.
Country bunk aside, my point is simply this: We cannot easily afford to make broadband a "utility" for rural residents. It's not like water and sewer that we can pump out of the ground and then back into the ground. If we're going to guarantee access to all, we collectively have to pay for rural residents, who are much, much, much more expensive to run lines to.
I concur with the position that our laws should not be authored by corporations and should not be passed using the influence of campaign financing.
That being said, I support the bill. As a teacher, if I were to ask my students to take a survey in class, then aggregate the data and sell the results to a corporation eager to know how to market to that age group, I would be fired. Then why should a school condone corporations like Google or Facebook to permit the same activity? As a parent, I would be very upset to know that schools are allowing corporations to harvest marketing data while at school. And as a taxpayer, I want as little corporate involvement in our public school as possible.
I just wish Microsoft wasn't involved. Especially given all the illegal acts Microsoft has committed over the last two decades, it's almost the pot calling the kettle black.
To hell with those licensing schemes mentioned in other posts. And, no, we will not allow any foreign taxes paid to be deducted from taxes due in the US. If you have an office in Ireland, or wherever, you pay your taxes there - and you ALSO pay your taxes here.
I don't think it would be fair to tax foreign operations, if those foreign operations generate foreign income.
Therein lies the problem. Currently, a company that generates, say, 90% of its income in America is sending, say, 90% of its profits overseas.
Here's what would be fair and equitable: For any company with an international presence, if 90% of your income is generated in America, then 90% of your net profits are taxed, regardless of where you house those profits throughout the world.
Of course, then we'll probably see companies shift their financial operations overseas, allowing them to claim that income is no longer made "in America", which wouldn't at all be a difficult shift in today's internet-based global economy. In which case we change the law once more to say that you either still pay a percent of profits or instead pay a flat tax on international income, whichever is larger. Businesses would scream holy hell, but it doesn't matter, because they're the ones that brought this on themselves. If you profit from America, you are obligated to pay America taxes so that America can continue to afford to be America.
It's very well established that banks committed fraud. It's very well established that the US Government protected these very institutions when they were knowledgeable of the fraud being committed.
It's also very well established that no one's going to criminal court. Wall Street and Washington D.C. have been coupled together in such an orgy of conspiracy that neither will willingly do anything to jeopardize their sybiotic relationship.
In my school last week, we had a 6th grade student openly defiant against the teacher, the teacher assistant, and the principal. Refused to listen to anyone or do anything they said. As he was sitting in the office waiting for a parent to come pick him up, another staff member sat down and started visiting with him. The student took an interest in someone who was interested in him, and for the next thirty minutes read jokes to her out of a nearby jokebook. He was very calm and relaxed after that.
While we want to treat North Korea's actions and behaviors as signs of aggression, their behaviors in many ways are quite childish. Perhaps we need to rethink our ways of communicating with them and respond to their emotional needs to help them...how would you say..."grow up"?
I'm not putting my documents into the hands of Google until Google can guarantee me that it will stay private. Of course, the only way they can afford to do that is by charging me for their service, since the cost of their service being free is the ability to harvest data for advertising purposes. Remember when using Google (and Facebook, or any other free site for that matter): you are not the customer, you (and your data) are the product.
Now, if Microsoft would just get smacked upside the head, see what Google is beating them at, and design a product that their customers want, they wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. If anyone here works at Microsoft, please listen: I want a product that is Office 365 / Google Docs, but installed on a private server/s onsite in a way that integrates with Active Directory. I want to sign in securely through a web window, edit my onsite documents through the web portal while at home or away on business, allow others to have access to the documents to read and/or edit and edit collaboratively online, and have those documents there for me to open back up and edit the traditional way (logging into a computer joined to the domain and opening the file in Microsoft Office) when I'm back at work. And since the data is hosted onsite, no one's looking at or harvesting my data for marketing purposes, and I can tell my boss that the security of data is in our hands, our responsibility, and our responsibility alone. I could be a hospital, a business, a school, a government agency, I could work for any entity that needs to guarantee to his superiors that no one else but us will have access to this data. Google can never promise that.
Microsoft, if you do this, you'll maintain control of the business market for at least another decade. Don't let Google erode privacy away.
Your comment has deeper insight than what appears at first glance.
We are upset with Westboro for the very same reasons we are upset with gunmen who commit massacres.
These people are irresponsible with the liberties we all respect and desire to preserve, whether the 1st amendment or the 2nd.
The question truly is this: Is restricting the liberties of those who are abuse them worth the price of infringing upon our own?
I believe there is no good answer.
The only solution I can see is better education for our children about understanding, appreciating, and upholding our responsibilities inherent to our liberties.
He's saying that Hotmail, Yahoo, and GMail are running a cartel of free online webmail services.
He's trying to get opt-in email to accounts on these systems, and it's not going through. He has evidence indicating these services operate a common hidden blacklist service keeping those emails from getting to the accounts. He cannot reach people within these organizations to open up emails coming from his domains, as he does not have an inside contact to "assist" him with this problem. This leads him to speculate that Hotmail, Yahoo, and GMail are operating like a cartel, where only "approved" email list hosting service companies with inside contacts are able to do business with these services.
They would always comment about how, when couples back-in-the-day got married, the first thing on their list of wants was children. Now, the list of wants usually starts with a house, two cars, living in a nice neighborhood, better insurance, a bigger TV, a good living room set... One's take on the matter: "America's so selfish nowadays it doesn't deserve children."
Slashdot Mirror
No, in this case, punishment absolutely has to be a concern. The next time another pompous asshole considers to perjure himself in front of Congress, I want him to remember this guy serving 5-10 years and then reconsider the real consequences of his actions.
But it ain't gonna happen. You know it, I know it, the world knows it. Congress holding liars accountable? Ha!
When you look at our history over the last fifteen years, we've learned that it's OK for the government to lie almost anything...data collection, terrorists, the economy, the banking industry, election financing, the health and general welfare of our armed forces personnel, who has yellowcake, aluminum tubes, and weapons of mass destruction...
But don't you dare lie about getting a blow job.
It has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person.
Not quite. He is still a citizen of the United States and can contact the US Embassy for assistance to leave the country, though it would mean his surrender to the United States. If he publicly made that intent known, officials from the US Embassy in Russia could travel to the airport, use diplomatic powers to pass into where Snowden rests, issue him temporary travel documents to escort him out of the airport and to the embassy, and arrange for travel home.
He's not stateless, but I'm sure he likes to think of himself that way.
1) I completely concur on government staying out of marriage. For sake of argument, let's call "marriage recognized by the state" as "civil union". Two people who enter into a civil union are recognized by the state as having certain benefits, including tax and legal.
2) The question citizens should ask themselves is this: Does allowing homosexual unions into the definition of a "civil union" harm or benefit society? If there's clear evidence that homosexual unions harm society, then let's ban it. But, in the absense of such evidence, the state should not restrict liberties of its citizens.
The reason why I bring up the subject of harm is this: if we allow homosexual unions to be recognized as civil unions, then what is there to stop advocates of other taboo-unions from petitioning for the same opportunity, such as unions of incest or bestiality? Using harm to society as a metric for evaluating these other relationships allows us to allow the former while filtering out the latter. It can be easily argued that incest harm society by its affect on the human gene pool, and bestiality can be negated for either animal cruelty or risk of exposure to disease. But I have yet to see clear justification (beyond biblical refernece) as to harm inflicted upon a society for permitting homosexual unions. Norway and Sweden have allowed them for over a decade, and quality of life in both contries appears to be substantially high.
How come you have such a high /. ID? Were we "too hip" for you, old man?
The problem with justice is determining who deserves it. Measuring culpability is no simple science.
If we're talking about murder, then let's consider motive. Who is more culpable: one who kills in cold blood or one who kills in passion? Let's be more specific: murderer A robs a bank, and during the robbery, shoots the teller; murderer B is a law-abiding citizen whose daughter was raped by a depraved individual, and in a moment of passion, he hunts down and kills the rapist. Both committed murder, but who deserves justice?
I think as a society we would agree that while both murderers are responsible for their actions, murderer B is less responsible than murderer A, as his emotional state, induced by a signifantly emotional and personal event, led to a crime of passion rather than murderer A's act of cold blood, and that murderer B is much less depraved than murderer A. As such, we would apply a significantly lower punishment on murderer B than on murderer A.
Now, no matter what the circumstances, murderer A's going down. But let's see how this plays out sans the 5th for murderer B. Without the Fifth Amendment, one of two things happen: Either he/she lies about committing the murder, or he/she tells the truth about committing the murder. And here's where the fifth amentment makes the difference...
Say murderer B lies about the killing, and is caught doing so. The act of committing a lie will very likely prejudice the measurement of their culpability by the judge or jury. (The human thought process would be something along the lines of: "If he's capable of lying under oath, what else is he capable of?") This would negatively impacting the sentence given.
On the other hand, say murderer B admits his guilt. Then there's no need for a prosecutor to measure culpability. Why does the state need to know why it happened, when it has an admission of guilt served up on a silver platter? The motive for the crime is now irrelevant and moot. While a plea deal might be worked out to reduce the sentence, murderer B will get stuck with likely the same punishment as murderer A. This then also negatively impacts the sentence given.
Pleading the fifth forces the state to carry out a trial, find facts, analyze them, and deliberate on them. This will provide a much more accurate measurement of culpability, allowing the state to offer murderer B a more appropriate punishment to best fit the individual's crimes.
I would consider the 4th Amendment a critical tool as well. I guess it's just a matter of choosing which tool is right for the job.
No one said the machines didn't work. The point is that going back to old voting machines is an epic failure of the political system in the 21st century.
Electronic voting is very simple, as long as it follows one cardnal rule: include the paper trail.
1) Create a PoV (point-of-vote) touchscreen machine w/ touchscreen that's networkable. When the user is done voting, the machine sends an electronic tally to a state / national database to keep count.
2) PoV machine also prints out a receipt for every voter after voting is complete, with detailed results that the voter can read and visually verify. Receipt includes a machine-readible 2D barcode.
3) Receipt gets fed into an on-site audit machine that's not networked. It reads in all the paper receits, scans the barcodes, and keeps a separate count on-site. It's count is audited against the count in the state / national database as the first layer of verifying vote integrity.
4) A random sampling of polling places perform paper counts of the receipts, which are then matched with both the machine-audit count and state/national database count as a second layer of verifying vote integrity.
Bam, there you have it. Electronic voting with instantaneous results providing continual updates regarding vote counts which still require two levels of auditing including a paper-trail to preserve vote integrity. And all this could have been done with technology that's been around for 15 years.
But capitalism has messed it up. Diebold gets contracts, palms get greased, and citizens get screwed.
Allan Savory gave a really good Ted Talk a few months ago backing up that claim with a substantial amount of science and experience. I hope you're not too lazy to watch all twenty-two minutes of it, but if you are, let me give you a quick synopsis. Dr. Savory states that the majority of our global warming issues are due to desertification (the destruction of grasslands and their transformation into desert areas), and he claims that 50% of the CO2 in the atmosphere can be removed simply by ceasing unsustainable agriculture practices and converting these lands into grasslands for grazing.
I believe this is the news article you're looking for.
sometimes the cheapest (and *correct*) option is to stay on an "outdated" platform.
Has anyone ever tried to leverage Microsoft into creating an IE6 emulation environment within Win7 & IE10? Wouldn't this do a better overall job of providing upgrade paths with a modern platform?
If Microsoft can keep adding newer .NET libraries without removing the older ones, why not just include old IE libraries and call on them when necessary from newer versions?
Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards.
Last November, I made my last $237/month student loan payment. Imagine how much money I could be saving now. In fact, I could've use a small portion of that money to help pay off my credit card.
Guess what I did in November? Bought a new car. $300/month payments.
You know very well where that money went. On other things. On new company cars, and other things. Lined a few pockets and greased a few palms too, I'm sure. Didn't get saved, though.
(For the record, I needed to replace my 96 Olds Ciera...237K was pushing it. Didn't need a car that expensive. Wanted it, though.)
Over the last eight years and my previous three ISPs, my router has never once received anything other than a 192.168.x.x or a 10.x.x.x IP address from my local ISP. Not once have I received a live & legit IPv4 address. I have to pay a lot more for those. What's the difference between this and CGNAT?
I can explain it with some data regarding my car, a 2011 Kia Sportage. Some would call it a crossover, other would call it a supersized hatchback.
2.4L 176hp four-banger w/ 6-speed transmission. EPA rated it at 21/28. It has an onboard mpg-meter that I've found to be pretty accurate. When cruising on the highway in optimal conditions (no wind, flat terrain, warm weather, inflated tires, etc.), I get:
34 mpg driving 45 mph
32 mpg driving 50 mph
31 mpg driving 55 mph
28 mpg driving 60 mph
27 mpg driving 65 mph
25 mpg driving 70 mph
In addition, the six speed transmission has *barely* enough power to maintain cruising speeds in its highest gear. Any time you accelerate, experience a headwind, go up any hill, drive with a cold car, or have a lot of weight in your vehicle, it doesn't use the highest gear and instead pushes back one or two gears for additional power, dropping your fuel efficiency further.
So, there are considerable variables there that will cause wide variation with highway driving. Grandma and grandpa will be very pleased that they get 32 mpg driving on the highway, while joe leadfoot will probably return the vehicle complaining it only gets 25 mpg (or less) on the highway.
In addition, I only get 12.5 mpg driving in the city. I live in a "city" of 5,000 people. My trek two-and-from work is 2 miles each way. I have six four-way stop signs between here and work. The fastest street I can drive on has a limit of 30 mph. My car is parked outside overnight, and I don't let my car warm up for more than one minute before driving it. Any other city driving is very similar. And that's all why I don't get the EPA-rated 21 mpg in the city.
Even the president has declared them guilty. Guess I should just throw in the towel.
“Whatever hateful agenda drove these men to such heinous acts will not, cannot, prevail. Whatever they thought they could achieve, they’ve already failed.” -- President Obama (http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/19/17823265-we-got-him-boston-bombing-suspect-captured-alive?lite)
For all we know, they were commiting a crime of an unrelated nature.
My point has not changed from my original post; I am tired of this bloody spectacle. The news has been fixated on this even for the past four days, and it has done nothing but reinforce fear and paranoia within our society. While the odds are high that these men are guilty, we should not let our personal opinions interfere with our judgement or our civility. I thought a little satire in my parent post would make this point, but I guess it didn't.
Is it safe to go out now?
I mean, before this case is even brought before a courtroom, police have already done the finger pointing, and the court of public opinion has already found him guilty. And how could either of them be wrong?
How many water pipes reach your house? How many sewer pipes?
We got ourselves a city slicker here. Fella, don't know how long it's been since you've seen pasture, but I'm not quite sure you got yourself an understandin' of how things work out in the country. Lemme give ya' a little lesson.
Out in the country, we don't run water & sewer pipes. We drill wells for water, and we use septic tanks to keep our shit.
Now, unless you've found a way to shove a grounding rod in the dirt, jack it to your computer, and pick up internet access free of charge, your analogy's fallin' flatter than a flapjack.
Country bunk aside, my point is simply this: We cannot easily afford to make broadband a "utility" for rural residents. It's not like water and sewer that we can pump out of the ground and then back into the ground. If we're going to guarantee access to all, we collectively have to pay for rural residents, who are much, much, much more expensive to run lines to.
I concur with the position that our laws should not be authored by corporations and should not be passed using the influence of campaign financing.
That being said, I support the bill. As a teacher, if I were to ask my students to take a survey in class, then aggregate the data and sell the results to a corporation eager to know how to market to that age group, I would be fired. Then why should a school condone corporations like Google or Facebook to permit the same activity? As a parent, I would be very upset to know that schools are allowing corporations to harvest marketing data while at school. And as a taxpayer, I want as little corporate involvement in our public school as possible.
I just wish Microsoft wasn't involved. Especially given all the illegal acts Microsoft has committed over the last two decades, it's almost the pot calling the kettle black.
To hell with those licensing schemes mentioned in other posts. And, no, we will not allow any foreign taxes paid to be deducted from taxes due in the US. If you have an office in Ireland, or wherever, you pay your taxes there - and you ALSO pay your taxes here.
I don't think it would be fair to tax foreign operations, if those foreign operations generate foreign income.
Therein lies the problem. Currently, a company that generates, say, 90% of its income in America is sending, say, 90% of its profits overseas.
Here's what would be fair and equitable: For any company with an international presence, if 90% of your income is generated in America, then 90% of your net profits are taxed, regardless of where you house those profits throughout the world.
Of course, then we'll probably see companies shift their financial operations overseas, allowing them to claim that income is no longer made "in America", which wouldn't at all be a difficult shift in today's internet-based global economy. In which case we change the law once more to say that you either still pay a percent of profits or instead pay a flat tax on international income, whichever is larger. Businesses would scream holy hell, but it doesn't matter, because they're the ones that brought this on themselves. If you profit from America, you are obligated to pay America taxes so that America can continue to afford to be America.
But we get the point.
It's very well established that banks committed fraud. It's very well established that the US Government protected these very institutions when they were knowledgeable of the fraud being committed.
It's also very well established that no one's going to criminal court. Wall Street and Washington D.C. have been coupled together in such an orgy of conspiracy that neither will willingly do anything to jeopardize their sybiotic relationship.
In my school last week, we had a 6th grade student openly defiant against the teacher, the teacher assistant, and the principal. Refused to listen to anyone or do anything they said. As he was sitting in the office waiting for a parent to come pick him up, another staff member sat down and started visiting with him. The student took an interest in someone who was interested in him, and for the next thirty minutes read jokes to her out of a nearby jokebook. He was very calm and relaxed after that.
While we want to treat North Korea's actions and behaviors as signs of aggression, their behaviors in many ways are quite childish. Perhaps we need to rethink our ways of communicating with them and respond to their emotional needs to help them...how would you say..."grow up"?
I'm not putting my documents into the hands of Google until Google can guarantee me that it will stay private. Of course, the only way they can afford to do that is by charging me for their service, since the cost of their service being free is the ability to harvest data for advertising purposes. Remember when using Google (and Facebook, or any other free site for that matter): you are not the customer, you (and your data) are the product.
Now, if Microsoft would just get smacked upside the head, see what Google is beating them at, and design a product that their customers want, they wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. If anyone here works at Microsoft, please listen: I want a product that is Office 365 / Google Docs, but installed on a private server/s onsite in a way that integrates with Active Directory. I want to sign in securely through a web window, edit my onsite documents through the web portal while at home or away on business, allow others to have access to the documents to read and/or edit and edit collaboratively online, and have those documents there for me to open back up and edit the traditional way (logging into a computer joined to the domain and opening the file in Microsoft Office) when I'm back at work. And since the data is hosted onsite, no one's looking at or harvesting my data for marketing purposes, and I can tell my boss that the security of data is in our hands, our responsibility, and our responsibility alone. I could be a hospital, a business, a school, a government agency, I could work for any entity that needs to guarantee to his superiors that no one else but us will have access to this data. Google can never promise that.
Microsoft, if you do this, you'll maintain control of the business market for at least another decade. Don't let Google erode privacy away.
Your comment has deeper insight than what appears at first glance.
We are upset with Westboro for the very same reasons we are upset with gunmen who commit massacres.
These people are irresponsible with the liberties we all respect and desire to preserve, whether the 1st amendment or the 2nd.
The question truly is this: Is restricting the liberties of those who are abuse them worth the price of infringing upon our own?
I believe there is no good answer.
The only solution I can see is better education for our children about understanding, appreciating, and upholding our responsibilities inherent to our liberties.
He's saying that Hotmail, Yahoo, and GMail are running a cartel of free online webmail services.
He's trying to get opt-in email to accounts on these systems, and it's not going through. He has evidence indicating these services operate a common hidden blacklist service keeping those emails from getting to the accounts. He cannot reach people within these organizations to open up emails coming from his domains, as he does not have an inside contact to "assist" him with this problem. This leads him to speculate that Hotmail, Yahoo, and GMail are operating like a cartel, where only "approved" email list hosting service companies with inside contacts are able to do business with these services.
Better?
They would always comment about how, when couples back-in-the-day got married, the first thing on their list of wants was children. Now, the list of wants usually starts with a house, two cars, living in a nice neighborhood, better insurance, a bigger TV, a good living room set... One's take on the matter: "America's so selfish nowadays it doesn't deserve children."