Yes, but this story is about a report of pedophilia to the FBI, so unless Scotland has recently outsourced their law enforcement, U.S. law is what counts for this story.
I agree as to the nature of the problem. However, it doesn't matter what the cause is, the evidence suggests that more money doesn't fix bad schools. Private school teachers generally make a lot less than public school teachers, yet they generally do a significantly better job of teaching students.
Now you can make all kinds of arguments about why private schools do a better job of teaching students, but that difference in salary between public and private school teachers clearly shows that the problem with public schools is not inadequate teacher salaries.
No, I point to public schools that spend more money than other public schools and get worse results. I am pretty sure if you take the top 10 schools in spending per pupil the majority will be among the bottom 10 schools as far as actually educating students goes. Washington DC school district is among the worst schools in the country and yet they spend more per pupil than just about any other public school district in the country.
This is the man who inherited the mayor-ship from his father. His only sense of priorities is maintaining and expanding his own power. Saying he has a sense of priorities that makes sense is like saying that President Mugabe of Zimbabwe has his priorities right when he calls for more food production in that country. He is one of the people who created the problem.
Of course the other problem with what he said is that the money spent on the military (including the wars it has fought) doesn't come from a level of government that has any business being involved in education.
Chrome is the future because what could go wrong with giving one company complete domination of the Internet?...but the thought of them having the browser market share that IE currently has scares me...
What could go wrong with giving one company complete domination of our computers?
Apparently, the thought of a company having 95% desktop OS share and 90% browser share and a stated vision of taking over the world is less scary than a company having majority search engine share and majority browser share but who's motto is "do no evil"...
I am confused, how does me being afraid of the idea of Google having the share of the browser market that IE currently has indicate that I don't have very major problems with MS being as dominant as it was at its peak (or even now)?
You know MS gaining dominance in the PC market was such a great thing that we should welcome Google becoming similarly dominant.
I don't go with either. I use firefox. I used Netscape for as long as it was feasible and switched to firefox when it became reasonable. I have always taken the philosophy that wherever there is a reasonable competitor I use something other than MS products.
I didn't say it was a good idea, personally, I think it was a terrible idea. I was replying to someone who thought it was good that this guy got hit with contempt of court for this because it was "spam" and "spam" is bad. The example I gave is just as much spam as this, but certainly should be protected. I can easily see a prohibition of soliciting people to send emails to a judge being extended to prohibiting people from soliciting people to send emails to elected representatives.
Again, I think doing anything to piss a judge off is a bad idea, especially a judge whose court you are currently appearing in, but that is a long way from me thinking it is good that someone who did it got slammed.
Chrome is the future because what could go wrong with giving one company complete domination of the Internet?
I don't have anything against Google, but the thought of them having the browser market share that IE currently has scares me. It is not unreasonable to think that it might happen. Google is already the overwhelmingly dominant search engine. They have been fairly successful at most of the things they have worked at.
So, when they release the next version without OOXML support they will retroactvely renumber so that the next version is still only Office 14 and hope that by the time they get to the 14th release of Office everyone will have forgotten this promise (or that the push for open standards will have run out of steam).
Not sure if you are serious, but, this was not spam in the usual sense. This was a case where someone who had an internet following, asked them all to send an email to the judge. Is it spam if a local radio DJ gets all of his/her listeners to send email to the local Congressman about something being discussed in Congress?
My understanding of Spam, as it is generally used, is that it is mass email from a single organization (even if it is routed through multiple email accounts by internet bots) that is unsolicited by those who receive it.
I am pretty sure that the collection agency in your example was guilty of violating several laws. IF you are ever in a situation like that again, report them to the state attorney general's office. You might want to make it sound like you are going to pay so that you can get the correct information.
I'm sorry, if they don't have a copy of the check (or at least a scanned copy), what evidence do they have that you wrote the checks? I am pretty sure you could take your bank to court (small claims, probably) and win. Legally, the bank is required to provide evidence that you wrote the check. If your bank was not going to reimburse you for at least the amount of the bad checks, you should be switching to another bank. I had a situation where my bank bounced several checks because they had double paid an electronic transfer. My bank not only refunded the bounced check penalties, but re-imbursed me for the charges from those I had written the checks to.
The bank paid out for checks you didn't write and has no evidence that you wrote those checks.
It is worse than that. I used to have an address that was ### 1/4. Some computerized systems would not accept anything other than a whole number (that was somebody else's address), others would accept 1/2 but not 1/4 (that was, also, somebody else's address. That address is in my credit report five or six different ways.
There is nothing wrong with your solution, that is why that is the law. The problem is that you have to convince the bank (or other lending institution) that you weren't the person who received the loan. As a general rule, the problem with having your identity stolen has more to do with cleaning up the records than with paying the debts. While the lenders will come after you if someone fraudulently used your ID, those that are well-run can be made to go away by providing some basic evidence that you weren't the person who received that credit. My sister had her identity stolen a few years ago and it was not all that hard for her to get it cleaned up, but it took several years and a fair amount of work (not hard work, just repetitive). The hardest part was that once she was able to stop the person from getting credit in her name, they were still able to open checking accounts in her name. The people trying to collect on the bad checks were harder to make go away than the people who trying to collect on the bad debt. The former she had to threaten with law suits before they would stop harrassing her for the money.
Thirdly, when you're lending money, that's your choice. You can charge interest and/or fees to make it worth your while. What you can't do is get someone who wasn't a party to the agreement to be responsible for getting the money back to you. If you lent it to the wrong person based on false credentials, that's your mistake, not that of the person whose credentials were misused. Somehow, institutions seem to be able to strong-arm that person into paying up anyway. I'd like to see the end of that, too.
I think it has to go further than that. If an institution extends credit to someone who is using a stolen identity they should be liable for the costs of the person whose identity was used that are incurred as a result of this. This is fairly complicated and the amount that institutions should be held responsible for needs to be increased to decrease their incentive to extend credit to people who are using a fraudulent identity. (As an aside where are all the people who say that stealing Intellectual Property isn't theft on this--if you steal my identity, I still have it)
One way is to bring up counter examples, such as the song "Happy Birthday". Ask them if they are aware that the song "Happy Birthday" is still under copyright, even though the author has been dead for somewhere around 100 years. Then ask them about how they would feel if the works of Hans Christian Andersen were still under copyright. What if school bands/orchestras had to pay a fee to perform the works of Bach? Mozart? John Philip Sousa?
The first step is to get them to acknowledge that current copyright is too long. There are some examples of classic literature that could not have been produced under current copyright law because they were based on works that would have still been under copyright.
Re:The iPad is original Apple Redux
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
No, lots of people saw that the Apple II was cool and neat, but no one saw the potential until Visi-calc came out. Until Visi-calc came out, all PCs were toys or at most tools in the same category as ham radio but with a little more general interest than ham radio but a little less practical functionality.
Re:The iPad is original Apple Redux
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
Having worked retail and knowing a car salesman, I can tell you that few if any salespeople will be carrying these around with them, so I don't see how they offer any advantage over existing PCs (except the locked down part). As for "home automation" computer people have been touting "home automation" as the way of the future but consumers have not shown all that much interest in it.
Re:The iPad is original Apple Redux
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The killer apps are yet to come, for those of us who see the potential in this thing to implement
Since you see the potential of this thing, what will the "killer app" be? If you can't answer that question, you don't "see the potential", you merely think the thing is really neat and hope someone else will see the potential and come up with the killer app that will make it a useful device.
The fact that a person can make a lot of money legitimately has never stopped people from cheating others (even when said cheating actually reduces the amount of money they can make from the victim). There have been many cases where people have cheated others where they would have made more money in the long run by being honest.
There have been at least two cases where people working for an online poker company were cheating. In one of those, the only reason they got caught was because of inside the company security (they were using the built in ability to see everyone's hand to pass information to an outside confederate who used that info to place their bets and routine company security caught them). I don't know what got the cheating caught at the other one, but that one also involved at least one person outside the company. If the whole cheating operation had been run insided the company in a jurisdiction with no regulation of internet gambling, there is a good chance they would never have gotten caught.
Two points, one, as I posted in another post, all laws are based on morality.
Two, the "no shirt, no shoes - no service" is a health regulation, not one about being dressed "decently". Whether that health regulation is a good one or not is another question. It is, however, still an enforcement of a moral code ("don't endanger the health of others unneccessarily").
Yeah, let's get rid of all of those laws that enforce moral standards. That's a great idea. Theft should be legal, I mena it's just your morals that say that stealing is wrong. And murder, there's another law that enforces a certain moral standard. Let's make that legal too.
Wait, what? Oh you meant, "Let's do away with laws that are meant to enforce moral standards that I disagree with."
Arguing that we should get rid of laws that enforce moral standards is stupid, all laws enforce moral standards. It is perfectly valid to argue that particular moral standards should not be enforced by law, but all laws enforce some sort of moral standard. There are two questions to ask about laws that enforce moral standards: Does the overwhelming majority (much more than 50% + 1) of society agree to the moral standard? Is the improvement to society from enforcing the moral standard greater than the costs (social and otherwise) of enforcing it?
As I said, the Internet is irrelevant to the discussion of any sort of monopoly because to most people (and to the context of this discussion) monopoly is about a single company controlling things. You may be correct, but I believe that you are wrong and there is no way to prove it because in every case of a "natural monopoly" that you can cite, the government intervened with regulation that favored the company that emerged as the monopolist before the market could decide.
That is a different understanding of what a monopoly is than most people use. While the Internet exists as it does because of government involvement, something like it would exist anyway. If you look at what was going on before the Internet took off, you see that the existing services were developing protocols to allow communication between separate proprietary (and some non-proprietary systems) systems. However, most people consider being a single company an inherent part of the definition of a monopoly. By your definition, Television is a monopoly (at least the over the air form).
Yes, interconnection between separate telephone companies would have indeed happened eventually. There are several ways this could have happened. Only one of those ways is the creation of a telephone monopoly (as in a single company).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but this story is about a report of pedophilia to the FBI, so unless Scotland has recently outsourced their law enforcement, U.S. law is what counts for this story.
I agree as to the nature of the problem. However, it doesn't matter what the cause is, the evidence suggests that more money doesn't fix bad schools. Private school teachers generally make a lot less than public school teachers, yet they generally do a significantly better job of teaching students.
Now you can make all kinds of arguments about why private schools do a better job of teaching students, but that difference in salary between public and private school teachers clearly shows that the problem with public schools is not inadequate teacher salaries.
No, I point to public schools that spend more money than other public schools and get worse results. I am pretty sure if you take the top 10 schools in spending per pupil the majority will be among the bottom 10 schools as far as actually educating students goes. Washington DC school district is among the worst schools in the country and yet they spend more per pupil than just about any other public school district in the country.
This is the man who inherited the mayor-ship from his father. His only sense of priorities is maintaining and expanding his own power. Saying he has a sense of priorities that makes sense is like saying that President Mugabe of Zimbabwe has his priorities right when he calls for more food production in that country. He is one of the people who created the problem.
Of course the other problem with what he said is that the money spent on the military (including the wars it has fought) doesn't come from a level of government that has any business being involved in education.
Chrome is the future because what could go wrong with giving one company complete domination of the Internet?...but the thought of them having the browser market share that IE currently has scares me...
What could go wrong with giving one company complete domination of our computers? Apparently, the thought of a company having 95% desktop OS share and 90% browser share and a stated vision of taking over the world is less scary than a company having majority search engine share and majority browser share but who's motto is "do no evil"...
I am confused, how does me being afraid of the idea of Google having the share of the browser market that IE currently has indicate that I don't have very major problems with MS being as dominant as it was at its peak (or even now)?
You know MS gaining dominance in the PC market was such a great thing that we should welcome Google becoming similarly dominant.
I don't go with either. I use firefox. I used Netscape for as long as it was feasible and switched to firefox when it became reasonable. I have always taken the philosophy that wherever there is a reasonable competitor I use something other than MS products.
I didn't say it was a good idea, personally, I think it was a terrible idea. I was replying to someone who thought it was good that this guy got hit with contempt of court for this because it was "spam" and "spam" is bad. The example I gave is just as much spam as this, but certainly should be protected. I can easily see a prohibition of soliciting people to send emails to a judge being extended to prohibiting people from soliciting people to send emails to elected representatives.
Again, I think doing anything to piss a judge off is a bad idea, especially a judge whose court you are currently appearing in, but that is a long way from me thinking it is good that someone who did it got slammed.
Chrome is the future because what could go wrong with giving one company complete domination of the Internet?
I don't have anything against Google, but the thought of them having the browser market share that IE currently has scares me. It is not unreasonable to think that it might happen. Google is already the overwhelmingly dominant search engine. They have been fairly successful at most of the things they have worked at.
So, when they release the next version without OOXML support they will retroactvely renumber so that the next version is still only Office 14 and hope that by the time they get to the 14th release of Office everyone will have forgotten this promise (or that the push for open standards will have run out of steam).
Not sure if you are serious, but, this was not spam in the usual sense. This was a case where someone who had an internet following, asked them all to send an email to the judge. Is it spam if a local radio DJ gets all of his/her listeners to send email to the local Congressman about something being discussed in Congress?
My understanding of Spam, as it is generally used, is that it is mass email from a single organization (even if it is routed through multiple email accounts by internet bots) that is unsolicited by those who receive it.
I am pretty sure that the collection agency in your example was guilty of violating several laws. IF you are ever in a situation like that again, report them to the state attorney general's office. You might want to make it sound like you are going to pay so that you can get the correct information.
I'm sorry, if they don't have a copy of the check (or at least a scanned copy), what evidence do they have that you wrote the checks? I am pretty sure you could take your bank to court (small claims, probably) and win. Legally, the bank is required to provide evidence that you wrote the check. If your bank was not going to reimburse you for at least the amount of the bad checks, you should be switching to another bank. I had a situation where my bank bounced several checks because they had double paid an electronic transfer. My bank not only refunded the bounced check penalties, but re-imbursed me for the charges from those I had written the checks to.
The bank paid out for checks you didn't write and has no evidence that you wrote those checks.
It is worse than that. I used to have an address that was ### 1/4. Some computerized systems would not accept anything other than a whole number (that was somebody else's address), others would accept 1/2 but not 1/4 (that was, also, somebody else's address. That address is in my credit report five or six different ways.
There is nothing wrong with your solution, that is why that is the law. The problem is that you have to convince the bank (or other lending institution) that you weren't the person who received the loan. As a general rule, the problem with having your identity stolen has more to do with cleaning up the records than with paying the debts. While the lenders will come after you if someone fraudulently used your ID, those that are well-run can be made to go away by providing some basic evidence that you weren't the person who received that credit. My sister had her identity stolen a few years ago and it was not all that hard for her to get it cleaned up, but it took several years and a fair amount of work (not hard work, just repetitive). The hardest part was that once she was able to stop the person from getting credit in her name, they were still able to open checking accounts in her name. The people trying to collect on the bad checks were harder to make go away than the people who trying to collect on the bad debt. The former she had to threaten with law suits before they would stop harrassing her for the money.
Thirdly, when you're lending money, that's your choice. You can charge interest and/or fees to make it worth your while. What you can't do is get someone who wasn't a party to the agreement to be responsible for getting the money back to you. If you lent it to the wrong person based on false credentials, that's your mistake, not that of the person whose credentials were misused. Somehow, institutions seem to be able to strong-arm that person into paying up anyway. I'd like to see the end of that, too.
I think it has to go further than that. If an institution extends credit to someone who is using a stolen identity they should be liable for the costs of the person whose identity was used that are incurred as a result of this. This is fairly complicated and the amount that institutions should be held responsible for needs to be increased to decrease their incentive to extend credit to people who are using a fraudulent identity. (As an aside where are all the people who say that stealing Intellectual Property isn't theft on this--if you steal my identity, I still have it)
One way is to bring up counter examples, such as the song "Happy Birthday". Ask them if they are aware that the song "Happy Birthday" is still under copyright, even though the author has been dead for somewhere around 100 years. Then ask them about how they would feel if the works of Hans Christian Andersen were still under copyright. What if school bands/orchestras had to pay a fee to perform the works of Bach? Mozart? John Philip Sousa?
The first step is to get them to acknowledge that current copyright is too long. There are some examples of classic literature that could not have been produced under current copyright law because they were based on works that would have still been under copyright.
Aw, come on, what's wrong with Fiats?
No, lots of people saw that the Apple II was cool and neat, but no one saw the potential until Visi-calc came out. Until Visi-calc came out, all PCs were toys or at most tools in the same category as ham radio but with a little more general interest than ham radio but a little less practical functionality.
Having worked retail and knowing a car salesman, I can tell you that few if any salespeople will be carrying these around with them, so I don't see how they offer any advantage over existing PCs (except the locked down part). As for "home automation" computer people have been touting "home automation" as the way of the future but consumers have not shown all that much interest in it.
The killer apps are yet to come, for those of us who see the potential in this thing to implement
Since you see the potential of this thing, what will the "killer app" be? If you can't answer that question, you don't "see the potential", you merely think the thing is really neat and hope someone else will see the potential and come up with the killer app that will make it a useful device.
The fact that a person can make a lot of money legitimately has never stopped people from cheating others (even when said cheating actually reduces the amount of money they can make from the victim). There have been many cases where people have cheated others where they would have made more money in the long run by being honest.
There have been at least two cases where people working for an online poker company were cheating. In one of those, the only reason they got caught was because of inside the company security (they were using the built in ability to see everyone's hand to pass information to an outside confederate who used that info to place their bets and routine company security caught them). I don't know what got the cheating caught at the other one, but that one also involved at least one person outside the company. If the whole cheating operation had been run insided the company in a jurisdiction with no regulation of internet gambling, there is a good chance they would never have gotten caught.
Two points, one, as I posted in another post, all laws are based on morality.
Two, the "no shirt, no shoes - no service" is a health regulation, not one about being dressed "decently". Whether that health regulation is a good one or not is another question. It is, however, still an enforcement of a moral code ("don't endanger the health of others unneccessarily").
Yeah, let's get rid of all of those laws that enforce moral standards. That's a great idea. Theft should be legal, I mena it's just your morals that say that stealing is wrong. And murder, there's another law that enforces a certain moral standard. Let's make that legal too.
Wait, what? Oh you meant, "Let's do away with laws that are meant to enforce moral standards that I disagree with."
Arguing that we should get rid of laws that enforce moral standards is stupid, all laws enforce moral standards. It is perfectly valid to argue that particular moral standards should not be enforced by law, but all laws enforce some sort of moral standard. There are two questions to ask about laws that enforce moral standards: Does the overwhelming majority (much more than 50% + 1) of society agree to the moral standard? Is the improvement to society from enforcing the moral standard greater than the costs (social and otherwise) of enforcing it?
As I said, the Internet is irrelevant to the discussion of any sort of monopoly because to most people (and to the context of this discussion) monopoly is about a single company controlling things. You may be correct, but I believe that you are wrong and there is no way to prove it because in every case of a "natural monopoly" that you can cite, the government intervened with regulation that favored the company that emerged as the monopolist before the market could decide.
That is a different understanding of what a monopoly is than most people use. While the Internet exists as it does because of government involvement, something like it would exist anyway. If you look at what was going on before the Internet took off, you see that the existing services were developing protocols to allow communication between separate proprietary (and some non-proprietary systems) systems. However, most people consider being a single company an inherent part of the definition of a monopoly. By your definition, Television is a monopoly (at least the over the air form).
Yes, interconnection between separate telephone companies would have indeed happened eventually. There are several ways this could have happened. Only one of those ways is the creation of a telephone monopoly (as in a single company).