"Forty-three children have died from swine flu since August 30 — about the same number that usually die in an entire flu season."
That statement is blatantly false. Over 35,000 people die in the US from the flu every year. Hundreds, if not thousands, of children die from the flu every year.
That is a cool word, but is actually something other than patent trolling (although, I am sure that many patent troll lawsuits also involves someone doing champerty). From your link:
champerty (CHAM-puhr-tee) noun
Aiding in a lawsuit in return for a share in the proceeds...... "Champerty, which is illegal in many, but not all, states, occurs when someone helps pay the costs of someone else's lawsuit in exchange for a share of any proceeds." Wade Lambert and Arthur S Hayes; Investing in Patents to File Suits is Curbed; The Wall Street Journal (New York); May 30, 1990.
This is a case of someone filing a lawsuit and paying for it themselves hoping to reap the proceeds all for themselves.
So let's make it "I before E except after C when it sounds like 'E' and isn't a name like that of a person, object, or substance.."
Ceiling, conCeit, conCeive, deCeit, deCeive, obeisance
I
You have a point, however most of the examples you used in this particular point do not actually support that point (notice where the E and the I come relative to the C)
Nevertheless, the researchers remain mystified and are requesting further ideas...
Have they considered Ask Slashdot?
That is not actually a bad idea. Just on this thread, there have been several ideas that merit exploration (although any and all of them may already have been examined and found wanting). Of course there have also been several ideas that are complete bunkum (a couple proposed as jokes a couple seriously).
If you have an observation that is not readily explained by existing mechanisms, posting a question on Slashdot looking for ideas to examine is not the worst thing you could do. I am sure there are other forums where such a question could be asked as well (some of them probably better). The more suggested explanations you get, the more likely you are to get one that is the right one (of course you have the labor of sorting the ones that are worth researching from the ones that are worthless).
If two people each have the right to marry, they have the right to marry each other. No, that does not somehow open the door to marriages with goats like some people (including, sadly, some in this very discussion) would like you to believe. Does this somehow create a strain on government programs that pay you for being married? Good. Get rid of them. It's ridiculous to incentivize marriage, for straight or gay people.
I'm sorry if this doesn't fit with some peoples' narrow-minded world view, but I'm tired of gay bashing being the last acceptable form of discrimination in the US. End rant.
So, why is marriage limited to two people? Why are people who want to marry more than one person discriminated against? What about siblings who want to marry?
BTW for those of you who say that it is discrimination, gays are allowed to marry. They just aren't (in most states) allowed to marry someone of the same sex, but then neither are straights.
Reread what you wrote. The top 1% of income earners in America are getting an excellent deal. They are using most of the public and private infrastructure for their own benefit at only about 40% of what it really costs to maintain them.
While the bottom 50% are using most of the public and private infrastructure for their own benefit for only about 3% of what it really costs to maintain them, what's your point?
So, it sounds a lot like the U.S., except that in the U.S. there is a group of people who are pushing college for everyone. I know a lot of people in the U.S. who went to college, who would have been better off and happier if they had chosen a trade school.
If enough people get together and agree on something, it's called democracy.
That logic is exactly why the Founding Fathers set up the U.S. Constitution the way they did, to prevent the majority from being a tyranny. You obviously don't approve.
I fail to see any significance in your arguments at all. The government is my representative, our representative, it only does what we want it to.
You said that you wanted to give people healthcare, but that isn't true. YOU don't want to give people healthcare, you want the government to take someone else's money and use it to pay for other people's healthcare. There are people who want to help other people by doing for them, those people are to be greatly admired. You are to be despised because you feel that there are people who need help, so you want to force OTHER people to help them.
Correction: the reason tuition is so high is because taxes on the rich are so low, and most of what money we do have ends up in the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex. Bring back the 91% marginal tax rate, switch to a needs based military, and we'll have plenty of money for education, health care, and infrastructure.
I don't see the connection between the marginal tax rate and tuition. How exactly does the tax rate effect tuition at Harvard or Yale or Stanford?
The other problem with your proposed solution is that currently (as of 2007, the most recent year for which I was able to find numbers)the top 1% of all income earners pay over 40% of federal income tax revenues. The top 10% of income earners (those who earn over $113,018 a year)pay over 70% of all federal income tax revenue.
There is significant evidence that when income tax rates go up, government revenue from income tax goes down. There is definitely some valid arguments about at what point income tax rates are low enough that decreases in income tax percentages no longer sufficient incentive to increase revenue, however, that rate is somewhere below a 40% marginal tax rate.
And now you know why college tuition is so high, because, like you, most people figure that the more expensive school gives the more valuable education. This means that schools that want to be viewed as elite must raise their tuition up to a comparable level as those with the highest in the nation. Since every school wants to be seen as more prestigious than it currently is, they must constantly raise their tuition to stay in the competition.
In Australia, if you're a citizen or permanent resident, the government will subsidise a large portion of your undergraduate tuition fee. The remainder is paid by the student, but the student can pay for the remaining amount with a government loan (a HELP fee).
So, why doesn't everybody (or at least the overwhelming majority) in Australia have an undergraduate degree? Are you trying to tell me that there are no people in Australia who have no business getting an undergraduate degree?
Your argument probably doesn't support what you actually believe: following your logic we should only give healthcare to people who have contagious diseases. But that's not nice.
I don't want to give people healthcare based on their potential benefit to society, that will have us killing old people. I want to give these people healthcare because they're sick, they need help, and I want to help them out.
Except that you don't want to give these people healthcare, you want someone else to. You don't need to get the government involved to give people healthcare, go get a medical degree and provide it directly, or if your gifts don't go in that direction, pay for their healthcare yourself. It is not charity to take someone else's money by force and give it to someone in need. Charity is taking money that you earned, and instead of spending it on your own wants and needs, giving it to someone in need.
Because proper education systems increase your wealth as well, the same as proper health systems benefit your health as well. Let me ask you this, would you rather have a nation full of highly educated white collar workers or a nation full of barely educated blue collar slobs barely able to swing a hammer?
Well the white collar workers of course, you cannot compete with the third world on manufacturing whilst maintaining a first world economy.
If we have a nation full of "white collar workers", who is going to build the houses we live in and the buildings we work in? Who is going to build the roads we use to get from one place to another? Who is going to transport goods from our seaports to where people live? Who is going to fix the vehicles we use to move around? There are a lot of blue collar jobs that are more economically valuable than most white collar jobs.
In a later post you mention that "In Australia anyone who wants an education can afford one and their choices are only limited to their own abilities (their TEE scores and other marks)." In the U.S. one is not limited by one's abilities, merely by the ability to find the money. In the U.S.if you are willing to search long and hard enough, it is unlikely that you will not be able to find a source of money to pay for a college education, no matter what your qualifications to actually benefit from said education. In the U.S., a student with a low SAT (more or less the equivalent of the TEE) can still find a college or university somewhere that will accept him or her.
I would be willing to accept a small set of schools that are fully paid for if you qualify for entry as long as they are limited to a small subset of the population (say the top 1%, although I would be open to discussing what that number would be). Of course, in the U.S. there are already scholarships for such people. I could have gotten one if I had chosen a school that offered it. The college I went to offered only very limited academic scholarships, the only full rides were for "economic hardship", which I didn't qualify for, so I had to take out massive student loans.
I saw your second post about being more upset about tuition than the loan rates. The reason that tuition is so high is because we as a society have decided that everyone should have a college education. As a result we have instituted programs that mean that only a minuscule percent of the population has to forgo a college education because of cost. This means that colleges and universities have an almost no incentive to control cost. College tuition increases significantly faster than inflation. Since there is not a significant gap between supply and demand, that indicates that there is some factor interfering in the market to cause prices to rise. Repeated government efforts over the past 40 or so years to make college education "more affordable" have failed because they are part of the problem.
There are other ways besides cost to limit the number of people who get a higher education (competitive exams are one example). One or more of these alternatives are used by countries that pay for the entire tuition of those who attend university, however, the U.S. does not. As a result, the U.S. has an ever increasing pool of individuals with a large amount of debt and an education with little economic value.
You sound like an idealogue. The rightest of rightiests (aside from the libertarians) were all for the TARP funds with Bush/Cheney was handing them out.
Sorry, you are wrong. I regularly go to a news and comment site that is explicitly conservative. The comments on the site were overwhelmingly opposed to TARP when it was proposed by George W. Bush. So, no conservatives were not for the TARP funds even when Bush was handing them out. That conservative opposition was part of the reason why Bush was unable to get Congress to pass a bail out bill for the auto companies (and then went on to use TARP funds for that purpose in what was probably an unconstitutional use of funds in a way not approved by Congress).
What motivation does Google have to try to charge users more for traffic to Google? What motivation do they have to restrict access by some subset of users?
There was recently an article in the New Yorker that gave the following quote from Al Gore about a meeting he had with Sergey Brin and Larry Page: "They had to go to another meeting," Gore recalled, "and said, 'If you can stay, Al, we'd like to bring in the search-quality researchers and specialists in charge of this part of the business.' Ten of them came in. Larry and Sergey left. I spent another three hours. And then, when it was over, I gave Larry and Sergey an oral report." Why are Goolge's "search-quality researchers and specialists in charge of this part of this business" consulting with Al Gore? When that is combined with the fact that Google has a PAC that gave 98% of its money to Democratic Party candidates in the 2006 election cycle and other activities indicating ties between Google and the Democratic Party it is cause to carefully watch their activities for signs that they are using their position as the search leader to skew results toward their political favorites. I am unaware of any evidence that they have done so at this point, but that doesn't mean that that won't change in the future.
The answer to your question "What motivation do they have to restrict access by some subset of users?" is: restricting access to information posted by those who oppose their political agenda is a fairly strong motive. That they have not so far apparently acted on that motivation does not mean that they won't in the future.
So, your assignment today is: If you see the government failing in its responsibility to enforce real Net Neutrality, get pissed off and stay pissed off until they fix it. There is, alas, no other way (unless you're a billionaire).
Unfortunately, it is not enough to stay "pissed off until they fix it". You have to continue to watch, so that they don't put it back the way it was as soon as you stop looking.
An important way to reduce the influence of money on politics is to reduce the role of the government in regulating the economy in general.
If you mean just, you should use just. Fair and just have similar meanings, but not the same. It is unfair that some people are stronger than others, but it is not unjust. It is unfair that some people have more money than others, but it is not unjust.
Perhaps the spirit of both posts would remain unchanged if you substituted "just" for "fair" in them, but the meaning wouldn't. It might not be a major change, but it would be significant.
The concern I always have when we discuss the idea of government regulation designed to enforce "net neutrality" is how neutral will these regulations actually be? My experience with this type of government regulation is that it usually favors some group (usually a corporation or group of corporations) over some other group (often individuals and groups of individuals). The other thing these regulations almost always do is strengthen the government at the expense of the common man. I favor the idea of net neutrality that is most often supported on this board, but I have no confidence that that is what we will get from government regulation.
Because someone who checks ID's will see many more driver's licenses than non-driver's license ID's, therefore they will have a better idea of what to look for in an out of state driver's license than in an out of state non-driver's license ID. I'm not sure that it is really that hard to identify fake out of state non-driver's license ID's, but I have never had to do it in a situation where loss of liquor license and major fines were on the line.
I was there, these people meant "that's not how magic works in the real world." They believed that he was a reincarnated priest from the lost continent of Mu.
I am not in favor of putting in place systems to make life "fairer". I am in favor of making things more just, but just is not the same as fair.
Some people are stronger than others, that's not fair. Some people are smarter than others, that's not fair. Some people are naturally healthier than others, that's not fair. These things all are, they are not things to be "fixed".
Well, my answer ended up being that I really didn't know whether it was okay or not.
How did you not know if it was "okay or not"? You don't know if it was your intention to prevent him from doing what he was doing? You may not know if he could legally do what he wanted to do without your permission, but you don't know if it is "okay" with you to do it?
If you don't want him to use your work the way he intended, you should have told him that and then told him you weren't sure if you had any legal standing to stop him. If you don't mind him using your work that way, you should have told him as much and said that you would give him license to do so, if the existing license did not already do so.
It isn't as complicated as you make it out. It just sounds like you didn't want him to do what he wanted to do, but you didn't want to come out and say that without knowing you could legally enforce it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Forty-three children have died from swine flu since August 30 — about the same number that usually die in an entire flu season."
That statement is blatantly false. Over 35,000 people die in the US from the flu every year. Hundreds, if not thousands, of children die from the flu every year.
What did you expect, this article is in the NYT?
champerty (CHAM-puhr-tee) noun .....
Aiding in a lawsuit in return for a share in the proceeds.
"Champerty, which is illegal in many, but not all, states, occurs when someone helps pay the costs of someone else's lawsuit in exchange for a share of any proceeds." Wade Lambert and Arthur S Hayes; Investing in Patents to File Suits is Curbed; The Wall Street Journal (New York); May 30, 1990.
This is a case of someone filing a lawsuit and paying for it themselves hoping to reap the proceeds all for themselves.
So let's make it "I before E except after C when it sounds like 'E' and isn't a name like that of a person, object, or substance.." Ceiling, conCeit, conCeive, deCeit, deCeive, obeisance
I
You have a point, however most of the examples you used in this particular point do not actually support that point (notice where the E and the I come relative to the C)
Nevertheless, the researchers remain mystified and are requesting further ideas ...
Have they considered Ask Slashdot?
That is not actually a bad idea. Just on this thread, there have been several ideas that merit exploration (although any and all of them may already have been examined and found wanting). Of course there have also been several ideas that are complete bunkum (a couple proposed as jokes a couple seriously).
If you have an observation that is not readily explained by existing mechanisms, posting a question on Slashdot looking for ideas to examine is not the worst thing you could do. I am sure there are other forums where such a question could be asked as well (some of them probably better). The more suggested explanations you get, the more likely you are to get one that is the right one (of course you have the labor of sorting the ones that are worth researching from the ones that are worthless).
If two people each have the right to marry, they have the right to marry each other. No, that does not somehow open the door to marriages with goats like some people (including, sadly, some in this very discussion) would like you to believe. Does this somehow create a strain on government programs that pay you for being married? Good. Get rid of them. It's ridiculous to incentivize marriage, for straight or gay people.
I'm sorry if this doesn't fit with some peoples' narrow-minded world view, but I'm tired of gay bashing being the last acceptable form of discrimination in the US. End rant.
So, why is marriage limited to two people? Why are people who want to marry more than one person discriminated against? What about siblings who want to marry?
BTW for those of you who say that it is discrimination, gays are allowed to marry. They just aren't (in most states) allowed to marry someone of the same sex, but then neither are straights.
Reread what you wrote. The top 1% of income earners in America are getting an excellent deal. They are using most of the public and private infrastructure for their own benefit at only about 40% of what it really costs to maintain them.
While the bottom 50% are using most of the public and private infrastructure for their own benefit for only about 3% of what it really costs to maintain them, what's your point?
So, it sounds a lot like the U.S., except that in the U.S. there is a group of people who are pushing college for everyone. I know a lot of people in the U.S. who went to college, who would have been better off and happier if they had chosen a trade school.
If enough people get together and agree on something, it's called democracy.
That logic is exactly why the Founding Fathers set up the U.S. Constitution the way they did, to prevent the majority from being a tyranny. You obviously don't approve.
Freepers aren't conservatives, they're radical ideologues.
I wasn't talking about Freepers. I don't go to the Free Republic website, so I don't really know what their political persuasion is.
I fail to see any significance in your arguments at all. The government is my representative, our representative, it only does what we want it to.
You said that you wanted to give people healthcare, but that isn't true. YOU don't want to give people healthcare, you want the government to take someone else's money and use it to pay for other people's healthcare. There are people who want to help other people by doing for them, those people are to be greatly admired. You are to be despised because you feel that there are people who need help, so you want to force OTHER people to help them.
Correction: the reason tuition is so high is because taxes on the rich are so low, and most of what money we do have ends up in the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex. Bring back the 91% marginal tax rate, switch to a needs based military, and we'll have plenty of money for education, health care, and infrastructure.
I don't see the connection between the marginal tax rate and tuition. How exactly does the tax rate effect tuition at Harvard or Yale or Stanford?
The other problem with your proposed solution is that currently (as of 2007, the most recent year for which I was able to find numbers)the top 1% of all income earners pay over 40% of federal income tax revenues. The top 10% of income earners (those who earn over $113,018 a year)pay over 70% of all federal income tax revenue.
There is significant evidence that when income tax rates go up, government revenue from income tax goes down. There is definitely some valid arguments about at what point income tax rates are low enough that decreases in income tax percentages no longer sufficient incentive to increase revenue, however, that rate is somewhere below a 40% marginal tax rate.
And now you know why college tuition is so high, because, like you, most people figure that the more expensive school gives the more valuable education. This means that schools that want to be viewed as elite must raise their tuition up to a comparable level as those with the highest in the nation. Since every school wants to be seen as more prestigious than it currently is, they must constantly raise their tuition to stay in the competition.
In Australia, if you're a citizen or permanent resident, the government will subsidise a large portion of your undergraduate tuition fee. The remainder is paid by the student, but the student can pay for the remaining amount with a government loan (a HELP fee).
So, why doesn't everybody (or at least the overwhelming majority) in Australia have an undergraduate degree? Are you trying to tell me that there are no people in Australia who have no business getting an undergraduate degree?
Your argument probably doesn't support what you actually believe: following your logic we should only give healthcare to people who have contagious diseases. But that's not nice. I don't want to give people healthcare based on their potential benefit to society, that will have us killing old people. I want to give these people healthcare because they're sick, they need help, and I want to help them out.
Except that you don't want to give these people healthcare, you want someone else to. You don't need to get the government involved to give people healthcare, go get a medical degree and provide it directly, or if your gifts don't go in that direction, pay for their healthcare yourself. It is not charity to take someone else's money by force and give it to someone in need. Charity is taking money that you earned, and instead of spending it on your own wants and needs, giving it to someone in need.
Because proper education systems increase your wealth as well, the same as proper health systems benefit your health as well. Let me ask you this, would you rather have a nation full of highly educated white collar workers or a nation full of barely educated blue collar slobs barely able to swing a hammer? Well the white collar workers of course, you cannot compete with the third world on manufacturing whilst maintaining a first world economy.
If we have a nation full of "white collar workers", who is going to build the houses we live in and the buildings we work in? Who is going to build the roads we use to get from one place to another? Who is going to transport goods from our seaports to where people live? Who is going to fix the vehicles we use to move around? There are a lot of blue collar jobs that are more economically valuable than most white collar jobs.
In a later post you mention that "In Australia anyone who wants an education can afford one and their choices are only limited to their own abilities (their TEE scores and other marks)." In the U.S. one is not limited by one's abilities, merely by the ability to find the money. In the U.S.if you are willing to search long and hard enough, it is unlikely that you will not be able to find a source of money to pay for a college education, no matter what your qualifications to actually benefit from said education. In the U.S., a student with a low SAT (more or less the equivalent of the TEE) can still find a college or university somewhere that will accept him or her.
I would be willing to accept a small set of schools that are fully paid for if you qualify for entry as long as they are limited to a small subset of the population (say the top 1%, although I would be open to discussing what that number would be). Of course, in the U.S. there are already scholarships for such people. I could have gotten one if I had chosen a school that offered it. The college I went to offered only very limited academic scholarships, the only full rides were for "economic hardship", which I didn't qualify for, so I had to take out massive student loans.
I saw your second post about being more upset about tuition than the loan rates. The reason that tuition is so high is because we as a society have decided that everyone should have a college education. As a result we have instituted programs that mean that only a minuscule percent of the population has to forgo a college education because of cost. This means that colleges and universities have an almost no incentive to control cost. College tuition increases significantly faster than inflation. Since there is not a significant gap between supply and demand, that indicates that there is some factor interfering in the market to cause prices to rise. Repeated government efforts over the past 40 or so years to make college education "more affordable" have failed because they are part of the problem.
There are other ways besides cost to limit the number of people who get a higher education (competitive exams are one example). One or more of these alternatives are used by countries that pay for the entire tuition of those who attend university, however, the U.S. does not. As a result, the U.S. has an ever increasing pool of individuals with a large amount of debt and an education with little economic value.
You sound like an idealogue. The rightest of rightiests (aside from the libertarians) were all for the TARP funds with Bush/Cheney was handing them out.
Sorry, you are wrong. I regularly go to a news and comment site that is explicitly conservative. The comments on the site were overwhelmingly opposed to TARP when it was proposed by George W. Bush. So, no conservatives were not for the TARP funds even when Bush was handing them out. That conservative opposition was part of the reason why Bush was unable to get Congress to pass a bail out bill for the auto companies (and then went on to use TARP funds for that purpose in what was probably an unconstitutional use of funds in a way not approved by Congress).
What motivation does Google have to try to charge users more for traffic to Google? What motivation do they have to restrict access by some subset of users?
There was recently an article in the New Yorker that gave the following quote from Al Gore about a meeting he had with Sergey Brin and Larry Page: "They had to go to another meeting," Gore recalled, "and said, 'If you can stay, Al, we'd like to bring in the search-quality researchers and specialists in charge of this part of the business.' Ten of them came in. Larry and Sergey left. I spent another three hours. And then, when it was over, I gave Larry and Sergey an oral report." Why are Goolge's "search-quality researchers and specialists in charge of this part of this business" consulting with Al Gore? When that is combined with the fact that Google has a PAC that gave 98% of its money to Democratic Party candidates in the 2006 election cycle and other activities indicating ties between Google and the Democratic Party it is cause to carefully watch their activities for signs that they are using their position as the search leader to skew results toward their political favorites. I am unaware of any evidence that they have done so at this point, but that doesn't mean that that won't change in the future.
The answer to your question "What motivation do they have to restrict access by some subset of users?" is: restricting access to information posted by those who oppose their political agenda is a fairly strong motive. That they have not so far apparently acted on that motivation does not mean that they won't in the future.
So, your assignment today is: If you see the government failing in its responsibility to enforce real Net Neutrality, get pissed off and stay pissed off until they fix it. There is, alas, no other way (unless you're a billionaire).
Unfortunately, it is not enough to stay "pissed off until they fix it". You have to continue to watch, so that they don't put it back the way it was as soon as you stop looking.
An important way to reduce the influence of money on politics is to reduce the role of the government in regulating the economy in general.
If you mean just, you should use just. Fair and just have similar meanings, but not the same. It is unfair that some people are stronger than others, but it is not unjust. It is unfair that some people have more money than others, but it is not unjust.
Perhaps the spirit of both posts would remain unchanged if you substituted "just" for "fair" in them, but the meaning wouldn't. It might not be a major change, but it would be significant.
The concern I always have when we discuss the idea of government regulation designed to enforce "net neutrality" is how neutral will these regulations actually be? My experience with this type of government regulation is that it usually favors some group (usually a corporation or group of corporations) over some other group (often individuals and groups of individuals). The other thing these regulations almost always do is strengthen the government at the expense of the common man. I favor the idea of net neutrality that is most often supported on this board, but I have no confidence that that is what we will get from government regulation.
Because someone who checks ID's will see many more driver's licenses than non-driver's license ID's, therefore they will have a better idea of what to look for in an out of state driver's license than in an out of state non-driver's license ID. I'm not sure that it is really that hard to identify fake out of state non-driver's license ID's, but I have never had to do it in a situation where loss of liquor license and major fines were on the line.
I was there, these people meant "that's not how magic works in the real world." They believed that he was a reincarnated priest from the lost continent of Mu.
I am not in favor of putting in place systems to make life "fairer". I am in favor of making things more just, but just is not the same as fair.
Some people are stronger than others, that's not fair. Some people are smarter than others, that's not fair. Some people are naturally healthier than others, that's not fair. These things all are, they are not things to be "fixed".
Well, my answer ended up being that I really didn't know whether it was okay or not.
How did you not know if it was "okay or not"? You don't know if it was your intention to prevent him from doing what he was doing? You may not know if he could legally do what he wanted to do without your permission, but you don't know if it is "okay" with you to do it?
If you don't want him to use your work the way he intended, you should have told him that and then told him you weren't sure if you had any legal standing to stop him. If you don't mind him using your work that way, you should have told him as much and said that you would give him license to do so, if the existing license did not already do so.
It isn't as complicated as you make it out. It just sounds like you didn't want him to do what he wanted to do, but you didn't want to come out and say that without knowing you could legally enforce it.