Sounds to me like their (admittedly higher) taxes have a far higher return in quality of living than ours here in the U.S. We have our tax revenue directed by politicians who are determined to make government look inept, and that's what we get.
I would gladly pay far more in taxes if we had a functional safety net comparable to other first-world nations.
And that action, somehow, always implies increasing governmental control over our lives at best, or, at worst, flat-out handing bits and pieces of sovereignty to some international body
Climate change happens to be a very important global issue, and the only solution that is even close to practical involves international cooperation, treaties, and economic regulation. We have global economic trade and you guys aren't screaming bloody murder; global governance capable of reining in global entities that can't be assed to deal with climate change on their own isn't some big conspiracy, it's simply a recognition of reality.
So much so, one can not help but begin agreeing with the paranoics, who claim that transfer of power is the goal in itself â" and the idea of "climate change" is just means to that end. And that is my problem.
You're grasping at straws to cook up a conspiracy theory to suit your "us vs. them" nationalist fantasies. Denying reality feels good, but it doesn't make it go away.
Bombs are poor tools for murdering a specific person, and most murderers want to kill someone specific.
I agree with you there, but specifically in regard to the exceptional amount of mass shootings the United States experiences, the shooters could have used a bomb instead. With the exception of the recent bombings at the Boston marathon, they didn't. The ease of accessing assault weapons in the United States goes a long way towards perpetuating mass shootings; we may not be able to prevent all future shootings with legislation, but we could do a lot better than what we have now.
If it were not an outrageous lie that the majority supports gun control, the Constitution could be amended by such a majority to erase the Second Amendment.
There are already several types of guns that you are not allowed to own in the United States without rigorous licensing, the second amendment notwithstanding (machine guns come to mind). As much as I would like to repeal the second amendment, it has not stood in the way of gun control legislation in the past and it won't prevent future legislation either.
You would be fighting overwhelming public opinion on that one. The proposal would justifiably crash and burn.
There may have been a time when the second amendment did cover IEDs. Luckily, the U.S. consitution is a living document and we no longer subscribe to those notions of individual arms, much like how we don't allow the average citizen to stockpile chemical or nuclear weapons.
The whole point was to prove that antigun laws are as useless and counterproductive as the war on drugs.
Gun control works quite well in countries that have decided to implement it nationwide.
Thorough gun control is analogous to bomb control. Anyone can build a bomb with instructions on the internet, but most of us don't. Why? The public has decided that bombs kill way too many people and the law (in the United States, at least), severely punishes people who, successfully or otherwise, blow up a bomb. Like all other hazardous items (with the curious exception of guns), individuals have to be licensed to handle bombs and there is probably a federal registry that lists all of them and where they store their bomb-building supplies.
People in the United States don't have lots of bombs in their houses. Why, then, would gun control enforcement pose any particular challenge?
Once again I am saddened by The depths to which the Slashdot community has fallen. This used to be a technology site. Technology that could not happen without extremely advanced science.
As long as I've been here, it's been a technophile site for advertisting consumer electronics.
This isn't a matter of science being wrong, it is a matter of society not being allowed to trust a very small subset of scientists because they threaten a very profitable economic paradigm.
You've hit the nail on the head. The Slashdot community as a whole touts the virtues of science, unless it's the kind of science that discovers the uncomfortable reality about capitalism and unlimited economic growth. Then they go apeshit and cover their ears as if it makes the evidence go away.
if you don't like it, get a bus/train where you can text to your hearts delight.
Among numerous other reasons, this is why we need a far more reliable public transportation system (The nearest bus stop where I live is almost 3 miles away and it only gets service once a day). If buses and trains were commonplace, law enforcement could penalize reckless/distracted driving far more harshly and the number of drivers texting while driving would quickly approach zero.
Last I checked, the time will slow down so much that you'd never hit the black hole (event horizon), that is, before the universe will end.
For an observer outside the black hole, yes. The light bouncing off of the object falling into the black hole gets redshifted more and more, and it never quite appears to fall in.
From the perspective of the thing falling in, it passes through the event horizon without the "redshifting" delay.
When using an internationally frequented forum don't assume people are using the US 'definition' of America or that they are obligated to do so to be polite.
When using a site that implicitly (or explicitly, it's probably in the FAQ somewhere) caters to Americans, don't assume that the convention on what to call the United States in your home country is used here. It's not about being polite, it's about being expedient so people don't have to re-read your comment multiple times.
Our immune system already enforces a "no derivatives" clause. Procreation is only possible with an elaborate workaround that keeps the immune system from noticing what's going on.
If states can pursue and kill any hacker as they please without due process, then improperly-secured servers should be grounds for aiding the enemy.
I'm not suggesting either of these should be done, but it would level the playing field. If the sysadmins and their bosses don't like that liability, they shouldn't hook up important infrastructure to the internet.
Of-course since you are actually willing to entertain the thought of a 4 year old voting in a serious manner, I have to conclude that you are mentally retarded unfortunately or have never dealt with 4 year olds.
If you don't want me to have a serious discussion about the subjects you bring up, you don't have to tell me twice. It destroys any shred of credibility you might have in future discussions, but I suspect that's something you've gotten used to.
Total hyperbole -- even so, I'll bite. Would it really be that bad? A 4-year-old that actually wants to vote is not someone I would underestimate, and it's possible that getting people involved in the political process sooner would make them care a little more and net us a smarter electorate in the end. It's true that kids are more vulnerable to suggestion and aggressive marketing, but that sort of drawback sticks with a significant fraction of the population into adulthood. If children were informed about their rights as voters, I don't see how it would hurt our nation.
limiting suffrage to land owners was one of those principles, and I completely agree with it, land owners were the ones paying taxes, but today it cannot be limited just to land owners, but it must be limited at the most to the people who are paying taxes
To put it bluntly, fuck that. This would only give the wealthy elite another very powerful tool to disenfranchise less-wealthy voters.
Do I think people who don't own land should be able to vote? Yes. People who don't pay taxes? Yes. Convicted felons in prison? Yes. 16-year-olds? Yes. (In fact, I'm leaning towards not having an absolute age restriction at all.) Every citizen with a civic conscience, no matter how much I may agree or disagree with them, should be able to vote for the people that rule them.
Free market capitalism is as removed from reality as ideal communism, and just as unworkable in practice with large groups of people. Social Security has zero contribution to our national debt -- if anything, Congress needs to stop looting it for purposes entirely unrelated to public welfare.
As for Bradley Manning, I wish we as a nation would grow a spine and stand up against the injustice against him, the injustice against other whistleblowers, and the injustices he helped expose. We need to drag the authoritarians kicking and screaming through an equitable process to make this happen, but it's something we would all be better off doing.
USA government kills civilian children on daily basis with bombs, that's part of the information released by Manning. I don't give a shit what the literal legality is of what he did, he is not a traitor
USA government, every single fucker in it that knew and authorised that knows and authorises murder of people on daily basis should be rotting in jail, Manning is a normal person that became part of a completely corrupt, oppressive, ridiculously blood thirsty system and he did not stand for it.
Thank you, roman_mir, for telling it like it is. I often rage at your comments, but it's good to see that we agree on some important things.
web sites are private space, thus the rules are different for them.
The servers the sites are hosted on are typically private, but the information they send out over public infrastructure (the internet) is public speech. The client is not forced to listen to and process all that data, luckily, because some of it can be malicious. Likewise, the client doesn't have to request the loading of an ad just because the source code of the page recommends it.
Both the server and the client are private properties, and shouldn't need to care about what should or should not be done in a public space when creating/rendering the page.
The freedom of the client to choose what it wants to process supersedes the content provider's desire to render the page a certain way. Flipping that on its head would only be disastrous for internet users.
American citizenship has no bearing if you are actively engaged in planning WAR against the USA.
Actually, yes, it does. Sorry to burst your authoritarian bubble there, but U.S. citizenship and due process are not things the U.S. government can remove without consent. If you hear otherwise, the U.S. government was doing something outrageously illegal.
The War on Terror is deliberately blurry to the point that any organization suspected of subversion can be considered an enemy. Even if they aren't citizens, does that make it just? You live in a fantasy world where the U.S. government can do no wrong.
Are Internet-users in the UK actually limited to one ISP per area?
I'm not sure, but if the UK is anything like the US, I wouldn't be surprised if customers had no choice in the end.
How do ISPs profit from scarcity of addresses? I assume that you're referring to the practice of reserving static IP addresses for a premium, but they already did that pre-scarcity.
You answered your own question. Carrier-grade NAT would allow ISPs to charge a premium for a residential IP (and an even bigger premium for a static IP).
Now that addresses are exhausted wouldn't it simply mean that they have fewer IPs available to sell to new customers, while existing customers who already lease static IPs will cling to the ones they already have?
The whole point of IPv6 is to do away with the scarcity of end-to-end static IPs. From a business perspective, IPv6 would destroy the investment these existing customers have made.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds to me like their (admittedly higher) taxes have a far higher return in quality of living than ours here in the U.S. We have our tax revenue directed by politicians who are determined to make government look inept, and that's what we get.
I would gladly pay far more in taxes if we had a functional safety net comparable to other first-world nations.
And that action, somehow, always implies increasing governmental control over our lives at best, or, at worst, flat-out handing bits and pieces of sovereignty to some international body
Climate change happens to be a very important global issue, and the only solution that is even close to practical involves international cooperation, treaties, and economic regulation. We have global economic trade and you guys aren't screaming bloody murder; global governance capable of reining in global entities that can't be assed to deal with climate change on their own isn't some big conspiracy, it's simply a recognition of reality.
So much so, one can not help but begin agreeing with the paranoics, who claim that transfer of power is the goal in itself â" and the idea of "climate change" is just means to that end. And that is my problem.
You're grasping at straws to cook up a conspiracy theory to suit your "us vs. them" nationalist fantasies. Denying reality feels good, but it doesn't make it go away.
Less babysitters, less nannies, less ipad, less facebook, less drinking and drugs.
You forgot less commenting on Slashdot.
Sure, it's only The Voice; but tomorrow it could be American Idol, and by next month, America's Got Talent."
And nothing of value was lost?
Bombs are poor tools for murdering a specific person, and most murderers want to kill someone specific.
I agree with you there, but specifically in regard to the exceptional amount of mass shootings the United States experiences, the shooters could have used a bomb instead. With the exception of the recent bombings at the Boston marathon, they didn't. The ease of accessing assault weapons in the United States goes a long way towards perpetuating mass shootings; we may not be able to prevent all future shootings with legislation, but we could do a lot better than what we have now.
If it were not an outrageous lie that the majority supports gun control, the Constitution could be amended by such a majority to erase the Second Amendment.
There are already several types of guns that you are not allowed to own in the United States without rigorous licensing, the second amendment notwithstanding (machine guns come to mind). As much as I would like to repeal the second amendment, it has not stood in the way of gun control legislation in the past and it won't prevent future legislation either.
You would be fighting overwhelming public opinion on that one. The proposal would justifiably crash and burn.
There may have been a time when the second amendment did cover IEDs. Luckily, the U.S. consitution is a living document and we no longer subscribe to those notions of individual arms, much like how we don't allow the average citizen to stockpile chemical or nuclear weapons.
The whole point was to prove that antigun laws are as useless and counterproductive as the war on drugs.
Gun control works quite well in countries that have decided to implement it nationwide.
Thorough gun control is analogous to bomb control. Anyone can build a bomb with instructions on the internet, but most of us don't. Why? The public has decided that bombs kill way too many people and the law (in the United States, at least), severely punishes people who, successfully or otherwise, blow up a bomb. Like all other hazardous items (with the curious exception of guns), individuals have to be licensed to handle bombs and there is probably a federal registry that lists all of them and where they store their bomb-building supplies.
People in the United States don't have lots of bombs in their houses. Why, then, would gun control enforcement pose any particular challenge?
Once again I am saddened by The depths to which the Slashdot community has fallen. This used to be a technology site. Technology that could not happen without extremely advanced science.
As long as I've been here, it's been a technophile site for advertisting consumer electronics.
This isn't a matter of science being wrong, it is a matter of society not being allowed to trust a very small subset of scientists because they threaten a very profitable economic paradigm.
You've hit the nail on the head. The Slashdot community as a whole touts the virtues of science, unless it's the kind of science that discovers the uncomfortable reality about capitalism and unlimited economic growth. Then they go apeshit and cover their ears as if it makes the evidence go away.
if you don't like it, get a bus/train where you can text to your hearts delight.
Among numerous other reasons, this is why we need a far more reliable public transportation system (The nearest bus stop where I live is almost 3 miles away and it only gets service once a day). If buses and trains were commonplace, law enforcement could penalize reckless/distracted driving far more harshly and the number of drivers texting while driving would quickly approach zero.
I like the US forcing its American Way on others...
Your desire to lord over me is not on an equal footing with my desire to be free.
Those two statements contradict each other, especially when "forcing its American Way on others" means an occupying force.
It is about freedom -- of associaton, of speech, of property.
Property is not a natural right.
Last I checked, the time will slow down so much that you'd never hit the black hole (event horizon), that is, before the universe will end.
For an observer outside the black hole, yes. The light bouncing off of the object falling into the black hole gets redshifted more and more, and it never quite appears to fall in.
From the perspective of the thing falling in, it passes through the event horizon without the "redshifting" delay.
When using an internationally frequented forum don't assume people are using the US 'definition' of America or that they are obligated to do so to be polite.
When using a site that implicitly (or explicitly, it's probably in the FAQ somewhere) caters to Americans, don't assume that the convention on what to call the United States in your home country is used here. It's not about being polite, it's about being expedient so people don't have to re-read your comment multiple times.
Our immune system already enforces a "no derivatives" clause. Procreation is only possible with an elaborate workaround that keeps the immune system from noticing what's going on.
If states can pursue and kill any hacker as they please without due process, then improperly-secured servers should be grounds for aiding the enemy.
I'm not suggesting either of these should be done, but it would level the playing field. If the sysadmins and their bosses don't like that liability, they shouldn't hook up important infrastructure to the internet.
Of-course since you are actually willing to entertain the thought of a 4 year old voting in a serious manner, I have to conclude that you are mentally retarded unfortunately or have never dealt with 4 year olds.
If you don't want me to have a serious discussion about the subjects you bring up, you don't have to tell me twice. It destroys any shred of credibility you might have in future discussions, but I suspect that's something you've gotten used to.
let's have 4 year old voting.
Total hyperbole -- even so, I'll bite. Would it really be that bad? A 4-year-old that actually wants to vote is not someone I would underestimate, and it's possible that getting people involved in the political process sooner would make them care a little more and net us a smarter electorate in the end. It's true that kids are more vulnerable to suggestion and aggressive marketing, but that sort of drawback sticks with a significant fraction of the population into adulthood. If children were informed about their rights as voters, I don't see how it would hurt our nation.
limiting suffrage to land owners was one of those principles, and I completely agree with it, land owners were the ones paying taxes, but today it cannot be limited just to land owners, but it must be limited at the most to the people who are paying taxes
To put it bluntly, fuck that. This would only give the wealthy elite another very powerful tool to disenfranchise less-wealthy voters.
Do I think people who don't own land should be able to vote? Yes. People who don't pay taxes? Yes. Convicted felons in prison? Yes. 16-year-olds? Yes. (In fact, I'm leaning towards not having an absolute age restriction at all.) Every citizen with a civic conscience, no matter how much I may agree or disagree with them, should be able to vote for the people that rule them.
Free market capitalism is as removed from reality as ideal communism, and just as unworkable in practice with large groups of people. Social Security has zero contribution to our national debt -- if anything, Congress needs to stop looting it for purposes entirely unrelated to public welfare.
As for Bradley Manning, I wish we as a nation would grow a spine and stand up against the injustice against him, the injustice against other whistleblowers, and the injustices he helped expose. We need to drag the authoritarians kicking and screaming through an equitable process to make this happen, but it's something we would all be better off doing.
USA government kills civilian children on daily basis with bombs, that's part of the information released by Manning. I don't give a shit what the literal legality is of what he did, he is not a traitor
USA government, every single fucker in it that knew and authorised that knows and authorises murder of people on daily basis should be rotting in jail, Manning is a normal person that became part of a completely corrupt, oppressive, ridiculously blood thirsty system and he did not stand for it.
Thank you, roman_mir, for telling it like it is. I often rage at your comments, but it's good to see that we agree on some important things.
web sites are private space, thus the rules are different for them.
The servers the sites are hosted on are typically private, but the information they send out over public infrastructure (the internet) is public speech. The client is not forced to listen to and process all that data, luckily, because some of it can be malicious. Likewise, the client doesn't have to request the loading of an ad just because the source code of the page recommends it.
Both the server and the client are private properties, and shouldn't need to care about what should or should not be done in a public space when creating/rendering the page.
The freedom of the client to choose what it wants to process supersedes the content provider's desire to render the page a certain way. Flipping that on its head would only be disastrous for internet users.
As infuriating as a video like that would be, it still wouldn't convince me to asphixiate myself with car exhaust.
American citizenship has no bearing if you are actively engaged in planning WAR against the USA.
Actually, yes, it does. Sorry to burst your authoritarian bubble there, but U.S. citizenship and due process are not things the U.S. government can remove without consent. If you hear otherwise, the U.S. government was doing something outrageously illegal.
The War on Terror is deliberately blurry to the point that any organization suspected of subversion can be considered an enemy. Even if they aren't citizens, does that make it just? You live in a fantasy world where the U.S. government can do no wrong.
Are Internet-users in the UK actually limited to one ISP per area?
I'm not sure, but if the UK is anything like the US, I wouldn't be surprised if customers had no choice in the end.
How do ISPs profit from scarcity of addresses? I assume that you're referring to the practice of reserving static IP addresses for a premium, but they already did that pre-scarcity.
You answered your own question. Carrier-grade NAT would allow ISPs to charge a premium for a residential IP (and an even bigger premium for a static IP).
Now that addresses are exhausted wouldn't it simply mean that they have fewer IPs available to sell to new customers, while existing customers who already lease static IPs will cling to the ones they already have?
The whole point of IPv6 is to do away with the scarcity of end-to-end static IPs. From a business perspective, IPv6 would destroy the investment these existing customers have made.
Guess which ones customers are going to go for.
The only one available in their area. If customers have a choice of two (or three!) ISPs, they will all use carrier-grade NAT.
IPv6 alleviates scarcity, and thus profits made on that scarcity. This is why it will not be implemented without government intervention.