"It is a "hard labour camp" in the sense that you're required to work there if you want to eat
And this is bad...how?
I remember an interview with an African politician, who came to the UK to see how the social system worked. After touring the neighborhoods of welfare housing, filled with people living off of welfare checks, his observation what that this was a totally dehumanizing experience. The people he saw had no purpose to their lives, no one needed anything they produced, and in fact they produced nothing at all.
If society is going to give you money, why should you not be required to do something for it? If you sweep a sidewalk, remove graffiti, or something, you are contributing to your society. Additionally, this keeps the person in the habit of working - of getting up in the morning, leaving the house, and doing something.
If you are able-bodied, and cannot be bothered to do even a few hours of useful work for your society, then just why should your society be bothered to provide anything to you?
It's not about debt reduction, but about the budget deficit.
national debt 15 trillion
budget 2012 3.7 trillion income 2012 2.6 trillion
deficit 2012 1.1 trillion
Yes. This committee was asked to reduce spending by 1.2 trillion over 10 years, or about 0.12 trillion per year. Their task, which they failed at, was to reduce deficit spending form 1.1 trillion per year to about 1.0 trillion per year.
They weren't even attempting to approach a balanced budget - even if they had succeeded, it would have been far, far too little...
Even if the committee had "succeeded", our spending would still be out of control.
This.
You know, I think part of the problem is how they approach it. They shouldn't be looking for places to cut spending at all! Allow me to digress...
When I moved into my current house, which is on the edge of a forest, the garden was totally overgrown. Saplings had taken over about 30 feet of the property - a huge, dense thicket you could barely force your way through. Now, I could have said "ok, I'll look for a tree to trim", and maybe taken out a couple of sickly saplings. This would have gained me exactly nothing - for every sapling I took out, another dozen would have sprouted. The only possible solution was the chainsaw - level the entire thicket down to the ground, and then decide what I actually wanted to let grow.
It's the same with the US budget. Spending is totally out of control; there are too many special interests. In the end, the only solution that might really, actually work would be to announce: in one year, *every* existing federal department will close, *every* existing federal program will terminate, and *all* federal employees will lose their jobs. Then decide: what do we actually need? Use new legislation, define new federal departments, build it up from scratch. Stop fighting about which twig to trim - mow it all down, and plant anew.
The problem is: there *are* no cuts. The so-called cuts are reductions in planned increases. Government spending continues to go up - just less than it otherwise might have. This is not success.
Anyway, the amount they were supposed to cut was a joke. They were supposed to trim 1.2 trillion over 10 years. That's 120 billion per year. But again - not off the current spending, but off of planned increases. The result would still have been a net increase.
Idiots re-arranging the deck furniture on the Titanic. It would be entertaining if it weren't so frustrating.
The petition states that its goal is to prevent the US government from censoring the Internet. That has nothing to do with the idea of making the Internet an unalienable right.
If you declare Internet access to be an unalienable right, you are inviting government intervention to provide everyone with an Internet connection. This is not great. If you want a preview of the consequences, just visit any inner-city emergency room and ask them how EMTALA is working out for them.
Meanwhile, you have done nothing at all to prevent censorship. "Look, you have an Internet connection - we are just filtering out all the bad, evil stuff for you."
The AFL-CIO is the equivalent of the mafia, and has been for at least 40 years now.
Like any organization, unions are fine until they get too powerful. After they reach a certain size, it's all about the interests of the few people controlling the union - and screw the little guy.
In this case, you can bet there have been some back-room deals between the AFL-CIO and the media companies - and the union leaders have fatter bank accounts as a result.
If you're really serious about it, have a password-safe (like, for example, KeePassX). I assume you have some spot where you keep important papers - include a big note there about the password-safe, where to find it, and where people can find the password to open it. Depending on your level of trust, you can put the password with your important papers, or somewhere safer. Just don't put it somewhere so safe that they need a death certificate to get at it, or you're back to square 1.
That said, unexpected death always leaves something of a mess - that's just the way things are.
That's not enough time to do anything technical. How about spending part of the time on ethical and political issues? Anonymity, piracy, privacy, that sort of thing? I have a two-hour spiel I use for first-year college students - with a good group, you can get some interesting discussions going...
In a country of 300,000,000 people, any issue of importance ought to have hundreds of thousands of votes. At the moment, at least, this is still a fringe web-site, where it seems that mostly crackpots have voted. How else to explain the number of idiotic petitions among the top 20?
Even if this is just a stupid campaign tactic, sufficient participation could turn it into something useful anyway. What would happen if half of the Slashdot members were to vote? How many of us are there?
This is an article in Science News - once a good publication, now just a political mouthpiece. Anyway, where do they get these "scientists"?
- First, this is all predicated on Europeans moving on a massive scale to the Americas. The author writes "By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 80 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas." Given that Columbus sailed in 1492, does anyone seriously believe tens of millions of Europeans moved to the Americas in the next 8 years? Even in the next 100 years? Completely nonsensical numbers.
- Third, they got the direction wrong: if forests were chopped down, they would have been burned and not allowed to regrow - thus increasing CO2, not decreasing it.
Sure, NASA gets them votes. It gets them votes by passing around large amounts of money to contractors in key Congressional districts. Like the company in Utah that manufactured the segmented solid-rocket boosters for the Shuttle. Funny, how those same boosters are *required* for the new rocket - over the screaming objections of anyone who knows anything about rocket design.
Planetary exploration missions just cannot serve the same vote-buying purpose.
This isn't exactly a new attack vector. Banks don't let people plug removable drives into sensitive systems - why does the US government?
You know what happened - either Joe private plugged his private pr0n collection into a classified computer, or else he took a classified drive home to use privately. Either was, really bad news.
If you've just got to have removable storage, then you pay for special connectors, so they are incompatible with anything else. Then you cast the guts in epoxy, so no solder jockey can change out the connector. This is not rocket science.
The right way to overhaul these subsidies: eliminate them. Why should the federal government be paying for people's Internet access?
If there are truly issues in particular localities, then it's a job for the towns, counties, or even the states. The federal government has zero business interfering here...
At least, I wish you were kidding. Why do people have to work? Well, because *someone* has got to grow the food they eat, make the clothes they wear, build the apartment they live in. That requires work, and the workers want to get something for the effort they put in. They aren't going to work for nothing.
Any attempt at providing people with "a decent living" for free - i.e., without working - crashes and burns when it hits this simple reality.
Attempts by governments to fight this reality - through socialism or communism - have proven markedly unsuccessful. Productive people expect to get something for their effort. If they don't, they stop producing. Turn it around: if you don't produce anything useful, why should you get a part of my productivity for free?
I am also in Europe, and the social "safety nets" here are pretty good. But - guess what - they are still structured to get people to work. It's not about preventing "fecklessness" - it's about the cold, hard reality that all the things we all depend on in everyday life don't just magically happen. Somebody has to make them, which requires work, and getting good work requires motivation. This is simple, why is it so hard for socialists to understand?
If someone can really contribute to an issue, and takes the time to write a thoughtful post, complete with sources. By the time they are finished, the "magic window" has often passed, and their post never gets up-voted... I rarely make substantive comments any more, for exacty this reason: I know that the investment of time required to make a real contribution to the discussion means precisely that the comment will not be seen by most people.
Done. I had to reload the page a couple of times for the "petition tool" to display correctly. Probably the server is overloaded...
Of course, we are naive to believe that the O'bummer administration (or any administration) will pay attention to opinions that it dislikes. Don't expect this to change anything...
As another poster notes, what the problem is not is salaries for teaching staff. Most teaching staff is overloaded and paid peanuts. The big money goes to the upper-level administrators. Typical...
But the real problem is simple the staff ratio. The typical university now has around a 5-to-1 ratio: for every member of teaching staff, there are five other people running around increasing overhead. Lots of this is due - directly or indirectly - to federal mandates:
Affirmative action (or whatever the current buzzword is
XXX-studies, "human diversity" and other PC crap courses, and the associated programs, counseling centers, etc.
Legal offices and staff, driven by the ADA, federal idiocies like the latest "sexual harrassment" rules, etc.
Finally, just plain bloat, due to the fact that students have money (through federal loan programs), so universities have no incentive to keep costs under control.
In a nutshell: close the federal department of education, get rid of federal involvement in student loans, and let the free market work. After a brief period of bloodletting, as the fat is slashed away, tuition costs will plummet.
This really should not have to be a concern of the government. As other posters pointed out, board members are hired by shareholders, and can be voted out by shareholders.
Unfortunately, this lovely-sounding situation somehow doesn't actually work. Possibly because most of the shares that actually get voted are held by large organizations like banks, mutual funds, pension funds, etc. - whose votes may be driven by intercompany politics.
Even if the voting worked, the selection of board candidates that you can vote for is severely restricted. Joe the Shareholder will not be taken seriously - the only viable candidates are those proposed by the company management and the other board members. There are lots of backroom deals: you be on my company's board, and I'll be on yours. Among major corporations, the circle of corporate board members and CEOs is a small, select group that takes care of its members first.
Government regulation is almost always a bad idea. What other possible solutions are there?
She could also consider creating a BOINC project. She could then do some publicity locally and on forums, to get people to choose her project. I've never tried creating a BOINC project, so I don't know how hard this is. However, I do run the client as a background task, and I imagine many other people do as well.
Watch real teenagers play a game, and they set up their own rules. Who cares if the games supports their goals directly? In one of the fantasy games my kids have, there are "civilians" - NPCs that you can interact with. If you kill them, many parts of the game become inaccessible - which didn't stop them from having a contest: who could kill the most NPCs the fastest. Needless to say, this provided a reason for an official parental discussion, but that's not the point here.
There are arguments on both sides of the equation, well summarized by other posters. My point here is that official game goals are pretty irrelevant to the question of whether people can slaughter civilians - people will define their own goals.
As other posters have noted, the original point of copyright was never to guarantee someone a lifetime income.
That said, if this is the new purpose, then change copyright to exceed 60 years if and only if the copyright has been continuously in the possession of the musician from the start. There is zero need for companies to have an extended copyright. Of course, we all know that's what it's really about...
This is totally OT, but: I haven't had moderator points in *months*. It's not life-threatening or anything, but it is weird... Anyone else suffering the lack?
Forget it - this is asset forfeiture. The feds already raided Gibson once, back in 2009. They took a lot of ebony, but never filed charges. Gibson is still fighting the asset forfeiture case, and the burden of proof is exactly wrong: Gibson must prove their innocence of any wrong-doing. The feds want to keep the stuff; it would be auctioned off, and they would get to keep the proceeds. One of the theories explaining this second raid is that the feds are pissed that Gibson hasn't just rolled over on the first case.
Asset forfeiture is perverse: you aren't charged with anything at all - your *property* is. The Gibson case is entitled "United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms". There is no presumption of innocence, because your property isn't a person, and anyway isn't being charged with a crime. The fact that this is naked theft is apparently beside the point - it is a very lucrative racket for law enforcement agencies at all levels.
Slashdot Mirror
"It is a "hard labour camp" in the sense that you're required to work there if you want to eat
And this is bad...how?
I remember an interview with an African politician, who came to the UK to see how the social system worked. After touring the neighborhoods of welfare housing, filled with people living off of welfare checks, his observation what that this was a totally dehumanizing experience. The people he saw had no purpose to their lives, no one needed anything they produced, and in fact they produced nothing at all.
If society is going to give you money, why should you not be required to do something for it? If you sweep a sidewalk, remove graffiti, or something, you are contributing to your society. Additionally, this keeps the person in the habit of working - of getting up in the morning, leaving the house, and doing something.
If you are able-bodied, and cannot be bothered to do even a few hours of useful work for your society, then just why should your society be bothered to provide anything to you?
It's not about debt reduction, but about the budget deficit.
national debt 15 trillion
budget 2012 3.7 trillion
income 2012 2.6 trillion
deficit 2012 1.1 trillion
Yes. This committee was asked to reduce spending by 1.2 trillion over 10 years, or about 0.12 trillion per year. Their task, which they failed at, was to reduce deficit spending form 1.1 trillion per year to about 1.0 trillion per year.
They weren't even attempting to approach a balanced budget - even if they had succeeded, it would have been far, far too little...
Even if the committee had "succeeded", our spending would still be out of control.
This.
You know, I think part of the problem is how they approach it. They shouldn't be looking for places to cut spending at all! Allow me to digress...
When I moved into my current house, which is on the edge of a forest, the garden was totally overgrown. Saplings had taken over about 30 feet of the property - a huge, dense thicket you could barely force your way through. Now, I could have said "ok, I'll look for a tree to trim", and maybe taken out a couple of sickly saplings. This would have gained me exactly nothing - for every sapling I took out, another dozen would have sprouted. The only possible solution was the chainsaw - level the entire thicket down to the ground, and then decide what I actually wanted to let grow.
It's the same with the US budget. Spending is totally out of control; there are too many special interests. In the end, the only solution that might really, actually work would be to announce: in one year, *every* existing federal department will close, *every* existing federal program will terminate, and *all* federal employees will lose their jobs. Then decide: what do we actually need? Use new legislation, define new federal departments, build it up from scratch. Stop fighting about which twig to trim - mow it all down, and plant anew.
The problem is: there *are* no cuts. The so-called cuts are reductions in planned increases. Government spending continues to go up - just less than it otherwise might have. This is not success.
Anyway, the amount they were supposed to cut was a joke. They were supposed to trim 1.2 trillion over 10 years. That's 120 billion per year. But again - not off the current spending, but off of planned increases. The result would still have been a net increase.
Idiots re-arranging the deck furniture on the Titanic. It would be entertaining if it weren't so frustrating.
The petition states that its goal is to prevent the US government from censoring the Internet. That has nothing to do with the idea of making the Internet an unalienable right.
If you declare Internet access to be an unalienable right, you are inviting government intervention to provide everyone with an Internet connection. This is not great. If you want a preview of the consequences, just visit any inner-city emergency room and ask them how EMTALA is working out for them.
Meanwhile, you have done nothing at all to prevent censorship. "Look, you have an Internet connection - we are just filtering out all the bad, evil stuff for you."
The AFL-CIO is the equivalent of the mafia, and has been for at least 40 years now.
Like any organization, unions are fine until they get too powerful. After they reach a certain size, it's all about the interests of the few people controlling the union - and screw the little guy.
In this case, you can bet there have been some back-room deals between the AFL-CIO and the media companies - and the union leaders have fatter bank accounts as a result.
If you're really serious about it, have a password-safe (like, for example, KeePassX). I assume you have some spot where you keep important papers - include a big note there about the password-safe, where to find it, and where people can find the password to open it. Depending on your level of trust, you can put the password with your important papers, or somewhere safer. Just don't put it somewhere so safe that they need a death certificate to get at it, or you're back to square 1.
That said, unexpected death always leaves something of a mess - that's just the way things are.
That's not enough time to do anything technical. How about spending part of the time on ethical and political issues? Anonymity, piracy, privacy, that sort of thing? I have a two-hour spiel I use for first-year college students - with a good group, you can get some interesting discussions going...
In a country of 300,000,000 people, any issue of importance ought to have hundreds of thousands of votes. At the moment, at least, this is still a fringe web-site, where it seems that mostly crackpots have voted. How else to explain the number of idiotic petitions among the top 20?
Even if this is just a stupid campaign tactic, sufficient participation could turn it into something useful anyway. What would happen if half of the Slashdot members were to vote? How many of us are there?
This is an article in Science News - once a good publication, now just a political mouthpiece. Anyway, where do they get these "scientists"?
- First, this is all predicated on Europeans moving on a massive scale to the Americas. The author writes "By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 80 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas." Given that Columbus sailed in 1492, does anyone seriously believe tens of millions of Europeans moved to the Americas in the next 8 years? Even in the next 100 years? Completely nonsensical numbers.
- Second, there was no significant variation in CO2 at that time. The deviation they point to is ridiculously small on a historical scale - noise.
- Third, they got the direction wrong: if forests were chopped down, they would have been burned and not allowed to regrow - thus increasing CO2, not decreasing it.
Sure, NASA gets them votes. It gets them votes by passing around large amounts of money to contractors in key Congressional districts. Like the company in Utah that manufactured the segmented solid-rocket boosters for the Shuttle. Funny, how those same boosters are *required* for the new rocket - over the screaming objections of anyone who knows anything about rocket design.
Planetary exploration missions just cannot serve the same vote-buying purpose.
This isn't exactly a new attack vector. Banks don't let people plug removable drives into sensitive systems - why does the US government?
You know what happened - either Joe private plugged his private pr0n collection into a classified computer, or else he took a classified drive home to use privately. Either was, really bad news.
If you've just got to have removable storage, then you pay for special connectors, so they are incompatible with anything else. Then you cast the guts in epoxy, so no solder jockey can change out the connector. This is not rocket science.
The right way to overhaul these subsidies: eliminate them. Why should the federal government be paying for people's Internet access?
If there are truly issues in particular localities, then it's a job for the towns, counties, or even the states. The federal government has zero business interfering here...
At least, I wish you were kidding. Why do people have to work? Well, because *someone* has got to grow the food they eat, make the clothes they wear, build the apartment they live in. That requires work, and the workers want to get something for the effort they put in. They aren't going to work for nothing.
Any attempt at providing people with "a decent living" for free - i.e., without working - crashes and burns when it hits this simple reality.
Attempts by governments to fight this reality - through socialism or communism - have proven markedly unsuccessful. Productive people expect to get something for their effort. If they don't, they stop producing. Turn it around: if you don't produce anything useful, why should you get a part of my productivity for free?
I am also in Europe, and the social "safety nets" here are pretty good. But - guess what - they are still structured to get people to work. It's not about preventing "fecklessness" - it's about the cold, hard reality that all the things we all depend on in everyday life don't just magically happen. Somebody has to make them, which requires work, and getting good work requires motivation. This is simple, why is it so hard for socialists to understand?
If someone can really contribute to an issue, and takes the time to write a thoughtful post, complete with sources. By the time they are finished, the "magic window" has often passed, and their post never gets up-voted... I rarely make substantive comments any more, for exacty this reason: I know that the investment of time required to make a real contribution to the discussion means precisely that the comment will not be seen by most people.
How to fix this? That's hard...
Since facts cannot be copyrighted, surely this is a case where you file for damages, legal fees, and demand sanctions against the opposing attorney?
Done. I had to reload the page a couple of times for the "petition tool" to display correctly. Probably the server is overloaded...
Of course, we are naive to believe that the O'bummer administration (or any administration) will pay attention to opinions that it dislikes. Don't expect this to change anything...
As another poster notes, what the problem is not is salaries for teaching staff. Most teaching staff is overloaded and paid peanuts. The big money goes to the upper-level administrators. Typical...
But the real problem is simple the staff ratio. The typical university now has around a 5-to-1 ratio: for every member of teaching staff, there are five other people running around increasing overhead. Lots of this is due - directly or indirectly - to federal mandates:
In a nutshell: close the federal department of education, get rid of federal involvement in student loans, and let the free market work. After a brief period of bloodletting, as the fat is slashed away, tuition costs will plummet.
This really should not have to be a concern of the government. As other posters pointed out, board members are hired by shareholders, and can be voted out by shareholders.
Unfortunately, this lovely-sounding situation somehow doesn't actually work. Possibly because most of the shares that actually get voted are held by large organizations like banks, mutual funds, pension funds, etc. - whose votes may be driven by intercompany politics.
Even if the voting worked, the selection of board candidates that you can vote for is severely restricted. Joe the Shareholder will not be taken seriously - the only viable candidates are those proposed by the company management and the other board members. There are lots of backroom deals: you be on my company's board, and I'll be on yours. Among major corporations, the circle of corporate board members and CEOs is a small, select group that takes care of its members first.
Government regulation is almost always a bad idea. What other possible solutions are there?
She could also consider creating a BOINC project. She could then do some publicity locally and on forums, to get people to choose her project. I've never tried creating a BOINC project, so I don't know how hard this is. However, I do run the client as a background task, and I imagine many other people do as well.
Watch real teenagers play a game, and they set up their own rules. Who cares if the games supports their goals directly? In one of the fantasy games my kids have, there are "civilians" - NPCs that you can interact with. If you kill them, many parts of the game become inaccessible - which didn't stop them from having a contest: who could kill the most NPCs the fastest. Needless to say, this provided a reason for an official parental discussion, but that's not the point here.
There are arguments on both sides of the equation, well summarized by other posters. My point here is that official game goals are pretty irrelevant to the question of whether people can slaughter civilians - people will define their own goals.
As other posters have noted, the original point of copyright was never to guarantee someone a lifetime income.
That said, if this is the new purpose, then change copyright to exceed 60 years if and only if the copyright has been continuously in the possession of the musician from the start. There is zero need for companies to have an extended copyright. Of course, we all know that's what it's really about...
Dvorak and other optimized layouts only buy you around a 10% increase in speed.
This is totally OT, but: I haven't had moderator points in *months*. It's not life-threatening or anything, but it is weird... Anyone else suffering the lack?
Forget it - this is asset forfeiture. The feds already raided Gibson once, back in 2009. They took a lot of ebony, but never filed charges. Gibson is still fighting the asset forfeiture case, and the burden of proof is exactly wrong: Gibson must prove their innocence of any wrong-doing. The feds want to keep the stuff; it would be auctioned off, and they would get to keep the proceeds. One of the theories explaining this second raid is that the feds are pissed that Gibson hasn't just rolled over on the first case.
Asset forfeiture is perverse: you aren't charged with anything at all - your *property* is. The Gibson case is entitled "United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms". There is no presumption of innocence, because your property isn't a person, and anyway isn't being charged with a crime. The fact that this is naked theft is apparently beside the point - it is a very lucrative racket for law enforcement agencies at all levels.