"All business decisions should be made on the basis of cost-benefit analysis."
I gotta take exception that this should be the only consideration.
By this reasoning, the only reason my employer doesn't get out of the line of business we're in and start distributing heroin wholesale is that there's less profit smuggling h.
Now, maybe network and server support really is more profitable than wholesale narcotics distribution, but I suspect there's other considerations that go into it.
"My job is to apply The Formula. Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, times the probability of a failure, B, times the average out-of-court settlement, C. A, times B, times C, equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't issue a recall." That's the same reasoning the unnamed car company Edward Norton works for in Fight Club.
And the fact that people see nothing unethical in applied amorality is one of the problems in society at large today.
Points out 1) These are drugs that millions of well-meaning, loving, parents cheerfully give to their 9-year old for ADHD
2) If anyone can tell me why it is more logical, medical, ethical, efficacious, or safe to force it on a kid who scores high on a reliable but totally invalid ADHD checklist; but less so for a "scientist" with considerably more insight into his own condition-- and, by the way, the autonomy to decide for himself-- I'm listening.
3)why not encourage the use of the drugs? Beyond safety issues, is it just that we're worried about unfair advantage in science? That's the debate in sports, that it doesn't allow for a level playing field. You want a fair competition. But why would you care about that in science? I mean, if it takes 800mg of Provigil a day to find the cure to cancer a month earlier, well...?
"(I am for a system that excludes drug users from coverage if the illness can be attributed to their drug use)"
Here's what I don't get about US attitudes to health care. Why are you perfectly OK with socializing a number of different, very expensive, services like police, firefighters, and roads, but you have a problem with socialized medicine? (When I say "socialized medicine" I mean a system like Canada, UK, sweden, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, or any other wealthy industrialized democracy has.)
It's cheaper and it has better health care outcomes.
I mean, sure, it doesn't seem entirely "fair" that my taxes go up as a result of my neighbor that smokes, eats at McDonald's 10X a week, and needs to use a mirror to see his shoes, but life's not fair.
There's no other industrialized country in the world that sees health care as a luxury or a commodity.
"If you really want to destroy yourself, do it outside the realm of society. But of course, these junkies don't hold such noble notions of personal responsibility, so you can't expect them (nor society) to act in accord with such notions."
While I basically agree with you on this one, I can't help but point out that the trajectory of self-destruction wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for drug prohibition.
Around the end of the 1900/early 20th century, doctors were prescribing heroin or morphine to alcoholics. They knew it was at least as bad for you as booze, but they figured at least if you were on smack you didn't come home and beat your wife or get into bar brawls.
A great deal of the harm caused by junkies comes from the fact that drug prohibition jacks up the prices. Legal supply of Oxycontin, for example, will run you a buck or 2 per 80-mg pill. But that same pill on the black market sells for a dollar per mg.
If junkies didn't have to steal to get their drugs, a lot of the hassle to others would evaporate.
"My poke is at the *business* hiring them which is making me pay for part of it's cost of doing business so it has higher profits. That's the main thing corporations do-- find ways to push their costs outside of their company onto society as a whole."
Which is another problem solved by universal health care.
I can't understand why US corps don't push for it. They're paying through the nose for private insurance for their employees. I heard somewhere that on a couple of occasions, the decision to locate a factory in southern ontario instead of Detroit has been made on those grounds.
"EMTALA is an unfunded mandate that says that the nurses who work in an ER, the hospital who runs the ER, and ER physicians like me have to pay for uninsured emergency care. It takes a segment of the US economy and says we have to take responsibility for and subsidize what everyone else doesn't. That cheap McDonalds hamburger you ate today that is less expensive because McDonalds doesn't offer health insurance? I paid for a part of that. "
Um, at the risk of side-tracking this discussion even more than it already is, why don't you guys in the US just do what every other industrialized country does, and put health care in the same category as roads, police, and firefighters?
How do people conclude that firefighters and cops and 50 other government services are necessary but that cancer treatment is a luxury?
"Not when it affects those in society. Ie, if you overdose and cannot afford health insurance, are rushed to the ER and tax payer money pays for your treatment and recovery, then it is our business."
Oh, so is it your assertion that every time somebody does something that possibly might injure themselves, thus costing the taxpayer money, that the government should have a say?
If what's at issue is how likely you are to injure yourself and cost the taxpayer money, then how is it that alcohol is legal and pot is not?
C'mon, don't start that "you cost the taxpayers $$, therefore we get to regulate your behavior". Once you start down that road, you're opening the door for every neo-puritan zealot to try and legislate their pet issue, from smoking to drinking to diet and exercise.
It never ceases to blow my mind that people will freely admit that the experiment of Alcohol Prohibition was a dismal failure think that drug prohibition is somehow different.
Probably the only thing Friedman ever said that I agree with is his 'iron law of drug prohibition' - that the stronger the anti-drug laws are, the stronger the drugs get. Booze prohibition means beer and wine get pushed out by bathtub moonshine, cocaine makes way for crack, etc.
The problem with drugs and politics is that lawmakers deliberately fed the hysteria to get elected on the assertion that they were making the public safe, because drugs are dangerous and scary. Well, cars are dangerous too. Or at least they can be. So if you (or your political party) was getting elected over the last 20 years by claiming that drugs are bad, m'kay, nobody's gonna come out and say "well, we were full of crap on 99% of what we said about drug policy for the last 30-40 years".
For a standard of comparison, there was a largely-ignored WHO study in the late 90's that found cocaine use in Canada is only about as dangerous as snowmobiling.
See, the reason they don't want to go to that sort of structure is, while people like your average slashdotter might be thrilled to pay a 'per usage' price structure, we're not a majority.
The majority is people like my mom or my girlfriend's parents who pay $45/month for web surfing and e-mail and _maybe_ the occasional youtube video. Those are probably 60-70% of their customers.
In a 'pay per usage' model, those people might be paying $15-20/month.
Basically, they wanna have their cake and eat it too. Have people like my mother paying $40/month and using less than 5 gigs a month, but if somebody actually _uses_ their 'unlimited' connection, well, they're a problem.
I sent an e-mail to my ISP (Shaw) asking for some clarification as to their rules on bandwidth caps, throttling, traffic shaping, etc, after I noticed that my ping times will shoot up and down dramatically if I leave a BT client with encryption running.
They sent me back an e-mail saying basically nothing. We've been going back and forth for 2 weeks now, with me receiving a "marketing-speak" e-mail and replying to it about every 2 or 3 days.
So far, their position seems to be "we would like to reserve the right to change the rules, whenever we feel like it, without telling you, and not even give you a straight answer as to what 'the rules' are."
Now, I do some downloading, but not a huge amount (maybe 20-25 gigs a month between me and my girlfriend). So as far as I can tell, what Shaw wants is: 1) To be able to bill me $40/month for using e-mail and a little web surfing 2) To never have to make any upgrades to their network, never mind their monopoly position 3) To be able to change the terms of my contract whenever it suits their purposes.
These guys have never played straight with their customers from day one, and now 'cause _they_ screwed up by making assumptions about what I would use my internet connection for, after they already offered me 'unlimited', they want us to eat the costs?
Fuck that. I'm no radical socialist, but there's a point where maybe we'd be better to nationalize the fuckers, and run it like a Crown Corporation, make it part of their mandate to get the fastest speed to people at the cheapest price, at a 'break-even or better' price structure.
There's gonna come a point where ISPs are more like water and sewage, i.e., "natural monopoly", and, in fact, competition in that situation is horribly inefficient.
Dear USA:
That may be true, but thanks to the Alberta oil boom of late, we are the current leading edge of new tech for recovery of non-standard types of oil. If you want to have a race to see who can get it out first, we'll even give you a 2-year head start, just to make it sporting.
Yes, yes, we all know you could invade us without breaking a sweat, but can you live without the oil coming in from Alberta? How about the electricity that comes from James Bay Hyrdo? If you wanna see what life would be like without it, imagine everything east of Chicago living under a blackout. Yes, you have a great big expensive army, but I don't think you have enough troops to protect 2000 miles of power lines from being dynamited.
Oh, yeah, and we're a nuclear 'threshold' country, so we could fire up a nuke and a delivery vehicle that could hit Washington in 2 or 3 years max. So draw when ready, pardner.
However, what they do do very well is let an interrogator bluff better.
First of all, people will frequently make admissions or confessions in the 'pre-test' interview, mistakenly thinking "the magic box will be able to tell that I lied", and 2ndly, it lets the examiner come in after the exam and say "Look, you can lie to yourself, but your body can't lie to this machine. We know you did it now, this proves it.", and frequently get a confession.
It's a slightly more sophisticated version of the scam they pulled for comic relief on "The Wire" where they tell a suspect that their photocopier is really an experimental lie-detector.
So they ask this poor dumb kid a question, with his hand on the photocopier and the top down, then press the 'copy' button, and hold up a piece of paper (he can't see the side where the paper comes out) that either says "true" or "lie" in big red letters.
For anybody who thinks that the scientific basis of the polygraph is anything other than 100%, weapons-grade bullonium, I got a couple of names names for you:
Both of them passed a polygraph. With Ames, he passed numerous polygraphs while he was working for the USSR.
Apologists for polygraph testing say that Ames was given big, bad, scary, 'sophisticated countermeasures' by his KGB contacts, but he says that all his KGB guy told him was to get a good night's sleep and try to relax.
Actually, at the risk of starting a very drastic flame war, your point about when the cheater genuinely loves both people reminds me of a study I remember a few years back. At the risk of being attacked from all sides, the study's author said that the thing she found that surprised her the most was that some % (I think it was 30-40%, could be wrong) of the women were quite happy to keep both relationships going indefinitely.
Of course, there are such thing as polyagamist couples aka 'open marriages'. Although I don't personally know anybody with an arrangement like that.
"My unscientific opinion is that men tend to rate nearly all women as attractive, and are not very picky beyond that. It's almost a binary, yes/no kind of thing."
You're kidding, right? How many times have you seen a guy who, on an attractive scale, is average or below, with some woman who's a 9 or a 10?
Now how many times have you ever seen the reverse? A guy who's a 9 or a 10, i.e., tall, good physical shape, decent job, good conversationalist, dating a geeky, gorf-ed out chick who's just average or below?
There's a way higher premium on female attractiveness.
"You are right- we are all individuals who control our own destinies and we have no strong control others. But it take time to slide from loving someone to being willing to lie and betray them. If you catch them early, then you can stop things before they are too far along."
Um, well, so what?
If your wife/gf is going to cheat on you, then the problem lies with her. Speaking as someone who has both (a) cheated, and (b) recently been tempted to cheat, but resisted the temptation, the difference between the two was the difference in (a) a dysfunctional relationship, and (b) a healthy, happy relationship.
Adultery is a symptom, not a cause, of a breakup/divorce.
So 'keeping an eye on your wife/gf' is a flawed approach, because if the only thing preventing your girlfriend from cheating on you is your supervision, well, then you have something fundamentally wrong between the two of you. Maybe it's you, (doubtful), maybe it's her, (seems likely in this case) but adultery is a symptom, not a cause.
Allow me to propose a counter-offer: Anybody who wants to voluntarily pay X $$ per month tacked onto their ISP bill, they can commit as many acts of non-commercial copyright infringement that they like. That is, anyone who pays the fee/levy/whatever gets blanket immunity from RIAA lawsuits.
Anybody who isn't interested, well, they can choose to continue with the current status quo.
Let me start the negotiation for what that amount per month should be with my offer of $1 per month.
Um, if you're a university prof at Lakehead university, you don't have a choice. Well, that is, you can choose to go without the university's email, and communicate with your students by, I don't know, smoke signals?
It's an especially good example, because the university's contract with their professors has a clause saying that their e-mail has to be private. But then they outsourced it to gmail.
I'm so sick and tired of hearing about how the US could invade anytime they like. Maybe, but before anybody thinks about that, maybe take a look at this:
Draw a triangle from DC to Maine to Chicago. Everything in that has electricity all or partially supplied by Canada.
Sure, you can invade, but you think you can keep the Mohawk Warriors or whoever from dynamiting the power lines? I don't think you got enough marines to guard thousands of km of power lines.
I think the way to handle this is to put checks and balances on the way law enforcement operates. In your chainsaw example, let's say of the 10 people who bought chains in that time, 9 you know 100% are innocent, and there _might_ be one guilty person. (criminal could've bought months ago, or bought from the next state over, etc)
If the concern is over violating the rights of those 9 definitely and 1 possibly innocent chainsaw users, then maybe the thing to do is make sure that we don't have cause to worry about police investigating someone?
I was looking for an example of a developing/3rd world country, one with the very rich, the very poor, and little in between. But looks like I've been called out on my ignorance.
Slashdot Mirror
"All business decisions should be made on the basis of cost-benefit analysis."
I gotta take exception that this should be the only consideration.
By this reasoning, the only reason my employer doesn't get out of the line of business we're in and start distributing heroin wholesale is that there's less profit smuggling h.
Now, maybe network and server support really is more profitable than wholesale narcotics distribution, but I suspect there's other considerations that go into it.
"My job is to apply The Formula. Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, times the probability of a failure, B, times the average out-of-court settlement, C. A, times B, times C, equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't issue a recall."
That's the same reasoning the unnamed car company Edward Norton works for in Fight Club.
And the fact that people see nothing unethical in applied amorality is one of the problems in society at large today.
Whenever somebody says "social security won't be there by the time I retire", you know why I roll my eyes?
Because seniors vote in record numbers.
As this guy:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/04/nature_says_scientists_use_per.html
Points out
1) These are drugs that millions of well-meaning, loving, parents cheerfully give to their 9-year old for ADHD
2) If anyone can tell me why it is more logical, medical, ethical, efficacious, or safe to force it on a kid who scores high on a reliable but totally invalid ADHD checklist; but less so for a "scientist" with considerably more insight into his own condition-- and, by the way, the autonomy to decide for himself-- I'm listening.
3)why not encourage the use of the drugs? Beyond safety issues, is it just that we're worried about unfair advantage in science? That's the debate in sports, that it doesn't allow for a level playing field. You want a fair competition. But why would you care about that in science? I mean, if it takes 800mg of Provigil a day to find the cure to cancer a month earlier, well...?
"(I am for a system that excludes drug users from coverage if the illness can be attributed to their drug use)"
Here's what I don't get about US attitudes to health care. Why are you perfectly OK with socializing a number of different, very expensive, services like police, firefighters, and roads, but you have a problem with socialized medicine? (When I say "socialized medicine" I mean a system like Canada, UK, sweden, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, or any other wealthy industrialized democracy has.)
It's cheaper and it has better health care outcomes.
I mean, sure, it doesn't seem entirely "fair" that my taxes go up as a result of my neighbor that smokes, eats at McDonald's 10X a week, and needs to use a mirror to see his shoes, but life's not fair.
There's no other industrialized country in the world that sees health care as a luxury or a commodity.
"If you really want to destroy yourself, do it outside the realm of society. But of course, these junkies don't hold such noble notions of personal responsibility, so you can't expect them (nor society) to act in accord with such notions."
While I basically agree with you on this one, I can't help but point out that the trajectory of self-destruction wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for drug prohibition.
Around the end of the 1900/early 20th century, doctors were prescribing heroin or morphine to alcoholics. They knew it was at least as bad for you as booze, but they figured at least if you were on smack you didn't come home and beat your wife or get into bar brawls.
A great deal of the harm caused by junkies comes from the fact that drug prohibition jacks up the prices. Legal supply of Oxycontin, for example, will run you a buck or 2 per 80-mg pill. But that same pill on the black market sells for a dollar per mg.
If junkies didn't have to steal to get their drugs, a lot of the hassle to others would evaporate.
"My poke is at the *business* hiring them which is making me pay for part of it's cost of doing business so it has higher profits. That's the main thing corporations do-- find ways to push their costs outside of their company onto society as a whole."
Which is another problem solved by universal health care.
I can't understand why US corps don't push for it. They're paying through the nose for private insurance for their employees. I heard somewhere that on a couple of occasions, the decision to locate a factory in southern ontario instead of Detroit has been made on those grounds.
"EMTALA is an unfunded mandate that says that the nurses who work in an ER, the hospital who runs the ER, and ER physicians like me have to pay for uninsured emergency care. It takes a segment of the US economy and says we have to take responsibility for and subsidize what everyone else doesn't. That cheap McDonalds hamburger you ate today that is less expensive because McDonalds doesn't offer health insurance? I paid for a part of that. "
Um, at the risk of side-tracking this discussion even more than it already is, why don't you guys in the US just do what every other industrialized country does, and put health care in the same category as roads, police, and firefighters?
How do people conclude that firefighters and cops and 50 other government services are necessary but that cancer treatment is a luxury?
"Not when it affects those in society. Ie, if you overdose and cannot afford health insurance, are rushed to the ER and tax payer money pays for your treatment and recovery, then it is our business."
Oh, so is it your assertion that every time somebody does something that possibly might injure themselves, thus costing the taxpayer money, that the government should have a say?
If what's at issue is how likely you are to injure yourself and cost the taxpayer money, then how is it that alcohol is legal and pot is not?
C'mon, don't start that "you cost the taxpayers $$, therefore we get to regulate your behavior". Once you start down that road, you're opening the door for every neo-puritan zealot to try and legislate their pet issue, from smoking to drinking to diet and exercise.
It never ceases to blow my mind that people will freely admit that the experiment of Alcohol Prohibition was a dismal failure think that drug prohibition is somehow different.
Probably the only thing Friedman ever said that I agree with is his 'iron law of drug prohibition' - that the stronger the anti-drug laws are, the stronger the drugs get. Booze prohibition means beer and wine get pushed out by bathtub moonshine, cocaine makes way for crack, etc.
The problem with drugs and politics is that lawmakers deliberately fed the hysteria to get elected on the assertion that they were making the public safe, because drugs are dangerous and scary. Well, cars are dangerous too. Or at least they can be. So if you (or your political party) was getting elected over the last 20 years by claiming that drugs are bad, m'kay, nobody's gonna come out and say "well, we were full of crap on 99% of what we said about drug policy for the last 30-40 years".
For a standard of comparison, there was a largely-ignored WHO study in the late 90's that found cocaine use in Canada is only about as dangerous as snowmobiling.
See, the reason they don't want to go to that sort of structure is, while people like your average slashdotter might be thrilled to pay a 'per usage' price structure, we're not a majority.
The majority is people like my mom or my girlfriend's parents who pay $45/month for web surfing and e-mail and _maybe_ the occasional youtube video. Those are probably 60-70% of their customers.
In a 'pay per usage' model, those people might be paying $15-20/month.
Basically, they wanna have their cake and eat it too. Have people like my mother paying $40/month and using less than 5 gigs a month, but if somebody actually _uses_ their 'unlimited' connection, well, they're a problem.
I sent an e-mail to my ISP (Shaw) asking for some clarification as to their rules on bandwidth caps, throttling, traffic shaping, etc, after I noticed that my ping times will shoot up and down dramatically if I leave a BT client with encryption running.
They sent me back an e-mail saying basically nothing. We've been going back and forth for 2 weeks now, with me receiving a "marketing-speak" e-mail and replying to it about every 2 or 3 days.
So far, their position seems to be "we would like to reserve the right to change the rules, whenever we feel like it, without telling you, and not even give you a straight answer as to what 'the rules' are."
Now, I do some downloading, but not a huge amount (maybe 20-25 gigs a month between me and my girlfriend). So as far as I can tell, what Shaw wants is:
1) To be able to bill me $40/month for using e-mail and a little web surfing
2) To never have to make any upgrades to their network, never mind their monopoly position
3) To be able to change the terms of my contract whenever it suits their purposes.
These guys have never played straight with their customers from day one, and now 'cause _they_ screwed up by making assumptions about what I would use my internet connection for, after they already offered me 'unlimited', they want us to eat the costs?
Fuck that. I'm no radical socialist, but there's a point where maybe we'd be better to nationalize the fuckers, and run it like a Crown Corporation, make it part of their mandate to get the fastest speed to people at the cheapest price, at a 'break-even or better' price structure.
There's gonna come a point where ISPs are more like water and sewage, i.e., "natural monopoly", and, in fact, competition in that situation is horribly inefficient.
Yep, but if there's a joke to be made about drinking milkshakes, the USA is the punchline, not Canada.
Canada is the leading edge of technology for recovering non-standard oil deposits, thanks to the recent alberta oil boom.
Imagine it like this: The US has a standard little straw like you'd find in a cocktail, whereas Canada is gonna be drawing it up through a 6" pipe.
What they'll do with it, is the same thing we do with any other environmental consequence of the oil industry: Let somebody else worry about it!
Duh.
Dear USA:
That may be true, but thanks to the Alberta oil boom of late, we are the current leading edge of new tech for recovery of non-standard types of oil. If you want to have a race to see who can get it out first, we'll even give you a 2-year head start, just to make it sporting.
Yes, yes, we all know you could invade us without breaking a sweat, but can you live without the oil coming in from Alberta? How about the electricity that comes from James Bay Hyrdo? If you wanna see what life would be like without it, imagine everything east of Chicago living under a blackout. Yes, you have a great big expensive army, but I don't think you have enough troops to protect 2000 miles of power lines from being dynamited.
Oh, yeah, and we're a nuclear 'threshold' country, so we could fire up a nuke and a delivery vehicle that could hit Washington in 2 or 3 years max. So draw when ready, pardner.
Sincerely,
The Dominion of Canada.
Last time I checked, nobody had actually ever recovered a single freakin' barrel of oil from shale in even a break-even fashion.
However, I only did a half-ass job of checking. Surely to god somebody on slashdot can correct me if I'm wrong on this point?
Of course, they don't really measure a lie.
However, what they do do very well is let an interrogator bluff better.
First of all, people will frequently make admissions or confessions in the 'pre-test' interview, mistakenly thinking "the magic box will be able to tell that I lied", and 2ndly, it lets the examiner come in after the exam and say "Look, you can lie to yourself, but your body can't lie to this machine. We know you did it now, this proves it.", and frequently get a confession.
It's a slightly more sophisticated version of the scam they pulled for comic relief on "The Wire" where they tell a suspect that their photocopier is really an experimental lie-detector.
So they ask this poor dumb kid a question, with his hand on the photocopier and the top down, then press the 'copy' button, and hold up a piece of paper (he can't see the side where the paper comes out) that either says "true" or "lie" in big red letters.
For anybody who thinks that the scientific basis of the polygraph is anything other than 100%, weapons-grade bullonium, I got a couple of names names for you:
Aldrich Ames:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames
Gary Leon Ridgway (AKA green river killer)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_river_killer
Both of them passed a polygraph. With Ames, he passed numerous polygraphs while he was working for the USSR.
Apologists for polygraph testing say that Ames was given big, bad, scary, 'sophisticated countermeasures' by his KGB contacts, but he says that all his KGB guy told him was to get a good night's sleep and try to relax.
You can read Ames' letter to the federation of American Scientists here:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/polygraph/ames.html
Actually, at the risk of starting a very drastic flame war, your point about when the cheater genuinely loves both people reminds me of a study I remember a few years back. At the risk of being attacked from all sides, the study's author said that the thing she found that surprised her the most was that some % (I think it was 30-40%, could be wrong) of the women were quite happy to keep both relationships going indefinitely.
Of course, there are such thing as polyagamist couples aka 'open marriages'. Although I don't personally know anybody with an arrangement like that.
"My unscientific opinion is that men tend to rate nearly all women as attractive, and are not very picky beyond that. It's almost a binary, yes/no kind of thing."
You're kidding, right? How many times have you seen a guy who, on an attractive scale, is average or below, with some woman who's a 9 or a 10?
Now how many times have you ever seen the reverse? A guy who's a 9 or a 10, i.e., tall, good physical shape, decent job, good conversationalist, dating a geeky, gorf-ed out chick who's just average or below?
There's a way higher premium on female attractiveness.
"You are right- we are all individuals who control our own destinies and we have no strong control others. But it take time to slide from loving someone to being willing to lie and betray them. If you catch them early, then you can stop things before they are too far along."
Um, well, so what?
If your wife/gf is going to cheat on you, then the problem lies with her. Speaking as someone who has both (a) cheated, and (b) recently been tempted to cheat, but resisted the temptation, the difference between the two was the difference in (a) a dysfunctional relationship, and (b) a healthy, happy relationship.
Adultery is a symptom, not a cause, of a breakup/divorce.
So 'keeping an eye on your wife/gf' is a flawed approach, because if the only thing preventing your girlfriend from cheating on you is your supervision, well, then you have something fundamentally wrong between the two of you. Maybe it's you, (doubtful), maybe it's her, (seems likely in this case) but adultery is a symptom, not a cause.
Allow me to propose a counter-offer: Anybody who wants to voluntarily pay X $$ per month tacked onto their ISP bill, they can commit as many acts of non-commercial copyright infringement that they like. That is, anyone who pays the fee/levy/whatever gets blanket immunity from RIAA lawsuits.
Anybody who isn't interested, well, they can choose to continue with the current status quo.
Let me start the negotiation for what that amount per month should be with my offer of $1 per month.
Um, if you're a university prof at Lakehead university, you don't have a choice. Well, that is, you can choose to go without the university's email, and communicate with your students by, I don't know, smoke signals?
It's an especially good example, because the university's contract with their professors has a clause saying that their e-mail has to be private. But then they outsourced it to gmail.
I'm so sick and tired of hearing about how the US could invade anytime they like. Maybe, but before anybody thinks about that, maybe take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project
Draw a triangle from DC to Maine to Chicago. Everything in that has electricity all or partially supplied by Canada.
Sure, you can invade, but you think you can keep the Mohawk Warriors or whoever from dynamiting the power lines? I don't think you got enough marines to guard thousands of km of power lines.
And that's without even talking about oil...
I think the way to handle this is to put checks and balances on the way law enforcement operates. In your chainsaw example, let's say of the 10 people who bought chains in that time, 9 you know 100% are innocent, and there _might_ be one guilty person. (criminal could've bought months ago, or bought from the next state over, etc)
If the concern is over violating the rights of those 9 definitely and 1 possibly innocent chainsaw users, then maybe the thing to do is make sure that we don't have cause to worry about police investigating someone?
OK, oops, my bad.
I was looking for an example of a developing/3rd world country, one with the very rich, the very poor, and little in between. But looks like I've been called out on my ignorance.
Care to nominate a better example?