Not necessarily. If the American government seized all CPU fabs inside its borders, and banned higher-power CPUs, even if other countries built their own fabs and succeeded in making them, it'd still be harder to get them here (though not impossible).
We already know our borders are a sieve since we both seem to agree the ban on drugs doesn't stop them. Cocaine and Heroin are not made in the U.S. and customs does not stop them in any meaningful way.
It'd depend partly on the demand of course
My point exactly.
Your whole argument that south american governments could not enforce their ban is exactly my point. The populace, whether led by Escobar or not didn't go along with it and so it was de facto legal. In the same way if enough people still drive and smuggle BMWs they will be de facto legal. It all depends on how many people go along with it.
There are many areas of the United States where enough people smoke pot that it's de facto legal to smoke in public because nobody cares. I used to frequent a bar in Oklahoma where I smoked pot regularly. I even sat behind the free keg with the bartender (my neighbor) on ladies night with joint in hand.
Occasionally the police would come in because of a scuffle between drunk patrons. The place reeked of pot. They never did anything about it because there were enough of us that didn't agree to follow the law. There is no law or ban that is enforceable without the consent of the people. Where the tipping point is between consent of a populace and the punishment imposed by the government may be a matter for debate, but a ban without the agreement of a populace(whether citizens of a region/country or countries making up the international community) is all for show
Even in China, most of the populace agrees with the governments policies. If not, China would be a very different and most likely more violent place.
Yes, I agree you can ban things people can't get anyway. I just don't think that's a meaningful ban. Therefore, I do not believe there are any meaningful bans without the consent of some percentage of the populace.
Was this done by poor people? Was this done by governments and monopolies? Or was this done by people who became also insanely rich in the process
Yes.
It was not done however by heirs and heiresses of the already rich. A poor man becoming rich helps the country much much more than unproductive grandchildren clinging to the wealth created by their grandparents. It's sad that people look up to them. Royalty is still admired even when they are worthless to the rest of us.
The third (changes) richest man in the world, Warren Buffett, said in 2007 that he paid 17.7%(without even trying to avoid paying higher taxes) on $46,000,000 that he made while his secretary paid 30% on the $60,000 he made. It is quite telling that self made billionaires will often admit that they pay less in taxes. It's the 75% of the rich that inherited their wealth and do less to help the economy than the guy who used to make your car that are lucky to have people like you on their side.
But that's the way it is - the gov't creates inequality by destroying competitive environment,... but hey, at least we can blame the rich for this.
Who do you think pushes the government to do these kind of things? It's not the poor man trying to get rich and thus increase the size of the pie for everybody. It's the already rich who want to keep the pie, and their share of it, the same.
but again the problem is that driving is simply much more necessary in most of the U.S. because we are so much spread out.
The age could be raised to 18. I didn't get a car until I was 18 (license at 17) and there was no public transport in my town. I had a job at 15(part time) and I didn't need a drivers licence. There is a difference between necessity and convenience.
You can either have a libertarian society where the population is strongly rooted in moral tradition and people generally police themselves or you can have a libertine population without the deep moral roots, and your society will have to become more and more totalitarian in order to keep dissolving into anarchy.
Deep moral roots didn't have much to do with anything. Slavery, lack of women's rights, dueling, clearing the frontier of savages were all perfectly acceptable for a time. The truth is that over time each side of our political spectrum has whittled away at our rights often under the guise of morality. That and technology has limited our privacy and ability to break laws that don't effect anybody else. There was plenty of murder and crime going on in America before our so called moral decline. If anything we recognize those atrocities more. It has little to do with policing ourselves vs being policed and everything to do with taking away our rights to do whatever we want as long as we don't hurt anyone else. Morality has nothing to do with needing a totalitarian government. Deep moral tradition is typically the rallying cry of a totalitarian government, not the other way around.
Amidst the increasing infantilization of our society and trends away from respecting and demanding personal responsibility, it pretty much becomes mandatory to keep absurd numbers of young people from self-destructing.
And yet Europe which is often criticized for being very socialist and demanding less personal responsibility than America doesn't have as big a problem with underage drinking as we do. It gets kind of circular here. It's mandatory to have a (relatively) high drinking age because of the decline in personal responsibility. So we justify denying personal responsibility because people don't have personal responsibility.
Go try to buy yourself enough fertilizer to blow up a building and see how successful you are.
By your own admission it's hard to ban things that are readily available. I live in the bread basket of America, it's not as hard as you might think to steal it. Additionally, fertilizer is not the only thing that can go boom. There are plenty of ways to make an IED.
Wrong. These things aren't banned everywhere: it's perfectly legal to make heroin and cocaine in various central and south American countries
I may have missed it but I couldn't really find any countries that allow more than possession of 1g. Peru and Bolivia seem to be the most lax about it but even there processed cocaine is illegal. Hardly perfectly legal to make.
I get what you are saying though. If something is difficult to make with present technology then it can be banned. At least until someone figures out a way around it. I guess my issue is I don't see that as being an effect of the ban and more an effect of technology/resources. In other words I can ban you from making an air craft carrier, but I can't really say my ban is effective. It's really more that you wouldn't have been able to make one anyway. If you have to put conditions like every country has to adopt the ban and it has to be extremely difficult for anyone to make it to begin with it really limits the point of a ban. Pakistan, India, and N. Korea all aquired nukes after the Non Poliferation Act came into force. Even South Africa developed nukes but later dismantled them. I suppose if you consider slowing the rate of use for something to be effective then bans work (sometimes). If a ban is supposed to eliminate something completely, then I'm not sure of any bans that have worked.
At a minimum bans are less affective in free countries, to a large extent because people in free countries have a culture of doing whatever they want. Which was my point. Bans are only effective when the populace agrees to them. Or (for your cpu example) in the international community, bans are only effective when countries agree to them.
In summary you can't ban something people can get and banning something people can't get is like this marble in my pocket that protects me from bears (no cause and effect).
Please explain to me how this is suppose to work where the "rich" supposedly are not paying their fair share.
Simple, do you think the people giving themselves a $1 salary are in the top 1% of people who pay income tax or in that bottom 47%? I would imagine it is the top %1 of the middle class (those receiving a taxable income) that pay half the taxes, not the top 1% of those that control 1/3 of the wealth in this country.
The reason the rich are getting off scott free is because they don't have 'income' the way the rest of us do. Therefore they often don't pay income tax at any rate that is significant to their wealth. If $1 is a reasonable salary for the CEO of a multi billion dollar company when a ~25k salary for a CPA is cause for concern for the IRS then it seems to me that the income tax system favors the wealthy.
Now I do agree that wealth creation should be encouraged by our tax system, however I do not agree that maintaining wealth should be encouraged. People getting rich help the country. People staying rich because the tax code protects money/land/stocks but not production/labor does not seem to me to benefit society.
directly tied to how hard you work to make the company earn money
Or at least how hard you make the balance sheet look good in the short term so you can sell your shares for a lot, step away and watch the business collapse like a house of cards. Or stay on and get a bonus when the government bails you out.
The truth of the matter is bans depend on how many people support the ban. There is some point in a populace where a ban is supported and thus is effective. You speak of Iran and N. Korea being examples of nuclear bans working. Really??? Technology/infrastructure is limiting them more than some 'ban' imposed by other nations. They are going slower because other nations are not doing it for them, they are not going slower because of a ban.
As far as other bombs go, ask people in OKC how affective that is. A ban on bombs works because most people here don't want to bomb anything. All bans work or don't work depending on whether people go along with it or not.
Heroin is not easy to make yourself, nor is it easy to setup growing/refining operations and yet I could get some with a phone call. Do you think Cocaine is easy to make from scratch? The reason the ban doesn't work is because lots of people ignore the ban.
Banning cigarettes would be far less affective than just everyone thinking they aren't cool. In some cases a ban can actually increase the use of something. Banning underage drinking seems to cause more underage binge drinking than in countries where there isn't a minimum age for alcohol.
Obviously. Now if you search for fox news and yahoo deleting comments concerning the Arizona shooting Google does find results. And while I am not claiming this as an unbiased source I do not believe it is completely made up either...
Palin facebook deleting negative comments
Now if you truly think it's absurd that anyone on the internet would post hateful things on Fox News website I really don't even know what to think of that.
They've found that express and self-check lanes work better to split the load.
I've noticed self-check lanes tend to be grouped into four with one queue. By the way what 5 letter word can you take four letters from and it still sounds the same?
I haven't ever seen that on NPR. Of course I haven't ever really seen anything on NPR:) Seriously though, I listen to NPR and watch Fox News all the time. You can't really be serious that you've heard more hate on NPR. I regret doing this but I need an example, a citation if you will. I've been listening to NPR for 20 years and hate is not something I have ever associated with them. Boredom maybe, but hate?
Would you consider inadequate shielding the cause of a gamma ray changing a value?
Yes. I'm sure under normal conditions it is considered to operate in its human decided parameters. So if you were going to use chips in an environment with more gamma rays and failed to use more shielding that would be a human error.
By that logic, all computer fuck ups are really human error.
That does seem logical. Even the random component randomly failing is within a range determined by the engineering and quality of the manufacturing of those components.
I think if you are running linux without a fancy UI you would not act surprised that the mouse buttons could be switched as the OP seemed to be commenting about his friend that wanted to be in IT.
I assume the vast majority of computers have a start button, but you are right that it is a bad assumption on slashdot. I supposed one might look in preferences/mouse or control center/peripherals/mouse if they don't have a start menu.
I think my main point stands that any fairly technical person should have a decent idea of where generic UI settings are for their desktop of choice.
My thoughts are that there is a genetic disposition putting each of us somewhere from extreme right to ambidextrous to extreme left and that society reinforces everyone's brain to use the right. So that truly genetically ambidextrous people would become right handed and people favoring their left would move towards ambidextrous. I think that's about the same as you are saying
Personally, when I have tried to write with my left hand I find it easier if I write in a mirror image to my right hand. It is more spatially correct relative to myself.
I think this is just the result of being naturally left handed and society making everything for right handed people. With practice I think right handed people are just as ambidextrous. Unless a righty breaks their right hand they are unlikely to teach there left hand how to do anything other than be a retarded date.
It still has the popup and everything. Nothing about the top left box changed except it looks like a tiny icon versus a minus sign. While I agree that Windows has made some GUI changes, changing the position of the buttons in the title bar fights 20 years of my muscle memory.
I really hate it because I'm always trying to sell Ubuntu to family and friends. Moving something so used for no reason is very frustrating.
Before Windows95 the top-left button, if double-clicked, closed the window.
And it's still there in Windows XP, and Vista and 7 as far as I know. The 'x' close button was added to the top right with Windows 95. Nothing was moved unless you count the min and max buttons moving over a little to accommodate the close button.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily. If the American government seized all CPU fabs inside its borders, and banned higher-power CPUs, even if other countries built their own fabs and succeeded in making them, it'd still be harder to get them here (though not impossible).
We already know our borders are a sieve since we both seem to agree the ban on drugs doesn't stop them. Cocaine and Heroin are not made in the U.S. and customs does not stop them in any meaningful way.
It'd depend partly on the demand of course
My point exactly.
Your whole argument that south american governments could not enforce their ban is exactly my point. The populace, whether led by Escobar or not didn't go along with it and so it was de facto legal. In the same way if enough people still drive and smuggle BMWs they will be de facto legal. It all depends on how many people go along with it.
There are many areas of the United States where enough people smoke pot that it's de facto legal to smoke in public because nobody cares. I used to frequent a bar in Oklahoma where I smoked pot regularly. I even sat behind the free keg with the bartender (my neighbor) on ladies night with joint in hand.
Occasionally the police would come in because of a scuffle between drunk patrons. The place reeked of pot. They never did anything about it because there were enough of us that didn't agree to follow the law. There is no law or ban that is enforceable without the consent of the people. Where the tipping point is between consent of a populace and the punishment imposed by the government may be a matter for debate, but a ban without the agreement of a populace(whether citizens of a region/country or countries making up the international community) is all for show
Even in China, most of the populace agrees with the governments policies. If not, China would be a very different and most likely more violent place.
Yes, I agree you can ban things people can't get anyway. I just don't think that's a meaningful ban. Therefore, I do not believe there are any meaningful bans without the consent of some percentage of the populace.
Was this done by poor people? Was this done by governments and monopolies? Or was this done by people who became also insanely rich in the process
Yes.
It was not done however by heirs and heiresses of the already rich. A poor man becoming rich helps the country much much more than unproductive grandchildren clinging to the wealth created by their grandparents. It's sad that people look up to them. Royalty is still admired even when they are worthless to the rest of us.
The third (changes) richest man in the world, Warren Buffett, said in 2007 that he paid 17.7%(without even trying to avoid paying higher taxes) on $46,000,000 that he made while his secretary paid 30% on the $60,000 he made. It is quite telling that self made billionaires will often admit that they pay less in taxes. It's the 75% of the rich that inherited their wealth and do less to help the economy than the guy who used to make your car that are lucky to have people like you on their side.
But that's the way it is - the gov't creates inequality by destroying competitive environment,... but hey, at least we can blame the rich for this.
Who do you think pushes the government to do these kind of things? It's not the poor man trying to get rich and thus increase the size of the pie for everybody. It's the already rich who want to keep the pie, and their share of it, the same.
but again the problem is that driving is simply much more necessary in most of the U.S. because we are so much spread out.
The age could be raised to 18. I didn't get a car until I was 18 (license at 17) and there was no public transport in my town. I had a job at 15(part time) and I didn't need a drivers licence. There is a difference between necessity and convenience.
You can either have a libertarian society where the population is strongly rooted in moral tradition and people generally police themselves or you can have a libertine population without the deep moral roots, and your society will have to become more and more totalitarian in order to keep dissolving into anarchy.
Deep moral roots didn't have much to do with anything. Slavery, lack of women's rights, dueling, clearing the frontier of savages were all perfectly acceptable for a time. The truth is that over time each side of our political spectrum has whittled away at our rights often under the guise of morality. That and technology has limited our privacy and ability to break laws that don't effect anybody else. There was plenty of murder and crime going on in America before our so called moral decline. If anything we recognize those atrocities more. It has little to do with policing ourselves vs being policed and everything to do with taking away our rights to do whatever we want as long as we don't hurt anyone else. Morality has nothing to do with needing a totalitarian government. Deep moral tradition is typically the rallying cry of a totalitarian government, not the other way around.
Amidst the increasing infantilization of our society and trends away from respecting and demanding personal responsibility, it pretty much becomes mandatory to keep absurd numbers of young people from self-destructing.
And yet Europe which is often criticized for being very socialist and demanding less personal responsibility than America doesn't have as big a problem with underage drinking as we do. It gets kind of circular here. It's mandatory to have a (relatively) high drinking age because of the decline in personal responsibility. So we justify denying personal responsibility because people don't have personal responsibility.
Go try to buy yourself enough fertilizer to blow up a building and see how successful you are.
By your own admission it's hard to ban things that are readily available. I live in the bread basket of America, it's not as hard as you might think to steal it. Additionally, fertilizer is not the only thing that can go boom. There are plenty of ways to make an IED.
Wrong. These things aren't banned everywhere: it's perfectly legal to make heroin and cocaine in various central and south American countries
I may have missed it but I couldn't really find any countries that allow more than possession of 1g. Peru and Bolivia seem to be the most lax about it but even there processed cocaine is illegal. Hardly perfectly legal to make.
I get what you are saying though. If something is difficult to make with present technology then it can be banned. At least until someone figures out a way around it. I guess my issue is I don't see that as being an effect of the ban and more an effect of technology/resources. In other words I can ban you from making an air craft carrier, but I can't really say my ban is effective. It's really more that you wouldn't have been able to make one anyway. If you have to put conditions like every country has to adopt the ban and it has to be extremely difficult for anyone to make it to begin with it really limits the point of a ban. Pakistan, India, and N. Korea all aquired nukes after the Non Poliferation Act came into force. Even South Africa developed nukes but later dismantled them. I suppose if you consider slowing the rate of use for something to be effective then bans work (sometimes). If a ban is supposed to eliminate something completely, then I'm not sure of any bans that have worked.
At a minimum bans are less affective in free countries, to a large extent because people in free countries have a culture of doing whatever they want. Which was my point. Bans are only effective when the populace agrees to them. Or (for your cpu example) in the international community, bans are only effective when countries agree to them.
In summary you can't ban something people can get and banning something people can't get is like this marble in my pocket that protects me from bears (no cause and effect).
Please explain to me how this is suppose to work where the "rich" supposedly are not paying their fair share.
Simple, do you think the people giving themselves a $1 salary are in the top 1% of people who pay income tax or in that bottom 47%? I would imagine it is the top %1 of the middle class (those receiving a taxable income) that pay half the taxes, not the top 1% of those that control 1/3 of the wealth in this country.
The reason the rich are getting off scott free is because they don't have 'income' the way the rest of us do. Therefore they often don't pay income tax at any rate that is significant to their wealth. If $1 is a reasonable salary for the CEO of a multi billion dollar company when a ~25k salary for a CPA is cause for concern for the IRS then it seems to me that the income tax system favors the wealthy.
Now I do agree that wealth creation should be encouraged by our tax system, however I do not agree that maintaining wealth should be encouraged. People getting rich help the country. People staying rich because the tax code protects money/land/stocks but not production/labor does not seem to me to benefit society.
directly tied to how hard you work to make the company earn money
Or at least how hard you make the balance sheet look good in the short term so you can sell your shares for a lot, step away and watch the business collapse like a house of cards. Or stay on and get a bonus when the government bails you out.
The truth of the matter is bans depend on how many people support the ban. There is some point in a populace where a ban is supported and thus is effective. You speak of Iran and N. Korea being examples of nuclear bans working. Really??? Technology/infrastructure is limiting them more than some 'ban' imposed by other nations. They are going slower because other nations are not doing it for them, they are not going slower because of a ban.
As far as other bombs go, ask people in OKC how affective that is. A ban on bombs works because most people here don't want to bomb anything. All bans work or don't work depending on whether people go along with it or not.
Heroin is not easy to make yourself, nor is it easy to setup growing/refining operations and yet I could get some with a phone call. Do you think Cocaine is easy to make from scratch? The reason the ban doesn't work is because lots of people ignore the ban.
Banning cigarettes would be far less affective than just everyone thinking they aren't cool. In some cases a ban can actually increase the use of something. Banning underage drinking seems to cause more underage binge drinking than in countries where there isn't a minimum age for alcohol.
MATH is 100% fiction
Are you saying that if I have 2 coconuts and somebody gives me 3 coconuts that I have as many coconuts as I make up?
Obviously. Now if you search for fox news and yahoo deleting comments concerning the Arizona shooting Google does find results. And while I am not claiming this as an unbiased source I do not believe it is completely made up either... Palin facebook deleting negative comments
Now if you truly think it's absurd that anyone on the internet would post hateful things on Fox News website I really don't even know what to think of that.
What's the difference between that and any other social network?
For only a few items I will checkout in Electronics, Jewelry, or Garden. At least when I'm at Wal-Mart. I've made it in and out in under 3 minutes.
They've found that express and self-check lanes work better to split the load.
I've noticed self-check lanes tend to be grouped into four with one queue. By the way what 5 letter word can you take four letters from and it still sounds the same?
At the end of the day FOX is still watched by 4 times as many viewers as MSNBC - why?
Because facts are boring and drama=ratings.
I've seen more hate from NPR
I haven't ever seen that on NPR. Of course I haven't ever really seen anything on NPR :) Seriously though, I listen to NPR and watch Fox News all the time. You can't really be serious that you've heard more hate on NPR. I regret doing this but I need an example, a citation if you will. I've been listening to NPR for 20 years and hate is not something I have ever associated with them. Boredom maybe, but hate?
The main reason that WWI started though was because the doctrine of mobilization still existed.
The TOS for my celluar service is not a good sign.
Would you consider inadequate shielding the cause of a gamma ray changing a value?
Yes. I'm sure under normal conditions it is considered to operate in its human decided parameters. So if you were going to use chips in an environment with more gamma rays and failed to use more shielding that would be a human error.
By that logic, all computer fuck ups are really human error.
That does seem logical. Even the random component randomly failing is within a range determined by the engineering and quality of the manufacturing of those components.
I think if you are running linux without a fancy UI you would not act surprised that the mouse buttons could be switched as the OP seemed to be commenting about his friend that wanted to be in IT.
I assume the vast majority of computers have a start button, but you are right that it is a bad assumption on slashdot. I supposed one might look in preferences/mouse or control center/peripherals/mouse if they don't have a start menu.
I think my main point stands that any fairly technical person should have a decent idea of where generic UI settings are for their desktop of choice.
My thoughts are that there is a genetic disposition putting each of us somewhere from extreme right to ambidextrous to extreme left and that society reinforces everyone's brain to use the right. So that truly genetically ambidextrous people would become right handed and people favoring their left would move towards ambidextrous. I think that's about the same as you are saying
Personally, when I have tried to write with my left hand I find it easier if I write in a mirror image to my right hand. It is more spatially correct relative to myself.
I'm a programmer, and I would have no idea how to switch the mouse buttons.
Really?!? you wouldn't think it might be in the Control Panel. Maybe under mouse?
Most lefties are slightly ambidextrous
I think this is just the result of being naturally left handed and society making everything for right handed people. With practice I think right handed people are just as ambidextrous. Unless a righty breaks their right hand they are unlikely to teach there left hand how to do anything other than be a retarded date.
It still has the popup and everything. Nothing about the top left box changed except it looks like a tiny icon versus a minus sign. While I agree that Windows has made some GUI changes, changing the position of the buttons in the title bar fights 20 years of my muscle memory.
I really hate it because I'm always trying to sell Ubuntu to family and friends. Moving something so used for no reason is very frustrating.
Before Windows95 the top-left button, if double-clicked, closed the window.
And it's still there in Windows XP, and Vista and 7 as far as I know. The 'x' close button was added to the top right with Windows 95. Nothing was moved unless you count the min and max buttons moving over a little to accommodate the close button.
Parts of the Pentagon Papers are still classified and the NY Times published them in 1971.
You mean the same fundamental way in which windows moved the close button to the top right with 95?
They didn't move the close button they added it.