Actually, as I recall, about 60+ percent of Americans believe that Revelations is the literal prediction of the end of the world.
The Baptist Convention is simply the largest and the most political (the only major U.S. religious group to back the Iraq invasion). But push comes to shove, most of the nation believes what they believe.
Most of the nation also believes in UFO spaceships, angels, ghosts, magic, Satanic cults taking over whole towns, terrorists under every bed, cities as the source of evil, George Bush, and chiropractics.
Asimov and Sagan were right. War between the irrational and the rational, thought and emotion, science and magic.
The thing is, we've almost all the nuclear bombs. And we're making more.
Uh, guys? Revelations was a metaphor for the fall of Rome. Seven hills, etc. Rome and its evil sway over the land of Israel was all the Jews cared about back in the first century.
Since to write about the fall of Rome was a one-way ticket to death by torture, political writings were dressed in metaphorical language that couldn't easily be read as traitorous. John of course mixed his religion with politics, but I don't think he meant it to be read like the writings of Nostradamus. Hell, Revelations almost didn't make the cut into the New Testament.
And I doubt Herr PolitzenFueher Ashcroft will have any chips planted in his body that the the Fatherland Security Department will find trackable. Nor his financial or demographic records. The Fatherland Security Act deems dissemination of such information, such as addresses or social security numbers of the Reich leaders as de facto terrorism with all the throw-your-ass-in-a-torture-chamber non-prison laws applying.
I'm not exagerating. Remember about a month ago when some people started skywriting personal information about (Ashcroft?)to prove a point about privacy? They couldn't give a whole number because that would have violated the Fatherland Security Act and they would have been yanked from public life for thirty years.
No, no, no. All their rich men are corrupt. What the man they locked up did was to challenge the status quo.
ALL of them could be locked up for being "corrupt". But the police chose to only arrest the one man who was too "liberal". Amazingly enough, all the other corrupt crime bosses got a pass.
I say this to illustrate what is wrong about "law and order" police states. It all depends on who the leaders choose to prosecute. With careful selection, you can eliminate all your political enemies, and reign supremely corrupt forever.
Who of Enron is in jail? Seven billion stolen by fraud, stolen while the administration cheerled them on and blamed hippies for shutting down power plants. But somehow, the Justice Department has time to raid a cathouse in New Orleans and slam Tommy Chong in federal prison for selling plastic tubes.
It all depends on who you choose to see committing a crime. The crew who enabled Enron in California kicked out the only man who fingered them as the guilty party, and now control the governor. Wanna bet the Enron lawsuit gets dropped now? No criminals exist if no one prosecutes.
To use the Sony Betamax decision's logic, if a device has ANY -- ANY -- legal use, it cannot be banned. Otherwise the MPAA would have been granted their wish in the 80's, and VCR's would have been outlawed.
If the courts come to some other decision someday soon, it will mean that the judiciary has been seeded far too much with business-worshipping judgesin the last 23 years by rightwing administrations.
It's an impossible situation. When the last of the older judges have finally retired, it will be nigh impossible to bring cases to trial and expect fair treatment if in so doing business interests will be offended.
FYI: The first group that started linking copying and/or linking to "stealing" was the Church of Scientology in the very early 90's. They started the meme war (we're being robbed by criminals!) when people started posting their UFO secret scriptures online. They repeated, in courts, online, and to legislators, the following meme: copying is stealing, copying is stealing, copying is stealing, copying is stealing -- you are criminals, lawbreakers, thieves, badpeoplebbad....
looks like they won. Once the MPAA and RIAA coopted the semantic war, we have this nonsense reasoning going on.
LISTEN. Before all the new laws were bought by the CoS and the others, copying a CD for PROFIT was called pirating. Copying for private use was not really addressed as an infraction at all of civil law.
BUT neither were criminal infractions. They were CIVIL ones. Which means you don't go to jail, you pay a fine based on deprived income of the copyright holder.
NOT STEALING. COPYRIGHT VIOLATION. Stealing is depriving a property owner of his property. Copying does not steal property away. It merely makes more.
To paraphrase Jefferson on this very issue, when you light someone else's candle with the flame of your own, are you deprived of light yourself? No. You merely have created more light.
If someone lights their dark candle with yours without your permission, they are not depriving you of light. No theft occurs. The metaphor is still good after 200+ years.
"There is one area of our profession of course that cannot reasonably be outsourced and that is defense. "
Oh, not, not, not, NOT true.
Investigate how many components used in our national defense structure are made in China, South Korea, Japan, on and on. There is an immense problem in that, in order to save money and because we have LOST key domestic manufacturing capabilities, we are dependent on foreign good will to purchase parts to keep our defense going. And I'm sure most of the coding for industrial grade microprocessors which we purchase is done in countries other than the U.S.
I don't think people understand something. Countries other than the U.S. protect their own citizens by controlling immigration of workers that would threaten their own prosperity. India, for instance, will not permit a migration of American coders to take up apartments and jobs in India. They protect their own.
We are among a handful of nations whose business leaders are so greedy that they would annihilate the prosperity of their own homeland by shipping jobs overseas. And one of the few nations whose political leaders, and its PEOPLE as well, who would let it happen because of ideological madness.
..."and awarded millions to some idiot who couldn't figure out that driving a car with hot coffee between her laps was a bad idea."
Actually, she wasn't an idiot, and she didn't get millions.
If you investigate the "idiot's" case, instead of parroting the meme, you will find a couple of things you may not have known.
First, the coffee was not "hot". It was near-boiling. McDonalds in New Mexico had apparently kept the coffee super-hot - 180 degrees or higher - both to satisfy health inspectors who were concerned about coffee sitting in pots for hours, and to keep the coffee hotter longer for take-out orders.
Secondly, there were over 700 cases of such cases of people being injured by the boiling coffee.
Third: the woman wasn't driving, or doing anything else other than prying the lid off of the coffee cup between her thighs. The coffee splashed on her pants, and soaked her skin. She suffered third degree burns on her genitals, perineum, buttocks, and inner thighs. She underwent eight days of skin grafts and debridement (think of a steel wool pad scouring the subdermal layers of your now-skinless penis, boys). Normally hot coffee made at home doesn't make third degree burns; it is served at around 140 degrees. Near-boiling coffee, at 180-190 degrees, which McDs had been doing, does. I can add a personal observation: I've been burned by normal coffee, and also I've fallen into a puddle of boiling hot water. Believe me, 30 degrees or more variance determines the difference between a second and a third degree burn.
Fourth. She originally asked to settle her claim for 20 grand. McD's refused her offer.
Fifth. She didn't make millions. Here's a quote from ballinlaw.com:
"The jury awarded Ms. Liebeck $200,000 in compensatory damages (money to compensate the injured party for the injury sustained). The judge reduced this amount to $160,000 because the jury believed the plaintiff was 20 percent at fault. The jury also awarded Ms. Liebeck $2.7 million in punitive damages. The jury considered McDonald's actions reckless and willful, but despite this, the trial court reduced the punitive award to $480,000, which was considered three times her compensatory damages. "
Six. McD's in New Mexico reduced the serving temperature from 190 to 158 after the punitive damages.
http://ballinlaw.com/mcdonald.htm
Seven. The large judgement was not awarded because the woman was burned; it was because McD's had served the coffee at boiling temperature for years, ignoring over 700 instances of scaled customers. They found them willfully negligent for not reducing the temperature long before the 80+ year old lady lost the skin on her lap.
Here's some more documentation: http://www.mattenlaw.com/FSL5CS/ar ticles/articles6.asp "The coffee was 40 degrees hotter than most other restaurants keep it - close to the 212 degree boiling point. A national burn center had issued a public warning not to serve hot beverages over 135 degrees. There were 700 other burn claims against McDonald's before this injury, yet no action was taken. The victim offered to settle the case for $20,000 before trial, but McDonald's refused to settle. "
"The jury in this case decided that the coffee was a defective product and that McDonald's had violated products liability laws that assure that consumers are protected.
The jury awarded her $200,000 in compensatory damages (to compensate her for past and future pain, suffering, emotional distress, lost wages, and medical bills). The jury also decided that she was 20% at fault and reduced her damage award by that amount.
The jury also awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages. However, the judge reduced the award of punitive damages to $480,000. The case settled for an undisclosed amount before it was appealed."
Now that we've discussed the facts of the case, I'm up for some editorial comment.
BIG point: The vast, vast majority of liability cases do no
Sorry to post twice, but I forgot to make the point.
Here's what MS will do, based on their past behavior, and that of other monopolies:
They make available a large music library for sale. They price the tunes far below what Musicmatch, AOL, or iTunes can sanely afford; as a matter of fact, with a forty billion dollar bank account, they can sell at a loss. Hell, they can give it away.
Competitors, constrained by stockholders and business realities, won't be able to match the price. They'll fail.
Rejoice, you'd have cheap music!
Uh oh.
With competitors dead, and investors loathe to create new businesses to compete with a company that can run a music download site at a loss forever, Microsoft becomes a near-monopoly distributor of legally downloadable music. Music labels and artists must deal with MS, realistically, even though technically they are free operators. This, by the way, is why monopolies are supposed to be regulated: they extend their monopoly into other arenas, forever, unless checked.
Oops. As time rolls on, MS starts, say, offering a new "premium" deal which costs more than the giveaway prices already established. Who knows the details now, but it'd happen.
Eventually, more people flock to the higher priced offerings. MS eventually phases out the giveaway downloads, or at least offers such crud for free that no one wants the stuff.
Meanwhile, thanks to.Net, the MS Windows Media Player Digital Rights Management, and the lovely DMCA, most legal digital music is managed by MS. A new generation of kids grow up thinking that this is the way it always has been, and doesn't care about might-have-beens.
At the end of the cycle, all decent music and/or everything else digital is licensed and priced by MS Inc. And it will cost far more than it does now.
This is how MS has always done business. This is how monopoly works. Invade a new market, eliminate the competition by giving a product away using a fat bank account, then raise the prices after the competitors have been eliminated.
You'd think that a free market would give rise to competitors that could take away MS's advantages with new tech, but that ignores Adam Smith's warnings about the need to control monopoly. Businesses collude (MS and the music industry, for instance), business conspire to control the market.
Look at what MS is doing in the game machine market. They'll keep selling X-Boxes at a loss until they eliminate the competition, or Gates decides that the cost of invading a market outweigh the benefits of a new monopoly.
"I just hope they aren't taking money away from everyone else in the state to pay for something that's only going to benefit the cities."
That argument has been used to good effect in the rural and suburban voter areas for a century.
The problem is, the people in the non-urban areas of the country have been on city-financed welfare for decades. Most of the western U.S. states, those which hate federal taxes the most, get three times the revenue they pay back in federal funds to develop the countryside; mostly roads and damns.
It's a lovely reflexive attack, because those who benefit most per capita from federal spending are the biggest complainers about their taxes.
Hey! Why do I have to pay taxes to fix the potholes on YOUR street? Leech! Fix your own potholes!
No taxes! Freedom! Good streets for those who can pay for them!
Seriously, there can never be a "unified voice of the people". They are too heterogeneous. If that is the metric, then no one's potholes get fixed; hell, there wouldn't be government built streets.
All spending on public works can be defeated with the "we don't all benefit" argument.
"When the demand is more than phones, then work on it. Do not try and predict demand."
The demand is obviously being constricted by the dearth of cheap pipes. If we wait for the "demand" to grow enough to justify private investment in FO to the home, it will never happen. The present setup is just dandy for whomever is selling pathetic connectivity. They will not roll out replacements for their current cash cows.
Think of it this way. Pretend that, instead of bandwidth, the "scarcity" is water. An imperfect analogy, 'cause water is finite and bandwidth is infinite... though the difference actually helps the argument.
Anyway. Pretend that we all lived in a area with no water lines, 20 years ago. People got their water from wells, and toted the water to their homes on their shoulders. Not a scarcity situation, for people got all the water they could drink.
Now pretend that someone invented a water pipe that piggybacked on existing equipment, and that water was found to be a resource that could simply be manufactured and shipped. People discover that they can use water not jusut for drinking, but for cooking.
Then someone discovers that they can build giant sluices that enable the supply to be increased twenty-fold to each customer. But, instead of the government building the infrastructure, a hundred thousand businesses compete to supply the water using products from vendors who try to maximize profit.
Imagine that the orignal well owners insist on covering their original invenstments + maintenance + cash to buy lots of other companies.
A state of balance eventually occurs when the businesses find their sweet spot financially. Instead of gallons of water per minute, people pay a reasonable price for a trickle of water, enough to wash their face and take the occasional shower. They don't NEED all that water, really. And who wants to put all the pipe companies out of business?
An artificial scarcity is maintained, with the vendors of the pipes and the providers of the water maximizing what profits they can.
Now, what if the government simply had built the pipes and the water could go sluicing down the pipes for practically nothing? Suppose the government, as the main supplier, could dictate terms to the piper manufacturers, forcing the equipment prices down?
One could say that the government wasn't necessary to supply water, because the trickle was enough, and the businesses needed to make a decent profit.
But who decided that? The businesses. Who speaks up for the consumer of water? The government, which they own.
The government could have supplied the water from the beginning, at orders of magnitude lower cost.
If you don't think this is possible, I point you to municipal water supplies in the real world. If they had been provided by the free market, we'd be metering water like champagne.
You're not thinking about the diapers aspect. A certain lack of dignity, I think.
I dunno if I really want the meat part of me wandering around widdling myself and screaming "Teri Amos!" after I'm deactiveated. I mean, really. The cost alone is prohibitive. It would an insult to whatever I've accomplished.
We don't let DOGS do that to themselves. Why do we insist on making each other suffer?
I don't believe that HIV can be transfered via the air. If the assistants had decided to inject themselves with a contaminated needle, there would be a very slim chance they could contract it. HIV is not easy to contract. I don't believe a BH level three is necessary. The scientist was right;there was little or no danger as long as you didn't inject it subcutaneously. The assistants were just scared of the word "AIDS".
Phil Donahue had the best rated program on MS-NBC (or CNBC?). He was canned because he was allowing people with views that contradicted the President's view on war. And no, this is not a liberal "conspiracy theory"; the internal memo concerning Donahue's cancellation got leaked. Go look it up.
They put on a show, replacing Phil's, that presented some psycho right winger who eventually told a gay caller to get AIDS and die. Savage, I think his name was. His show now has zero ratings, becaue they canned his hate-filled ass. But since they knew who he was when they hired him, they obviously wanted him to say such things.
There aren't any "liberal" (read: people who do not regularly profess hard-right viewpoints as facts) talk shows on television, none, that I can see. The few reporters who are old enough and smart enough to understand what is going on are too afraid of losing their jobs and their standing if they even utter a peep about the bias. Read about that CNN reporter who said CNN toed the Bush line hard to placate the Fox viewship; she got spanked hard. Fox went wild smearing her, proving her point. Rather said in a Euorpean interview that reporters are no longer permitted to tell the truth anymore, and that he would be "necklaced" (read South African history for a reference) if he said anything the hardrighters didn't like.
You DON'T GET AIRED if you contradict the right-wing for very long.
I can understand why anyone would think I pull data out of the air. It was like pulling teeth to find stories. I found it very interesting that CNN had damn-all on a lot of subjects... it seems they are too intimidated to report on things the neocons don't want discussed. But, I persevered.
My god. Is our children learning? How in the hell can Bush's people be judged if no one wants to report on their actions on a regular basis?
No wonder the country has neocon fever. How could they not? They don't hear anything!
Links:
I do know. The Bush administration, on reaching office, immediately sealed the records of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, as well as all future records of the current adminstration. Clinton's are wide open, though.
Bush Clamping Down On Presidential Papers (washingtonpost.com)... Bush Clamping Down On Presidential Papers Incumbent Could Lock Up Predecessor's Records By George Lardner Jr. Washington Post Staff... www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20731-2001 Oct31
NM&L (Fall 2001): Reagan's White House papers stay sealed... advisors, or between such advisors" sealed for 12... and Carter willingly released their presidential papers after 12... year period for the Reagan papers expired in... www.rcfp.org/news/mag/25-4/foi-reaganp.html - 7k - Cached - Similar pages
CBS News | Reagan Papers Released | January 4, 2002 09:58:30... The memo was among 8,000 pages of Reagan presidential papers released at... been released last January but were kept sealed as the Bush administration worked... www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/ 04/politics/main323121.shtml - 35k - Cached - Similar pages
Secret Papers... Just recently, Bush decreed that those papers will remain sealed for as long... His executive order stipulates that, in order for presidential papers to be... www.skepticism.org/politics/lib_SecretPapers. shtml - 19k - Cached - Similar pages
NM&L (Fall 2001): Reagan's White House papers stay sealed... advisors, or between such advisors" sealed for 12... and Carter willingly released their presidential papers after 12... year period for the Reagan papers expired in... www.rcfp.org/news/mag/25-4/foi-reaganp.html - 7k - Cached - Similar pages
This administration has ordered government agencies to hinder Freedom of Information Act requests.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2002/09/re090302.htm l "For whatever reason, this administration has gone way way too far in its pursuit of secrecy in some particularly worrying ways," said Mark Tapscott, head of the Center for Media and Public Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "
"Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration was expanding secrecy. It moved to hold up the release of presidential papers from former President Ronald Reagan and insisted on keeping secret members of an energy policy task force chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney."
"This administration is the most secretive of our lifetime, even more secretive than the Nixon administration. They don't believe the American people or Congress have any right to information," said last week Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that is suing the administration to force it to reveal the members of the energy task force. "
I do know. The Bush administration, on reaching office, immediately sealed the records of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, as well as all future records of the current adminstration. Clinton's are wide open, though.
This administration has ordered government agencies to hinder Freedom of Information Act requests.
This administration now has effectively refused to honor Freedom of Information Act requests.
This administration has ignored subpoenas regarding its energy polices meetings.
This administration has refused to cooperate with 9/11 investigators RE what the President's briefings said about the possibility of attacks just prior to 9/11. Simply hindered and refused.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, as I recall, about 60+ percent of Americans believe that Revelations is the literal prediction of the end of the world.
The Baptist Convention is simply the largest and the most political (the only major U.S. religious group to back the Iraq invasion). But push comes to shove, most of the nation believes what they believe.
Most of the nation also believes in UFO spaceships, angels, ghosts, magic, Satanic cults taking over whole towns, terrorists under every bed, cities as the source of evil, George Bush, and chiropractics.
Asimov and Sagan were right. War between the irrational and the rational, thought and emotion, science and magic.
The thing is, we've almost all the nuclear bombs. And we're making more.
Have a nice day!
Uh, guys? Revelations was a metaphor for the fall of Rome. Seven hills, etc. Rome and its evil sway over the land of Israel was all the Jews cared about back in the first century.
Since to write about the fall of Rome was a one-way ticket to death by torture, political writings were dressed in metaphorical language that couldn't easily be read as traitorous. John of course mixed his religion with politics, but I don't think he meant it to be read like the writings of Nostradamus. Hell, Revelations almost didn't make the cut into the New Testament.
Indeed. I love the illogic of the companies selling these embeddable chips as deterrants to potential kidnappers of children.
What do ya think the first order of business is when they get a victim? Locate the chip.
Second? Cut it out of the kid.
Of course, the next step will be deep embedding of the chip next to the stomach or something.
The bad people will still cut them out. That's why they are called bad people.
THINK, America!
And I doubt Herr PolitzenFueher Ashcroft will have any chips planted in his body that the the Fatherland Security Department will find trackable. Nor his financial or demographic records. The Fatherland Security Act deems dissemination of such information, such as addresses or social security numbers of the Reich leaders as de facto terrorism with all the throw-your-ass-in-a-torture-chamber non-prison laws applying.
I'm not exagerating. Remember about a month ago when some people started skywriting personal information about (Ashcroft?)to prove a point about privacy? They couldn't give a whole number because that would have violated the Fatherland Security Act and they would have been yanked from public life for thirty years.
This is not funny.
No, no, no. All their rich men are corrupt. What the man they locked up did was to challenge the status quo.
ALL of them could be locked up for being "corrupt". But the police chose to only arrest the one man who was too "liberal". Amazingly enough, all the other corrupt crime bosses got a pass.
I say this to illustrate what is wrong about "law and order" police states. It all depends on who the leaders choose to prosecute. With careful selection, you can eliminate all your political enemies, and reign supremely corrupt forever.
Who of Enron is in jail? Seven billion stolen by fraud, stolen while the administration cheerled them on and blamed hippies for shutting down power plants. But somehow, the Justice Department has time to raid a cathouse in New Orleans and slam Tommy Chong in federal prison for selling plastic tubes.
It all depends on who you choose to see committing a crime. The crew who enabled Enron in California kicked out the only man who fingered them as the guilty party, and now control the governor. Wanna bet the Enron lawsuit gets dropped now? No criminals exist if no one prosecutes.
To use the Sony Betamax decision's logic, if a device has ANY -- ANY -- legal use, it cannot be banned. Otherwise the MPAA would have been granted their wish in the 80's, and VCR's would have been outlawed.
If the courts come to some other decision someday soon, it will mean that the judiciary has been seeded far too much with business-worshipping judgesin the last 23 years by rightwing administrations.
It's an impossible situation. When the last of the older judges have finally retired, it will be nigh impossible to bring cases to trial and expect fair treatment if in so doing business interests will be offended.
"pirating" means selling copies for MONEY.
RIAA is using Ginrich's handbook, in a sense. Corrupt the words, render your opponent helpless. Semantic warfare.
copying = piracy
copying = stealing
copiers = thieves = criminals = doubleplusbad
FYI: The first group that started linking copying and/or linking to "stealing" was the Church of Scientology in the very early 90's. They started the meme war (we're being robbed by criminals!) when people started posting their UFO secret scriptures online. They repeated, in courts, online, and to legislators, the following meme: copying is stealing, copying is stealing, copying is stealing, copying is stealing -- you are criminals, lawbreakers, thieves, badpeoplebbad....
looks like they won. Once the MPAA and RIAA coopted the semantic war, we have this nonsense reasoning going on.
LISTEN. Before all the new laws were bought by the CoS and the others, copying a CD for PROFIT was called pirating. Copying for private use was not really addressed as an infraction at all of civil law.
BUT neither were criminal infractions. They were CIVIL ones. Which means you don't go to jail, you pay a fine based on deprived income of the copyright holder.
NOT STEALING. COPYRIGHT VIOLATION. Stealing is depriving a property owner of his property. Copying does not steal property away. It merely makes more.
To paraphrase Jefferson on this very issue, when you light someone else's candle with the flame of your own, are you deprived of light yourself? No. You merely have created more light.
If someone lights their dark candle with yours without your permission, they are not depriving you of light. No theft occurs. The metaphor is still good after 200+ years.
Actually, not paranoid. Homeland security probably won't require a subpoena anyway. The ISP will hand it over on request.
, 00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_1
And today legislation was introduced that will formally eliminate the need for the FBI to subpoena business records:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,61341
They will rifle our records at will.
Like Germany in the Thirties, it drips, drips, drips...
"There is one area of our profession of course that cannot reasonably be outsourced and that is defense. "
Oh, not, not, not, NOT true.
Investigate how many components used in our national defense structure are made in China, South Korea, Japan, on and on. There is an immense problem in that, in order to save money and because we have LOST key domestic manufacturing capabilities, we are dependent on foreign good will to purchase parts to keep our defense going. And I'm sure most of the coding for industrial grade microprocessors which we purchase is done in countries other than the U.S.
Actually, there is a growing problem (for India) of tech jobs moving to former Soviet states. Coders there will work for a DOLLAR an hour!
I'm to lazy to Google it, but I do recall a IT manager in Bombay saying in amusement, "When will it end? When they find someone who works for free?"
I thought it funny until I thought of Chinese prison labor. I wonder if they'll start Comp Sci 101 classes in a gulag there soon.
You *can* get coding for free. Where is the Invisible Hand then?
I don't think people understand something. Countries other than the U.S. protect their own citizens by controlling immigration of workers that would threaten their own prosperity. India, for instance, will not permit a migration of American coders to take up apartments and jobs in India. They protect their own.
We are among a handful of nations whose business leaders are so greedy that they would annihilate the prosperity of their own homeland by shipping jobs overseas. And one of the few nations whose political leaders, and its PEOPLE as well, who would let it happen because of ideological madness.
"So (serious question) why don't ambitious American managers, programmers and technologists move to India? "
They are not permitted to.
India does not permit foreign workers to immigrate to India to take tech jobs.
Some idea they have about protecting their own citizens' jobs. What a strange idea.
..."and awarded millions to some idiot who couldn't figure out that driving a car with hot coffee between her laps was a bad idea."
.asp
Actually, she wasn't an idiot, and she didn't get millions.
If you investigate the "idiot's" case, instead of parroting the meme, you will find a couple of things you may not have known.
First, the coffee was not "hot". It was near-boiling. McDonalds in New Mexico had apparently kept the coffee super-hot - 180 degrees or higher - both to satisfy health inspectors who were concerned about coffee sitting in pots for hours, and to keep the coffee hotter longer for take-out orders.
Secondly, there were over 700 cases of such cases of people being injured by the boiling coffee.
Third: the woman wasn't driving, or doing anything else other than prying the lid off of the coffee cup between her thighs. The coffee splashed on her pants, and soaked her skin. She suffered third degree burns on her genitals, perineum, buttocks, and inner thighs. She underwent eight days of skin grafts and debridement (think of a steel wool pad scouring the subdermal layers of your now-skinless penis, boys). Normally hot coffee made at home doesn't make third degree burns; it is served at around 140 degrees. Near-boiling coffee, at 180-190 degrees, which McDs had been doing, does. I can add a personal observation: I've been burned by normal coffee, and also I've fallen into a puddle of boiling hot water. Believe me, 30 degrees or more variance determines the difference between a second and a third degree burn.
Fourth. She originally asked to settle her claim for 20 grand. McD's refused her offer.
Fifth. She didn't make millions. Here's a quote from ballinlaw.com:
"The jury awarded Ms. Liebeck $200,000 in compensatory damages (money to compensate the injured party for the injury sustained). The judge reduced this amount to $160,000 because the jury believed the plaintiff was 20 percent at fault. The jury also awarded Ms. Liebeck $2.7 million in punitive damages. The jury considered McDonald's actions reckless and willful, but despite this, the trial court reduced the punitive award to $480,000, which was considered three times her compensatory damages. "
Six. McD's in New Mexico reduced the serving temperature from 190 to 158 after the punitive damages.
http://ballinlaw.com/mcdonald.htm
Seven. The large judgement was not awarded because the woman was burned; it was because McD's had served the coffee at boiling temperature for years, ignoring over 700 instances of scaled customers. They found them willfully negligent for not reducing the temperature long before the 80+ year old lady lost the skin on her lap.
Here's some more documentation:
http://www.mattenlaw.com/FSL5CS/ar ticles/articles6
"The coffee was 40 degrees hotter than most other restaurants keep it - close to the 212 degree boiling point.
A national burn center had issued a public warning not to serve hot beverages over 135 degrees.
There were 700 other burn claims against McDonald's before this injury, yet no action was taken.
The victim offered to settle the case for $20,000 before trial, but McDonald's refused to settle. "
"The jury in this case decided that the coffee was a defective product and that McDonald's had violated products liability laws that assure that consumers are protected.
The jury awarded her $200,000 in compensatory damages (to compensate her for past and future pain, suffering, emotional distress, lost wages, and medical bills). The jury also decided that she was 20% at fault and reduced her damage award by that amount.
The jury also awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages. However, the judge reduced the award of punitive damages to $480,000. The case settled for an undisclosed amount before it was appealed."
Now that we've discussed the facts of the case, I'm up for some editorial comment.
BIG point: The vast, vast majority of liability cases do no
Sorry to post twice, but I forgot to make the point.
.Net, the MS Windows Media Player Digital Rights Management, and the lovely DMCA, most legal digital music is managed by MS. A new generation of kids grow up thinking that this is the way it always has been, and doesn't care about might-have-beens.
Here's what MS will do, based on their past behavior, and that of other monopolies:
They make available a large music library for sale. They price the tunes far below what Musicmatch, AOL, or iTunes can sanely afford; as a matter of fact, with a forty billion dollar bank account, they can sell at a loss. Hell, they can give it away.
Competitors, constrained by stockholders and business realities, won't be able to match the price. They'll fail.
Rejoice, you'd have cheap music!
Uh oh.
With competitors dead, and investors loathe to create new businesses to compete with a company that can run a music download site at a loss forever, Microsoft becomes a near-monopoly distributor of legally downloadable music. Music labels and artists must deal with MS, realistically, even though technically they are free operators. This, by the way, is why monopolies are supposed to be regulated: they extend their monopoly into other arenas, forever, unless checked.
Oops. As time rolls on, MS starts, say, offering a new "premium" deal which costs more than the giveaway prices already established. Who knows the details now, but it'd happen.
Eventually, more people flock to the higher priced offerings. MS eventually phases out the giveaway downloads, or at least offers such crud for free that no one wants the stuff.
Meanwhile, thanks to
At the end of the cycle, all decent music and/or everything else digital is licensed and priced by MS Inc. And it will cost far more than it does now.
This is how MS has always done business. This is how monopoly works. Invade a new market, eliminate the competition by giving a product away using a fat bank account, then raise the prices after the competitors have been eliminated.
You'd think that a free market would give rise to competitors that could take away MS's advantages with new tech, but that ignores Adam Smith's warnings about the need to control monopoly. Businesses collude (MS and the music industry, for instance), business conspire to control the market.
Look at what MS is doing in the game machine market. They'll keep selling X-Boxes at a loss until they eliminate the competition, or Gates decides that the cost of invading a market outweigh the benefits of a new monopoly.
"Not to sound rude to the almighty slashdotters our there, but why the cyncism? Microsoft might be making music downloads cheap for everyone."
I know it sounds patronizing, but you're pretty young if you don't understand why MS's entry into a market is bad.
"I just hope they aren't taking money away from everyone else in the state to pay for something that's only going to benefit the cities."
That argument has been used to good effect in the rural and suburban voter areas for a century.
The problem is, the people in the non-urban areas of the country have been on city-financed welfare for decades. Most of the western U.S. states, those which hate federal taxes the most, get three times the revenue they pay back in federal funds to develop the countryside; mostly roads and damns.
It's a lovely reflexive attack, because those who benefit most per capita from federal spending are the biggest complainers about their taxes.
"How about fixing the potholes on my street?"
Hey! Why do I have to pay taxes to fix the potholes on YOUR street? Leech! Fix your own potholes!
No taxes! Freedom! Good streets for those who can pay for them!
Seriously, there can never be a "unified voice of the people". They are too heterogeneous. If that is the metric, then no one's potholes get fixed; hell, there wouldn't be government built streets.
All spending on public works can be defeated with the "we don't all benefit" argument.
"When the demand is more than phones, then work on it. Do not try and predict demand."
The demand is obviously being constricted by the dearth of cheap pipes. If we wait for the "demand" to grow enough to justify private investment in FO to the home, it will never happen. The present setup is just dandy for whomever is selling pathetic connectivity. They will not roll out replacements for their current cash cows.
Think of it this way. Pretend that, instead of bandwidth, the "scarcity" is water. An imperfect analogy, 'cause water is finite and bandwidth is infinite... though the difference actually helps the argument.
Anyway. Pretend that we all lived in a area with no water lines, 20 years ago. People got their water from wells, and toted the water to their homes on their shoulders. Not a scarcity situation, for people got all the water they could drink.
Now pretend that someone invented a water pipe that piggybacked on existing equipment, and that water was found to be a resource that could simply be manufactured and shipped. People discover that they can use water not jusut for drinking, but for cooking.
Then someone discovers that they can build giant sluices that enable the supply to be increased twenty-fold to each customer. But, instead of the government building the infrastructure, a hundred thousand businesses compete to supply the water using products from vendors who try to maximize profit.
Imagine that the orignal well owners insist on covering their original invenstments + maintenance + cash to buy lots of other companies.
A state of balance eventually occurs when the businesses find their sweet spot financially. Instead of gallons of water per minute, people pay a reasonable price for a trickle of water, enough to wash their face and take the occasional shower. They don't NEED all that water, really. And who wants to put all the pipe companies out of business?
An artificial scarcity is maintained, with the vendors of the pipes and the providers of the water maximizing what profits they can.
Now, what if the government simply had built the pipes and the water could go sluicing down the pipes for practically nothing? Suppose the government, as the main supplier, could dictate terms to the piper manufacturers, forcing the equipment prices down?
One could say that the government wasn't necessary to supply water, because the trickle was enough, and the businesses needed to make a decent profit.
But who decided that? The businesses. Who speaks up for the consumer of water? The government, which they own.
The government could have supplied the water from the beginning, at orders of magnitude lower cost.
If you don't think this is possible, I point you to municipal water supplies in the real world. If they had been provided by the free market, we'd be metering water like champagne.
You're not thinking about the diapers aspect. A certain lack of dignity, I think.
I dunno if I really want the meat part of me wandering around widdling myself and screaming "Teri Amos!" after I'm deactiveated. I mean, really. The cost alone is prohibitive. It would an insult to whatever I've accomplished.
We don't let DOGS do that to themselves. Why do we insist on making each other suffer?
Isn't V.C. Andrews still emailing in his novels? Elron Hubbard is still tapping away after death, too.
I don't believe that HIV can be transfered via the air. If the assistants had decided to inject themselves with a contaminated needle, there would be a very slim chance they could contract it. HIV is not easy to contract. I don't believe a BH level three is necessary. The scientist was right;there was little or no danger as long as you didn't inject it subcutaneously. The assistants were just scared of the word "AIDS".
Phil Donahue had the best rated program on MS-NBC (or CNBC?). He was canned because he was allowing people with views that contradicted the President's view on war. And no, this is not a liberal "conspiracy theory"; the internal memo concerning Donahue's cancellation got leaked. Go look it up.
They put on a show, replacing Phil's, that presented some psycho right winger who eventually told a gay caller to get AIDS and die. Savage, I think his name was. His show now has zero ratings, becaue they canned his hate-filled ass. But since they knew who he was when they hired him, they obviously wanted him to say such things.
There aren't any "liberal" (read: people who do not regularly profess hard-right viewpoints as facts) talk shows on television, none, that I can see. The few reporters who are old enough and smart enough to understand what is going on are too afraid of losing their jobs and their standing if they even utter a peep about the bias. Read about that CNN reporter who said CNN toed the Bush line hard to placate the Fox viewship; she got spanked hard. Fox went wild smearing her, proving her point. Rather said in a Euorpean interview that reporters are no longer permitted to tell the truth anymore, and that he would be "necklaced" (read South African history for a reference) if he said anything the hardrighters didn't like.
You DON'T GET AIRED if you contradict the right-wing for very long.
Firefox, 1983, with Clint Eastwood.
I can understand why anyone would think I pull data out of the air. It was like pulling teeth to find stories. I found it very interesting that CNN had damn-all on a lot of subjects... it seems they are too intimidated to report on things the neocons don't want discussed. But, I persevered.
... Bush Clamping Down On Presidential Papers Incumbent Could Lock Up Predecessor's ...
... advisors, or between such advisors" sealed for 12 ... and Carter willingly released their ... year period for the Reagan papers expired in ...
... The memo was among 8,000 pages of Reagan presidential papers released at ... been released ...
... Just recently, Bush decreed that those papers will remain sealed for as long ... His ...
... advisors, or between such advisors" sealed for 12 ... and Carter willingly released their ... year period for the Reagan papers expired in ...
My god. Is our children learning? How in the hell can Bush's people be judged if no one wants to report on their actions on a regular basis?
No wonder the country has neocon fever. How could they not? They don't hear anything!
Links:
I do know. The Bush administration, on reaching office, immediately sealed the records of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, as well as all future records of the current adminstration. Clinton's are wide open, though.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=U TF -8&q=sealed+presidential+papers+Bush+
Bush Clamping Down On Presidential Papers (washingtonpost.com)
Records By George Lardner Jr. Washington Post Staff
www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20731-2001 Oct31
NM&L (Fall 2001): Reagan's White House papers stay sealed
presidential papers after 12
www.rcfp.org/news/mag/25-4/foi-reaganp.html - 7k - Cached - Similar pages
CBS News | Reagan Papers Released | January 4, 2002 09:58:30
last January but were kept sealed as the Bush administration worked
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/ 04/politics/main323121.shtml - 35k - Cached - Similar pages
Secret Papers
executive order stipulates that, in order for presidential papers to be
www.skepticism.org/politics/lib_SecretPapers. shtml - 19k - Cached - Similar pages
NM&L (Fall 2001): Reagan's White House papers stay sealed
presidential papers after 12
www.rcfp.org/news/mag/25-4/foi-reaganp.html - 7k - Cached - Similar pages
This administration has ordered government agencies to hinder Freedom of Information Act requests.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2002/09/re090302.htm l
"For whatever reason, this administration has gone way way too far in its pursuit of secrecy in some particularly worrying ways," said Mark Tapscott, head of the Center for Media and Public Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "
"Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration was expanding secrecy. It moved to hold up the release of presidential papers from former President Ronald Reagan and insisted on keeping secret members of an energy policy task force chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney."
"This administration is the most secretive of our lifetime, even more secretive than the Nixon administration. They don't believe the American people or Congress have any right to information," said last week Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that is suing the administration to force it to reveal the members of the energy task force. "
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.a sp ?documentID=15902
"Among the more egregious actions, Attorney General John Ashcroft told government agencies in an Oct. 12, 2001, memo
I do know. The Bush administration, on reaching office, immediately sealed the records of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, as well as all future records of the current adminstration. Clinton's are wide open, though.
This administration has ordered government agencies to hinder Freedom of Information Act requests.
This administration now has effectively refused to honor Freedom of Information Act requests.
This administration has ignored subpoenas regarding its energy polices meetings.
This administration has refused to cooperate with 9/11 investigators RE what the President's briefings said about the possibility of attacks just prior to 9/11. Simply hindered and refused.
This is what I know.