"Prostitution is harmful to health (STDs, violent pimps, emotional handicap of many prostitutes)."
CRIMINALIZED prostitution makes pimps and slaves, not legalized prostitution. Not to mention impoverished prostitutes. The emotional damage is caused by pimps, johns who can't be found or charged, police that don't care, and the fact that the women are de facto slaves with no escape route.
Legalized prostitution, done right, eliminates pimps, who exist outside the law, makes prostitutes rich, if they handle the money right, and empowers the woman rather than enslaves her, because she's a volunteer, being highly paid, rather than a chained and abused slave.
The major reason why women couldn't sell sex legally in our history is this: they'd be rich and independent, and that was NOT to be allowed by men, period. After all, they are the sole providers of a highly valued commodity.
Illegal prostitution gave men the ability to take the women's money away, in one form or another: by artificially lowering the price, by inserting male middlemen who could use their physical or political power to take a huge cut, and turning the business into a slave market.
The White House on Friday condemned research in South Korea for producing human embryros through cloning and said President Bush would veto any legislation that loosens federal restrictions in the United States on embryonic stem cell research.
White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy said the work in South Korea amounted to human cloning for the sole purpose of scientific research. "The president is opposed to that," Duffy said. "That represents exactly what we're opposed to."
Separately, he said the president would veto legislation to permit spending government money for stem cell research that would destroy human embryos. A measure by Reps. Mike Castle (R-Delaware) and Diana DeGette (D-Colorado) would lift Bush's 2001 ban on the use of federal dollars for research using any new embryonic stem cell lines.
Bush, in his fifth year in office, has not yet exercised his first veto. The White House also promised a veto this week of a highway bill if it exceeded the administration's spending limits.
Bush began the day at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast where he was cheered for urging people to "pray that America uses the gift of freedom to build a culture of life."
The remark was a public reaffirmation of his position on sensitive issues such as abortion and stem cell research.
Bush recalled the legacy of the late Pope John Paul II and said, "The best way to honor this great champion of human freedom is to continue to build a culture of life where the strong protect the weak."
Bush won 52 percent of the Roman Catholic vote in last year's election and got the support of 56 percent of white Catholics, defeating the first Catholic presidential candidate from a major party since John F. Kennedy. In 2000, Bush narrowly lost the Catholic vote.
It's banned under executive order, i.e., Bush commanded it.
To jog people's memories: the ban was signed by Bush after he spent a week or so on retreat "thinking" about the subject exclusively, and listening to religious pundits, yet few if no scientists. It was late August and early September. Of 2001.
The weeks he didn't read the briefing titled "bin Laden determined to strike within U.S."
Good trade. No stem cell research in the U.S. for the twin towers, the Pentagon, and four airplanes.
"Those 2 year technical institutes are a scam designed to separate you from your money as quickly as possible for the promise of a few certificates. I know a guy who started going to the same university that I did and eventually gave up and went to ITT for a 2 year courseload. He's now fixing computers in Best Buy for 10 bucks an hour. Too bad he owes 32 grand in loans for his "education.""
But -- is that because ITT was a bad "education", or was it because IT people don't bother looking at anyone who didn't go to a 4 year university?
Is it what he knows, or is it where he went and what friends he knows? Does taking four years of literature actually make you a better coder?
To go to a four year prestigious school, you need either good grades and an artfully guided extracurricular life designed to get you a scholarship -- which means money sometimes and being raised in the right suburb almost certainly -- or, your family has ca$$h.
Failing that, to work your way through a state university will not get you the job opportunities that CalTech would. You're almost an ITT grad. You will be working at Best Buy. You may be the best code in the world, but if you came from Joe's university or DeVry, you've got a hill to climb, and you are not going to find the skilift that the CalTechers use.
The good jobs go to those who went to the primo schools and made the primo contacts. That is pretty the way it always has been. At high levels, it's a clubhouse.
And it is a fact that even if you work your tail off, you statistically won't succeed if you start off at the bottom as well as those who started with a boost. If this guy with a family works 8 hours a day, he isn't going to a four year for money and time reasons. Even if he could, his four year degree will take him 6-8 years, and he'll be too "old" to start out with the 18-22 year-olds when he graduates.
It's luck of birth, where you probably wind up.
It's amazing how picky age-wise and degree-snobbish employers are, considering the shortage of workers.
US companies followed the lead of every other free-range corporation and went overseas to find five-buck an hour coders. They got 'em.
They canned permanent workers and replaced them with temps and contract workers, all without benefits. Wow, what incentive.
They scorn workplace rules won decades ago by workers and use loopholes to make employees work 40-90 hour weeks. No laws need apply.
They flooded the market with H1B workers who can't quit and can't complain about overwork because they'd get booted home. And they want MORE H1B's.
They, and the entire coding industry including the currently employed, will not accept anyone starting out in the business who is not 22 years old. If you are over 35 and not going into management, say goodbye as well. This is a serious point. Their is an age floor AND ceiling that keeps perfectly good people out. Why get into an industry if you can only get decent work from age 18-35? It's engraved into the heart of the culture.:) If ya don't look good in a swimsuit, don't come a-knockin'.
If you do enter the workforce, you become a nomad, bouncing from job to job, city to city. Spouse and family? You're kidding, right? And I'm a guy; why would a woman want to work in a career that demands she will go through hell raising kids?
I'm sure others can think of more points.
A lot of you will say, "You don't like it? Do something else, we don't need you."
Exactly. But it turns out that you all really do need us old expensive farts with actual lives after all.
Once again, sharing is not selling, is not piracy. The various *AA's want the terminology confused, and no doubt will be successful in their BS campaign. Redefine the words, and opponents have no chance in an argument because the audience hears definitions in their own minds that were implanted by BS campaigns. It's a wonderful strategy. Oppose the war? You oppose the troops. Share a file? You steal/sell the file. Oppose Bush? You oppose America. Want reproduction and birth control education in schools at an early age? You're for little-kid promiscuity. Oppose inserting religion into the government? Anti-Christian, probably satanistic, certainly anti-American.
The analogy fails because you invoked the idea that I and my friends are selling parts of the book for a dollar. We are not selling anything; as a matter of fact, we pay for the bandwidth, tho that is irrelevant. What if we sat on the corner and let passers-by read our portions? Are we stealing then? The who **AA argument rests on the fallacy that just because it's electronic, the old traditions and laws should be junked. Frankly, they're using this to give themselves rights under law they always wanted, but never could get. They're using the newness of the technology to redefine copyright as ownership, which is NOT what copyright is about. Not to mention that the new copyrights are now eternal, which breaks the original deal the constitution's writers had in mind, which is: make cash for a bit, then the work goes into the public domain forever to enrich all. The deal was broken, so all bets are off. Change the copyright laws so that copyrights expire in twenty years after publication, and then we can talk. Right now, copyright=ownership for eternity. A free marketplace for ideas can't exist like this.
I swear. This type of science is sounding more and more like Stan Lee's Marvel dialog every year.
I've been a science geek my whole life, and I have barely an idea of what they are talking about. I thought there was some disagreement about the existence of the multidimensional strings. Is that over now?
We're going to wake up one day and someone in Portugal will have a wormhole operating in his lab, or an antimatter explosion will accidently be set off in Japan. Careful, boys, we're getting into comic book territory now.
Nope. The right to record on-air and on-cable programming has been established as Fair Use for decades. Add to this that the recorder has PAID for the programming.
Distributing on Bittorrent is as evil as borrowing a friend's videotape. Which we can do.
As for people not paying for the program they are downloading, let's rememeber that an unlimited number of people can come over to a subscriber's house and watch programming they have not paid for. And unlimited number can watch a videotape made by a subscriber. And none of this is illegal.
The idea that the home is a metered box office is honored by legislators, but is novel to the people actually watching the TV. People don't accept the idea. They never will, no matter how much lip service is paid to the Boss Gods about watching recordings = stealing. Because it isn't stealing. A TV screen is agnostic, and can't be regulated in the real world.
If the business model of cable operators or the MPAA can't survive bittorrent, then they will die out. Good riddance. Something else will take their place, something less commercial and predatory, perhaps more artistically democratic and cheaper to maintain. But I see no indication that they are even suffering from downloading, much less dying. The movie industry is fat and rich from DVDs and box office, the cable companies are buying each other and major film libraries; no one is hurting. Pity.
Ya know, it seems that this situation should be impossible if a PC were designed correctly. After all, the Space Shuttle originally had 6 identical computers working simultaneously and independently; results of computations were compared constantly. If a computer went bonkers, the other five would instantly lobotomize it, put it into a mode in which it could not hurt anything, and sound lots o' alarms. Apollo missions had three onboard computers, I think.
A really solid PC would have at least three physical processors, each checking on the status of the other two. If one BSODs, the other two should shut it down and reboot that subsystem until it checks out -- or shut it down and signal for help.
It sounds expensive, but parts are getting cheaper. CPUs are becoming potato chips, harddrives will eventually become solid state, yadda yadda. What's more expensive, a couple more chips and more complex mobo, or an embarrasingly loonie PC shutting down a reservations desk?
"I see a computer running an information display that has crashed. Either a bluescreen of death (soon to be redscreen AND bluescreen of death in Longhorn), or a fundamental error message. This never looks good to customers and is bad advertising in large traffic areas."
I recall driving up to a gas station some years back, to find that the pump's display screen was showing cascading program errors. This may/may not have been Windows' fault, but it does not inspire me with confidence.
The recording industries tried to make player piano rolls, cassette tapes, library loans, DAT, video tape, second hand music stores and recordable CD's illegal. They all failed, and now recording content is considered fair use. The various industries over the last hundred years insisted that libraries, VCR's, player pianos, and second-hand book and CD stores would ruin them and put their poor starving children on the street to sell apples. Didn't happen. They are ALL richer than God now. They've no argument.
They now insist that file sharing is illegal; such opinions should be adjudged by their previous legal opinions on the above media. They were wrong then, and they will be wrong again someday when the political axis shifts in a decade or so and new judges and lawmakers dump their player piano roll-hating screeds into the dumper of history.
Aside from the hubris of their ideas of controlling everyone's actions, the world can't afford another War on a Common Noun. IF we somehow manage to prevent the corporations from hiring their own police forces and forming their own courts/collection agencies, the civil and criminal courts and normal law enforcement do not have the capacity or the funds to arrest and prosecute the entire planet. Half the adult population of the U.S. and Europe would be in prison or a debtor's farm if these laws were to be enforced to their fullest extent.
Unlike the Bill of Rights, which don't change with the whim of the public, civil law about copyright and distribution will change if enough citizens become "criminals". They will change the laws, even if they have to vote every idiot who covers the old corporate bastards out of office. People don't like being sued and sent to jail when they don't think what they are doing is wrong. And make no mistake, they will turn. Their is no moral issue here; copying is not stealing. Lighting a candle with another candle doesn't diminish either, as Tom Jefferson said. We didn't create copyright to make people rich and loaded with "rights" to distribute media and knowledge. We created CR to permit authors to make a living, for a limited time, on new art, and then to let it be free to inspire new art. If CR no longer serves that purpose, it has to go.
As for me, I lost all sympathy for the copyright holders when the Sonny Bono Act made copyrights eternal. There was a 200 year-old deal: we give you a limited time to make money, and a living, then it gets kicked into the public domain. That deal is broken, and it isn't getting fixed. I do not want to see "intellectual property" eternally locked up in the vaults of immortal corporations. Human advancement requires that works of art and science be distribute freely, at some point, but that no longer can happen. The deal is broken. We did not break it. They did. So, war. And we will win, and the copyright gods will lose.
On this subject, people forget that not so long in the past, one of the reasons for foreskin removal was to cut down on the pleasure provided by the foreskin's presence, thus inhibiting mastubatory impulses in their Precious Children. The other reasons were "cleanliness", which means people didn't bathe a lot once upon a time; and the fact that a circumcision is always a guaranteed bill-padding item for any obstetrician and hospital. The last reason is the main impetus for Dr. Hackemoff to sell his patients on Clean Living and Clean Deeds in the last century or so.
Nowadays it is done mainly so that your kid won't look funny.
I don't think women would like the idea so much if a similar procedure was performed on baby girls (and yes, I am aware they are done).
Science can't win as a supernatural investigations agent, because whatever they investigate is defined by non-scientists as "natural"; "supernature" is defined as anything not conducive to investigation. If a scientist actually detected a free-standing, self-perpetuating EM field that consists of the surviving personality of a dead man, it wouldn't be "supernatural" to the religionists. The Supernature crowd would redefine the term to not-include ghosts; it would merely be the physical remnant of the person, in a state prepatory to going to God at a later time. Infinite regression, as they have done so many times before. And the carnival would go on.
This isn't about truth, or logic. The Biblists believe their reading of the book, American Southern Fundie standard, IS THE TRUTH, and that is THAT. Everything they do is sophistry aimed at their ultimate goal of remaking science and society and politics into a Dominionist utopia. And ending the world, of course.
Please, everyone, stop a moment and think about this.
Who is "terror", and have they been threatening us? Utterly unexamined assumption.
We got hit by a few dozen nutters a few years ago, and now we are under a "terror threat".
Firstly, a threat is a statement of intent -- a SPECIFIC statement -- that someone is coming to hurt or kill you.
Secondly, what the hell is "terror"? Bush has slapped the label on so many disparate factions and actions so as to make the term meaningless. Someone shoots at someone in the Phillipines? Terror. Someone kidnaps someone for ransom? A terrorist act. We invade a country, kill tens of thousands and mutilate far more -- those who shoot back are branded "terrorists" of the same stripe who blow up trains in Spain. Teacher's unions have been labelled terrorists by a Congresscritter.
The word "terrorist" is a simple cognate coined and maintained as a substitute for the old Red/Communist/Russian/Soviet monolithic "they" that we were told was intent on killing or subverting us for over fifty years. It turned out that the original threat estimate for the Soviets were based on "information" offered up by ex-Nazis in the same manner information is "offered" by people in Guantanamo. The prisoners tell the torturer what they want to hear: The Soviets are mighty and mad; Al Queda has cells EVERYWHERE and is planning to kill again soon, please, not the electrodes again...
Terrorism. What is shock and awe, but terror? What is slaugtering your way into a country, but terror? What was what we did, invading and killing to capture Noriega, but terror? Terror is an emotion, not a tactic. It is felt by us, not inflicted on us. We've become flaming cowards, afraid of everything and everyone, condoning torture and kidnap and murder of "terrorists", which is nothing but an label slapped onto any damned one that Bush wants to eliminate. The Partiot Act has created a dictator who has declared that human rights and treaties don't apply to "terrorists", as Bushie said just yesterday. Since "terror" is defined as "anything that makes us uneasy or afraid", and a "terrorist" can be declared secretly by the Bush team, Bush has declared "war" on no particular person, has no timetable for the "war" to be ended, has no definition of the terms of its ending.
By ceding this terminology to Bush's whim, we've created an uncheckable police state that recognizes no national boundaries and strips human rights, in holes in the ground, from people snatched from their homes in the middle of the night.
The most telling point to be made is that when Bush's Justice Department takes the few cases it has made to the court system, they have convicted NO ONE on the evidence; on the contrary, they have consistently lost every case they have had to make.
Terror? Threat? The terror is the fear instilled in you by national hysteria fed by a pack of radicals intent on a revolution in our way of life and law. The threat is pathetic; a few dozen wackos who barely have had enough juice to make video tapes. They got lucky once, and they got what they wanted: an America attacking the oil rich countries, just as they predicted. We've made far, far more enemies killing -- quite illegally -- the Iraqis than we had before 9/11. We've made the nonexistent enemy a reality by our own terror and yes, racism and confusion, and by an elect few, greedy for power and riches beyond count.
Actually, no incidents were ever reported until a state attorney cast a net looking for some. It's amazing how much crime you can find if you advertise on a web page for victims. The incident that was settled years ago I discount -- how much payment would you consider to let a man off the hook for assaulting your son? Apparently, the dad wanted some millions or he'd make an accusation. After legal wrangling, MJ paid him off to make the slime go away -- a very bad idea, leading to what is happening now.
Kids: don't watch this "news" on cable anymore. It's not news, it's lazy pseudojournalistic exploitation for ratings, and fame for the prosecutors. Take it from an old guy: CNN et al have tanked and turned into tabloid horsecrap. The golden age of news in the U.S. is over for now.
1. Denial 2. Derision 3. Accusation 4. PR 5. Inviting everyone to sit down together at table 6. Get goods on Stallman, blackmail 7. Patent everything at the table 8. Toss everyone off the table 9. Profit! 10. Sue 2000 IRS employees simultaneously, get IRS to declare Microsoft a religion 11. Try to enable Kirstie Allen's comeback
Existence is debatable. Anything is debatable if one uses the false equivalence fallacy. Just because an opposing point of view can be constructed, ie vs global warming consensus, vs population growth limitation, vs reduction of oil consumption, doesn't mean the opposing view is worth debating. PR firms and Bushites use that technique constantly, and the new networks have become useless because of that false equivalence fallacy. Existence of opposing view does not equate with need to debate.
How mobbed up are the record companies? How many wise guys and friends of friends actually run that industry?
Are they specially treated in Congress, even tho their revenues are tiny compared to the PC and home entertainment companies, because there are Very Special People who might get upset if they are ignored?
Not only movie theaters could take advantage of removable terabyte disc storage. Films are being transferred to digital format for archival purposes in 4K resolution -- 4000 lines vertical. New films like Sin City are originally recorded in hi-def digital formats, and more will come.
Movie maniacs could have super-ultra-lastword-that's it-no-more 4K video for home use, if terabyte media isn't a problem. As for screens that could display such resolutions, they'll come when we need them.
"We need to continue to grow the per capita energy allocation. "
You can't. Not in the near future, not with world oil production at max with no discernible possiblities to find more, not with nuclear plant bans. There is no power generation capacity for the entire planet that will enable 7 billion people to match our standard of consumption. It's not going to happen, and to demand that reality reboot itself so that we don't have to change our habits is oil-black religion.
Reality is knocking, first with $100/barrel oil prices -- then it's going to get nasty. We've no national conservation program, no effeciency programs, no car-reduction programs -- hell, we in the US won't even change the CAFE standards for cars or tax the SUV's out of existence. The free market is not our friend here. As a matter of national security, as a matter of WORLD security, we need to make fuel efficent transport, build our suburbs with mass transit in mind, and build new and safer nuclear plants -- and we needed to do it thirty years ago.
As a result of letting cars do their thing, oil companies will become trillionaires while our national incomes divert to their coffers. Our budgets are busting now, trying to build and rebuiild roads and highways that cost too much for the number of people using them. The freedom for people to live in suburbs, on my dime ('cause we are all subsidizing those miles of concrete to nowhere) is the bankruptcy of the oil-consuming world.
If you have a family of four and you are making less than 31K, you've got a lot of financial problems as it is. Tax credit for those who are living on the edge is reasonable.
Tax removal from the wealthy in time of war is just plain nuts. Credit or no, they are doing just fine in their private lives.
Eventually the burden gets dumped on the Great Middle, who are perhaps closer to the edge than they think moneywise. One medical bill too many, and you're kaput, and perhaps soon will not be able to declare for relief by bankruptcy. How many times as the Donald gone bankrupt? Once? Twice? He's building a new tower in Chicago, and despite having no descernible talent, has a TV show. If a middle class family goes broke trying to pay for MRI's and doctor's fees, they just live in a car. Something's not right, when the helpless get no help and the bankrupt mighty never miss a hundred dollar meal.
Just raising the income ceiling for SS contributions would solve most of that program's shortfalls, and likewise raising taxes back to 2000 levels would solve all of our current woes, exempting the interest payment additions we've accumulated in the last three years. Because of THAT increased obligation, we'll have to kack taxes higher than 2000 levels just to pay back the "credit card" hangover caused by the last three years' deficit spending. The supply-side miracle hasn't happened, so let's put the fantasy away and start paying off the drunken orgy tab.
Let the near-poor keep their money -- it's negligible anyway. Raise the taxes for the wealthy back to 2000 levels, retax capital gains, stop this estate tax repeal idiocy, and for god's sake tax the corporations again in a concrete way! The biggest pay no taxes. BTW; the new constitution we dictated for Iraq caps the corporate tax rate at nearly zero -- those poor bastard common people are going to get reamed come taxtime.
Slashdot Mirror
"Prostitution is harmful to health (STDs, violent pimps, emotional handicap of many prostitutes)."
CRIMINALIZED prostitution makes pimps and slaves, not legalized prostitution. Not to mention impoverished prostitutes. The emotional damage is caused by pimps, johns who can't be found or charged, police that don't care, and the fact that the women are de facto slaves with no escape route.
Legalized prostitution, done right, eliminates pimps, who exist outside the law, makes prostitutes rich, if they handle the money right, and empowers the woman rather than enslaves her, because she's a volunteer, being highly paid, rather than a chained and abused slave.
The major reason why women couldn't sell sex legally in our history is this: they'd be rich and independent, and that was NOT to be allowed by men, period. After all, they are the sole providers of a highly valued commodity.
Illegal prostitution gave men the ability to take the women's money away, in one form or another: by artificially lowering the price, by inserting male middlemen who could use their physical or political power to take a huge cut, and turning the business into a slave market.
Bush's response
0 .html
Bush Blasts Human Clone Research
Associated Press
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,67586,0
08:40 AM May. 20, 2005 PT
The White House on Friday condemned research in South Korea for producing human embryros through cloning and said President Bush would veto any legislation that loosens federal restrictions in the United States on embryonic stem cell research.
White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy said the work in South Korea amounted to human cloning for the sole purpose of scientific research. "The president is opposed to that," Duffy said. "That represents exactly what we're opposed to."
Separately, he said the president would veto legislation to permit spending government money for stem cell research that would destroy human embryos. A measure by Reps. Mike Castle (R-Delaware) and Diana DeGette (D-Colorado) would lift Bush's 2001 ban on the use of federal dollars for research using any new embryonic stem cell lines.
Bush, in his fifth year in office, has not yet exercised his first veto. The White House also promised a veto this week of a highway bill if it exceeded the administration's spending limits.
Bush began the day at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast where he was cheered for urging people to "pray that America uses the gift of freedom to build a culture of life."
The remark was a public reaffirmation of his position on sensitive issues such as abortion and stem cell research.
Bush recalled the legacy of the late Pope John Paul II and said, "The best way to honor this great champion of human freedom is to continue to build a culture of life where the strong protect the weak."
Bush won 52 percent of the Roman Catholic vote in last year's election and got the support of 56 percent of white Catholics, defeating the first Catholic presidential candidate from a major party since John F. Kennedy. In 2000, Bush narrowly lost the Catholic vote.
End of story
"great enough to constitute a firing offence (shagging a student, for example)"
There wouldn't be any staff left if that rule were enforced.
It's banned under executive order, i.e., Bush commanded it.
To jog people's memories: the ban was signed by Bush after he spent a week or so on retreat "thinking" about the subject exclusively, and listening to religious pundits, yet few if no scientists. It was late August and early September. Of 2001.
The weeks he didn't read the briefing titled "bin Laden determined to strike within U.S."
Good trade. No stem cell research in the U.S. for the twin towers, the Pentagon, and four airplanes.
"Those 2 year technical institutes are a scam designed to separate you from your money as quickly as possible for the promise of a few certificates. I know a guy who started going to the same university that I did and eventually gave up and went to ITT for a 2 year courseload. He's now fixing computers in Best Buy for 10 bucks an hour. Too bad he owes 32 grand in loans for his "education.""
But -- is that because ITT was a bad "education", or was it because IT people don't bother looking at anyone who didn't go to a 4 year university?
Is it what he knows, or is it where he went and what friends he knows? Does taking four years of literature actually make you a better coder?
To go to a four year prestigious school, you need either good grades and an artfully guided extracurricular life designed to get you a scholarship -- which means money sometimes and being raised in the right suburb almost certainly -- or, your family has ca$$h.
Failing that, to work your way through a state university will not get you the job opportunities that CalTech would. You're almost an ITT grad. You will be working at Best Buy. You may be the best code in the world, but if you came from Joe's university or DeVry, you've got a hill to climb, and you are not going to find the skilift that the CalTechers use.
The good jobs go to those who went to the primo schools and made the primo contacts. That is pretty the way it always has been. At high levels, it's a clubhouse.
And it is a fact that even if you work your tail off, you statistically won't succeed if you start
off at the bottom as well as those who started with a boost. If this guy with a family works 8 hours a day, he isn't going to a four year for money and time reasons. Even if he could, his four year degree will take him 6-8 years, and he'll be too "old" to start out with the 18-22 year-olds when he graduates.
It's luck of birth, where you probably wind up.
It's amazing how picky age-wise and degree-snobbish employers are, considering the shortage of workers.
Let's see.
:) If ya don't look good in a swimsuit, don't come a-knockin'.
US companies followed the lead of every other free-range corporation and went overseas to find five-buck an hour coders. They got 'em.
They canned permanent workers and replaced them with temps and contract workers, all without benefits. Wow, what incentive.
They scorn workplace rules won decades ago by workers and use loopholes to make employees work 40-90 hour weeks. No laws need apply.
They flooded the market with H1B workers who can't quit and can't complain about overwork because they'd get booted home. And they want MORE H1B's.
They, and the entire coding industry including the currently employed, will not accept anyone starting out in the business who is not 22 years old. If you are over 35 and not going into management, say goodbye as well. This is a serious point. Their is an age floor AND ceiling that keeps perfectly good people out. Why get into an industry if you can only get decent work from age 18-35? It's engraved into the heart of the culture.
If you do enter the workforce, you become a nomad, bouncing from job to job, city to city. Spouse and family? You're kidding, right? And I'm a guy; why would a woman want to work in a career that demands she will go through hell raising kids?
I'm sure others can think of more points.
A lot of you will say, "You don't like it? Do something else, we don't need you."
Exactly. But it turns out that you all really do need us old expensive farts with actual lives after all.
But you won't accept it. Goodbye, coding base.
Once again, sharing is not selling, is not piracy. The various *AA's want the terminology confused, and no doubt will be successful in their BS campaign. Redefine the words, and opponents have no chance in an argument because the audience hears definitions in their own minds that were implanted by BS campaigns. It's a wonderful strategy. Oppose the war? You oppose the troops. Share a file? You steal/sell the file. Oppose Bush? You oppose America. Want reproduction and birth control education in schools at an early age? You're for little-kid promiscuity. Oppose inserting religion into the government? Anti-Christian, probably satanistic, certainly anti-American.
The analogy fails because you invoked the idea that I and my friends are selling parts of the book for a dollar. We are not selling anything; as a matter of fact, we pay for the bandwidth, tho that is irrelevant. What if we sat on the corner and let passers-by read our portions? Are we stealing then? The who **AA argument rests on the fallacy that just because it's electronic, the old traditions and laws should be junked. Frankly, they're using this to give themselves rights under law they always wanted, but never could get. They're using the newness of the technology to redefine copyright as ownership, which is NOT what copyright is about. Not to mention that the new copyrights are now eternal, which breaks the original deal the constitution's writers had in mind, which is: make cash for a bit, then the work goes into the public domain forever to enrich all. The deal was broken, so all bets are off. Change the copyright laws so that copyrights expire in twenty years after publication, and then we can talk. Right now, copyright=ownership for eternity. A free marketplace for ideas can't exist like this.
I swear. This type of science is sounding more and more like Stan Lee's Marvel dialog every year.
I've been a science geek my whole life, and I have barely an idea of what they are talking about. I thought there was some disagreement about the existence of the multidimensional strings. Is that over now?
We're going to wake up one day and someone in Portugal will have a wormhole operating in his lab, or an antimatter explosion will accidently be set off in Japan. Careful, boys, we're getting into comic book territory now.
Nope. The right to record on-air and on-cable programming has been established as Fair Use for decades. Add to this that the recorder has PAID for the programming.
Distributing on Bittorrent is as evil as borrowing a friend's videotape. Which we can do.
As for people not paying for the program they are downloading, let's rememeber that an unlimited number of people can come over to a subscriber's house and watch programming they have not paid for. And unlimited number can watch a videotape made by a subscriber. And none of this is illegal.
The idea that the home is a metered box office is honored by legislators, but is novel to the people actually watching the TV. People don't accept the idea. They never will, no matter how much lip service is paid to the Boss Gods about watching recordings = stealing. Because it isn't stealing. A TV screen is agnostic, and can't be regulated in the real world.
If the business model of cable operators or the MPAA can't survive bittorrent, then they will die out. Good riddance. Something else will take their place, something less commercial and predatory, perhaps more artistically democratic and cheaper to maintain. But I see no indication that they are even suffering from downloading, much less dying. The movie industry is fat and rich from DVDs and box office, the cable companies are buying each other and major film libraries; no one is hurting. Pity.
Ya know, it seems that this situation should be impossible if a PC were designed correctly. After all, the Space Shuttle originally had 6 identical computers working simultaneously and independently; results of computations were compared constantly. If a computer went bonkers, the other five would instantly lobotomize it, put it into a mode in which it could not hurt anything, and sound lots o' alarms. Apollo missions had three onboard computers, I think.
A really solid PC would have at least three physical processors, each checking on the status of the other two. If one BSODs, the other two should shut it down and reboot that subsystem until it checks out -- or shut it down and signal for help.
It sounds expensive, but parts are getting cheaper. CPUs are becoming potato chips, harddrives will eventually become solid state, yadda yadda. What's more expensive, a couple more chips and more complex mobo, or an embarrasingly loonie PC shutting down a reservations desk?
"I see a computer running an information display that has crashed. Either a bluescreen of death (soon to be redscreen AND bluescreen of death in Longhorn), or a fundamental error message. This never looks good to customers and is bad advertising in large traffic areas."
I recall driving up to a gas station some years back, to find that the pump's display screen was showing cascading program errors. This may/may not have been Windows' fault, but it does not inspire me with confidence.
The recording industries tried to make player piano rolls, cassette tapes, library loans, DAT, video tape, second hand music stores and recordable CD's illegal. They all failed, and now recording content is considered fair use. The various industries over the last hundred years insisted that libraries, VCR's, player pianos, and second-hand book and CD stores would ruin them and put their poor starving children on the street to sell apples. Didn't happen. They are ALL richer than God now. They've no argument.
They now insist that file sharing is illegal; such opinions should be adjudged by their previous legal opinions on the above media. They were wrong then, and they will be wrong again someday when the political axis shifts in a decade or so and new judges and lawmakers dump their player piano roll-hating screeds into the dumper of history.
Aside from the hubris of their ideas of controlling everyone's actions, the world can't afford another War on a Common Noun. IF we somehow manage to prevent the corporations from hiring their own police forces and forming their own courts/collection agencies, the civil and criminal courts and normal law enforcement do not have the capacity or the funds to arrest and prosecute the entire planet. Half the adult population of the U.S. and Europe would be in prison or a debtor's farm if these laws were to be enforced to their fullest extent.
Unlike the Bill of Rights, which don't change with the whim of the public, civil law about copyright and distribution will change if enough citizens become "criminals". They will change the laws, even if they have to vote every idiot who covers the old corporate bastards out of office. People don't like being sued and sent to jail when they don't think what they are doing is wrong. And make no mistake, they will turn. Their is no moral issue here; copying is not stealing. Lighting a candle with another candle doesn't diminish either, as Tom Jefferson said. We didn't create copyright to make people rich and loaded with "rights" to distribute media and knowledge. We created CR to permit authors to make a living, for a limited time, on new art, and then to let it be free to inspire new art. If CR no longer serves that purpose, it has to go.
As for me, I lost all sympathy for the copyright holders when the Sonny Bono Act made copyrights eternal. There was a 200 year-old deal: we give you a limited time to make money, and a living, then it gets kicked into the public domain. That deal is broken, and it isn't getting fixed. I do not want to see "intellectual property" eternally locked up in the vaults of immortal corporations. Human advancement requires that works of art and science be distribute freely, at some point, but that no longer can happen. The deal is broken. We did not break it. They did. So, war. And we will win, and the copyright gods will lose.
On this subject, people forget that not so long in the past, one of the reasons for foreskin removal was to cut down on the pleasure provided by the foreskin's presence, thus inhibiting mastubatory impulses in their Precious Children. The other reasons were "cleanliness", which means people didn't bathe a lot once upon a time; and the fact that a circumcision is always a guaranteed bill-padding item for any obstetrician and hospital. The last reason is the main impetus for Dr. Hackemoff to sell his patients on Clean Living and Clean Deeds in the last century or so.
Nowadays it is done mainly so that your kid won't look funny.
I don't think women would like the idea so much if a similar procedure was performed on baby girls (and yes, I am aware they are done).
" Should it be:
from who? Or. from whom?"
Should it be:
Or: from whom?
Science can't win as a supernatural investigations agent, because whatever they investigate is defined by non-scientists as "natural"; "supernature" is defined as anything not conducive to investigation. If a scientist actually detected a free-standing, self-perpetuating EM field that consists of the surviving personality of a dead man, it wouldn't be "supernatural" to the religionists. The Supernature crowd would redefine the term to not-include ghosts; it would merely be the physical remnant of the person, in a state prepatory to going to God at a later time. Infinite regression, as they have done so many times before. And the carnival would go on.
This isn't about truth, or logic. The Biblists believe their reading of the book, American Southern Fundie standard, IS THE TRUTH, and that is THAT. Everything they do is sophistry aimed at their ultimate goal of remaking science and society and politics into a Dominionist utopia. And ending the world, of course.
"The terror threat is real"
.
Please, everyone, stop a moment and think about this
Who is "terror", and have they been threatening us? Utterly unexamined assumption.
We got hit by a few dozen nutters a few years ago, and now we are under a "terror threat".
Firstly, a threat is a statement of intent -- a SPECIFIC statement -- that someone is coming to hurt or kill you.
Secondly, what the hell is "terror"? Bush has slapped the label on so many disparate factions and actions so as to make the term meaningless. Someone shoots at someone in the Phillipines? Terror. Someone kidnaps someone for ransom? A terrorist act. We invade a country, kill tens of thousands and mutilate far more -- those who shoot back are branded "terrorists" of the same stripe who blow up trains in Spain. Teacher's unions have been labelled terrorists by a Congresscritter.
The word "terrorist" is a simple cognate coined and maintained as a substitute for the old Red/Communist/Russian/Soviet monolithic "they" that we were told was intent on killing or subverting us for over fifty years. It turned out that the original threat estimate for the Soviets were based on "information" offered up by ex-Nazis in the same manner information is "offered" by people in Guantanamo. The prisoners tell the torturer what they want to hear: The Soviets are mighty and mad; Al Queda has cells EVERYWHERE and is planning to kill again soon, please, not the electrodes again...
Terrorism. What is shock and awe, but terror? What is slaugtering your way into a country, but terror? What was what we did, invading and killing to capture Noriega, but terror? Terror is an emotion, not a tactic. It is felt by us, not inflicted on us. We've become flaming cowards, afraid of everything and everyone, condoning torture and kidnap and murder of "terrorists", which is nothing but an label slapped onto any damned one that Bush wants to eliminate. The Partiot Act has created a dictator who has declared that human rights and treaties don't apply to "terrorists", as Bushie said just yesterday. Since "terror" is defined as "anything that makes us uneasy or afraid", and a "terrorist" can be declared secretly by the Bush team, Bush has declared "war" on no particular person, has no timetable for the "war" to be ended, has no definition of the terms of its ending.
By ceding this terminology to Bush's whim, we've created an uncheckable police state that recognizes no national boundaries and strips human rights, in holes in the ground, from people snatched from their homes in the middle of the night.
The most telling point to be made is that when Bush's Justice Department takes the few cases it has made to the court system, they have convicted NO ONE on the evidence; on the contrary, they have consistently lost every case they have had to make.
Terror? Threat? The terror is the fear instilled in you by national hysteria fed by a pack of radicals intent on a revolution in our way of life and law. The threat is pathetic; a few dozen wackos who barely have had enough juice to make video tapes. They got lucky once, and they got what they wanted: an America attacking the oil rich countries, just as they predicted. We've made far, far more enemies killing -- quite illegally -- the Iraqis than we had before 9/11. We've made the nonexistent enemy a reality by our own terror and yes, racism and confusion, and by an elect few, greedy for power and riches beyond count.
"A jail term is not the entirety of the sentence. Think of it as a sentence to life, not in a physical prison, but a prison of constant surveillance."
We ALL WILL BE IN THAT PRISON.
And it starts with a shovelful of dirt, and happy smiles...
Actually, no incidents were ever reported until a state attorney cast a net looking for some. It's amazing how much crime you can find if you advertise on a web page for victims. The incident that was settled years ago I discount -- how much payment would you consider to let a man off the hook for assaulting your son? Apparently, the dad wanted some millions or he'd make an accusation. After legal wrangling, MJ paid him off to make the slime go away -- a very bad idea, leading to what is happening now.
Kids: don't watch this "news" on cable anymore. It's not news, it's lazy pseudojournalistic exploitation for ratings, and fame for the prosecutors. Take it from an old guy: CNN et al have tanked and turned into tabloid horsecrap. The golden age of news in the U.S. is over for now.
At some point, Bushies will have to take responibility for their actions. I'm not taking any bets on how soon.
1. Denial
2. Derision
3. Accusation
4. PR
5. Inviting everyone to sit down together at table
6. Get goods on Stallman, blackmail
7. Patent everything at the table
8. Toss everyone off the table
9. Profit!
10. Sue 2000 IRS employees simultaneously, get IRS to declare Microsoft a religion
11. Try to enable Kirstie Allen's comeback
wait, got stories mixed up here...
Existence is debatable. Anything is debatable if one uses the false equivalence fallacy. Just because an opposing point of view can be constructed, ie vs global warming consensus, vs population growth limitation, vs reduction of oil consumption, doesn't mean the opposing view is worth debating. PR firms and Bushites use that technique constantly, and the new networks have become useless because of that false equivalence fallacy. Existence of opposing view does not equate with need to debate.
A thought occurs:
How mobbed up are the record companies? How many wise guys and friends of friends actually run that industry?
Are they specially treated in Congress, even tho their revenues are tiny compared to the PC and home entertainment companies, because there are Very Special People who might get upset if they are ignored?
Not only movie theaters could take advantage of removable terabyte disc storage. Films are being transferred to digital format for archival purposes in 4K resolution -- 4000 lines vertical. New films like Sin City are originally recorded in hi-def digital formats, and more will come.
Movie maniacs could have super-ultra-lastword-that's it-no-more 4K video for home use, if terabyte media isn't a problem. As for screens that could display such resolutions, they'll come when we need them.
"We need to continue to grow the per capita energy allocation. "
You can't. Not in the near future, not with world oil production at max with no discernible possiblities to find more, not with nuclear plant bans. There is no power generation capacity for the entire planet that will enable 7 billion people to match our standard of consumption. It's not going to happen, and to demand that reality reboot itself so that we don't have to change our habits is oil-black religion.
Reality is knocking, first with $100/barrel oil prices -- then it's going to get nasty. We've no national conservation program, no effeciency programs, no car-reduction programs -- hell, we in the US won't even change the CAFE standards for cars or tax the SUV's out of existence. The free market is not our friend here. As a matter of national security, as a matter of WORLD security, we need to make fuel efficent transport, build our suburbs with mass transit in mind, and build new and safer nuclear plants -- and we needed to do it thirty years ago.
As a result of letting cars do their thing, oil companies will become trillionaires while our national incomes divert to their coffers. Our budgets are busting now, trying to build and rebuiild roads and highways that cost too much for the number of people using them. The freedom for people to live in suburbs, on my dime ('cause we are all subsidizing those miles of concrete to nowhere) is the bankruptcy of the oil-consuming world.
If you have a family of four and you are making less than 31K, you've got a lot of financial problems as it is. Tax credit for those who are living on the edge is reasonable.
Tax removal from the wealthy in time of war is just plain nuts. Credit or no, they are doing just fine in their private lives.
Eventually the burden gets dumped on the Great Middle, who are perhaps closer to the edge than they think moneywise. One medical bill too many, and you're kaput, and perhaps soon will not be able to declare for relief by bankruptcy. How many times as the Donald gone bankrupt? Once? Twice? He's building a new tower in Chicago, and despite having no descernible talent, has a TV show. If a middle class family goes broke trying to pay for MRI's and doctor's fees, they just live in a car. Something's not right, when the helpless get no help and the bankrupt mighty never miss a hundred dollar meal.
Just raising the income ceiling for SS contributions would solve most of that program's shortfalls, and likewise raising taxes back to 2000 levels would solve all of our current woes, exempting the interest payment additions we've accumulated in the last three years. Because of THAT increased obligation, we'll have to kack taxes higher than 2000 levels just to pay back the "credit card" hangover caused by the last three years' deficit spending. The supply-side miracle hasn't happened, so let's put the fantasy away and start paying off the drunken orgy tab.
Let the near-poor keep their money -- it's negligible anyway. Raise the taxes for the wealthy back to 2000 levels, retax capital gains, stop this estate tax repeal idiocy, and for god's sake tax the corporations again in a concrete way! The biggest pay no taxes. BTW; the new constitution we dictated for Iraq caps the corporate tax rate at nearly zero -- those poor bastard common people are going to get reamed come taxtime.