You may keep telling parents to be more responsible but the fact is that a given percentage of them will NOT be. That's a fact.
If you are a child of irresponsible parents, how does that help you? This law is to protect the kids of irresponsible parents, not the parents themselves. This is much like the mandatory usage of infant seats in the car - it is enforced for the sake of the CHILDREN of irresponsible parents.
You (and other libertarians) are basically saying: "if you are not responsible, live with the consequences". That's good if the consequences are affecting only the irresponsible party. When it comes to drunk driving or usage of infant car seats, it is not just you who suffers if you act irresponsibly. The case with the McDonalds toys is exatly the same. If you leave that to paren't responsibility, you are basically saying that the innocent children must suffer because their parents are irresponsible.
I live in Toronto and I don't have a car. I live midtown and use the public transit to go to work. Here is what I pay monthly for transportation:
- public transit pass - 109$
- 2-3 times a month I rent a car or use services like autoshare.com for shopping - 100-170$
Total: 209-279$
If I owned a car, I would pay per month:
- approx. 300$ for insurance (I don't have an insurance hostory in North America and the premium will be ridiculous)
- 85$ for parking in the building where I live
So far 385$ just for having the car and not driving it;-))
- If I use the car to go to work, that will be another 120-200$ monthly for parking at work
- Gas, repairs, maintenance + the cost of the car itself are all extra.
In my case it does not make any sense to have a car. That's because I live and work in a city with a relatively developed public transit system.
Now, if I moved to a suburb, the situation would be very different. Then the cost of commute might not even be considered as driving would be my only option.
"... because disturbances in its structure can upset satellite communications and radar"
They say nothing about disturbance in the Force. IMHO a disturbance in the Force can cause much greater damage than some petty disturbance in the ionosphere;-)
I liked one of the comments under the original article that charging 52K for long distance is crime itself.
Are we still living in the dark ages of pre-internet where telcos being monopolists could charge whatever price they wanted for pnone calls?
Another thing that bothers me is that there are sooo many voip solutions out there that allow you to make calls to Europe for as low as 3 cents per minute. It's not worth the risk of hacking if you have that option.
"Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit..." - why so? Just because sarcasm is viewed as offensive in the Western society doesn't mean it is the lowest form of wit.
Every time my employers tried to enforce some policy like that, they lost money! How? Simply I spent many hours trying to work around the restriction.
Years ago when ICQ worked only on some non-standard ports, it was easy to cut all connections different that 80 and 8080 at the gateway for example. Then I spent hours and days playing with http tunnels, proxies, etc. This was time lost for my employer but I do not regret. The reason: I don't think that restrcting ICQ will improve the security of the system of drop the productivity of the employees.
And this does not mean that I like to break policies just for the sake of it. Nothing like that in fact. I follow all the policies that make sense to me. I and I trust my common sense because I have years of experience. But I cannot agree with policies that follow Stalin's principle: "There is man, there is problem. There is no man, there is no problem". Heck, in the past (and even now in some places) having Internet at work was considered dangerous;-)
I don't think they hate Perl. And business people don't really care what technology was used to create the apps they are using. Companies just prefer to stay away from it for a number of reasons:
1) Perl is a write-only-language! Granted, it is powerful. You can build complex constructs in an elegant (to the sophisticated mind) and concise way, that's true. However it's powerful syntax is also its demise. It is extremely ugly and difficult to read, therefore it is very hard to support. Only the original developer (provided he/she is a real guru) can support a large system written in Perl. And we all know that the original developer is never there when you need him;-)
2) There has been a significant shift over the last 20 years from UNIX-based development to Windows-based development. In search of productivity people started to use tool-based dev environments, visual IDEs, etc. Perl is associated with UNIX and it is perceived as something from the past by the new generation of IT people (that came out in the 90s and later).
3) Because of (1) and (2) not many people nowadays bother to learn Perl. It is hard to find people with ANY Perl knowledge, and real experts are even harder to find. So if you are a business man, and you have to make a decision on the tech platform for your next big project, would you choose Perl knowing that it will be extremely difficult to find workers with the appropriate skill set? I think not.
Haha, I completely agree! While that might be a problem in a couple of occasions I fail to see real danger here. It is so trivial that it is not even worth mentioning.
No access to porn through search engines means that kids will not be able to find the tons of free porn out there.
This in turn means that kids will not get used to the idea that porn is free.
This in turn means that when they grow up, they will be more likely to pay for porn rather than looking for free stuff.
In addition to that hiding the porn links from the kids will help the porn advertisers (and most of the results you get by searching are exactly ad-ridden pages) get rid of the traffic, which is useless for them. After all kids clicking on porn ads are pure loss for them.
So the conventional wisdom seems still to be valid: no matter what they say, it's all about money;-)
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You may keep telling parents to be more responsible but the fact is that a given percentage of them will NOT be. That's a fact. If you are a child of irresponsible parents, how does that help you? This law is to protect the kids of irresponsible parents, not the parents themselves. This is much like the mandatory usage of infant seats in the car - it is enforced for the sake of the CHILDREN of irresponsible parents. You (and other libertarians) are basically saying: "if you are not responsible, live with the consequences". That's good if the consequences are affecting only the irresponsible party. When it comes to drunk driving or usage of infant car seats, it is not just you who suffers if you act irresponsibly. The case with the McDonalds toys is exatly the same. If you leave that to paren't responsibility, you are basically saying that the innocent children must suffer because their parents are irresponsible.
I live in Toronto and I don't have a car. I live midtown and use the public transit to go to work. Here is what I pay monthly for transportation: - public transit pass - 109$ - 2-3 times a month I rent a car or use services like autoshare.com for shopping - 100-170$ Total: 209-279$ If I owned a car, I would pay per month: - approx. 300$ for insurance (I don't have an insurance hostory in North America and the premium will be ridiculous) - 85$ for parking in the building where I live So far 385$ just for having the car and not driving it ;-))
- If I use the car to go to work, that will be another 120-200$ monthly for parking at work
- Gas, repairs, maintenance + the cost of the car itself are all extra.
In my case it does not make any sense to have a car. That's because I live and work in a city with a relatively developed public transit system.
Now, if I moved to a suburb, the situation would be very different. Then the cost of commute might not even be considered as driving would be my only option.
"... because disturbances in its structure can upset satellite communications and radar" ;-)
They say nothing about disturbance in the Force. IMHO a disturbance in the Force can cause much greater damage than some petty disturbance in the ionosphere
I liked one of the comments under the original article that charging 52K for long distance is crime itself. Are we still living in the dark ages of pre-internet where telcos being monopolists could charge whatever price they wanted for pnone calls? Another thing that bothers me is that there are sooo many voip solutions out there that allow you to make calls to Europe for as low as 3 cents per minute. It's not worth the risk of hacking if you have that option.
"Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit..." - why so? Just because sarcasm is viewed as offensive in the Western society doesn't mean it is the lowest form of wit.
Who has porn pictures on his hard drive these days? I thought video took over long ago ;-)
Every time my employers tried to enforce some policy like that, they lost money! How? Simply I spent many hours trying to work around the restriction.
;-)
Years ago when ICQ worked only on some non-standard ports, it was easy to cut all connections different that 80 and 8080 at the gateway for example. Then I spent hours and days playing with http tunnels, proxies, etc. This was time lost for my employer but I do not regret. The reason: I don't think that restrcting ICQ will improve the security of the system of drop the productivity of the employees.
And this does not mean that I like to break policies just for the sake of it. Nothing like that in fact. I follow all the policies that make sense to me. I and I trust my common sense because I have years of experience. But I cannot agree with policies that follow Stalin's principle: "There is man, there is problem. There is no man, there is no problem". Heck, in the past (and even now in some places) having Internet at work was considered dangerous
I don't think they hate Perl. And business people don't really care what technology was used to create the apps they are using. Companies just prefer to stay away from it for a number of reasons:
;-)
1) Perl is a write-only-language! Granted, it is powerful. You can build complex constructs in an elegant (to the sophisticated mind) and concise way, that's true. However it's powerful syntax is also its demise. It is extremely ugly and difficult to read, therefore it is very hard to support. Only the original developer (provided he/she is a real guru) can support a large system written in Perl. And we all know that the original developer is never there when you need him
2) There has been a significant shift over the last 20 years from UNIX-based development to Windows-based development. In search of productivity people started to use tool-based dev environments, visual IDEs, etc. Perl is associated with UNIX and it is perceived as something from the past by the new generation of IT people (that came out in the 90s and later).
3) Because of (1) and (2) not many people nowadays bother to learn Perl. It is hard to find people with ANY Perl knowledge, and real experts are even harder to find. So if you are a business man, and you have to make a decision on the tech platform for your next big project, would you choose Perl knowing that it will be extremely difficult to find workers with the appropriate skill set? I think not.
Haha, I completely agree! While that might be a problem in a couple of occasions I fail to see real danger here. It is so trivial that it is not even worth mentioning.
No access to porn through search engines means that kids will not be able to find the tons of free porn out there. This in turn means that kids will not get used to the idea that porn is free. This in turn means that when they grow up, they will be more likely to pay for porn rather than looking for free stuff.
;-)
In addition to that hiding the porn links from the kids will help the porn advertisers (and most of the results you get by searching are exactly ad-ridden pages) get rid of the traffic, which is useless for them. After all kids clicking on porn ads are pure loss for them.
So the conventional wisdom seems still to be valid: no matter what they say, it's all about money