Really? I know Microsoft Bashing is a sport here on/. and all, but it just blows my mind that we let MS do as they will but Google needs to be checked out. Hm.
Google has like 64% (google market share), with competitors Bing and Yahoo (now powered by Bing), and some others.
Microsoft has a 91% market share ( windows market share) with competitors Linux (FOSS) and Mac OSX (only available on Apple hardware, Apple openly sues you for building hackintoshes).
And yet GOOGLE is the one who needs investigating? Really?
Oh wait, I forgot, Microsoft is all buddy-buddy with congressmen.
Ah, that does sound good.:)
I would say the president being limited to 2 terms is already enough. If you were allowed to be president more than 2 times, then I would agree with the on/off rule for the president as well.
As it stands, with unlimited terms for office, congress certainly needs to be limited. On/off would be a great way to break up the incumbency.
Course, then you get the problem of having a politician be in office, then since he can't any more, his wife or son or somebody "runs", when in reality they are just a puppet for continued terms. I guess in theory the person in office would still have a chance to overwrite them, but... yeah.
As I said above, the whole problem with American politics is the two-party system. There's no accountability, they both point the blame at the other one, and we just get apathetic and leave them to it (which is what they want). We NEED the alternative vote in The United States, there is NO legitimate legal or moral reason we shouldn't have it, especially with modern electronic voting the process would be nearly instantaneous to calculate, and it would massively increase responsibility in politicians. Now instead of having a "left" or a "right" which both pander to the extremes and the middle, making promises that they have no intentions to keep, you'd have a system with at least 3 parties, a "left" for the extreme left, a "right" for the extreme right, and a "moderate" which would gain the most attention (lots of voters closer to the middle, more like a bell curve). So if the "left" party wanted to take some of those "moderate" votes, they'd have to give up their "left" votes. All it takes is the alternative vote, so we can have a third party and vote for them without everybody just knowing their votes are getting thrown away, so nobody votes that way, so one of the 2 main parties always wins.
Wrong. Net neutrality says ISPs have to treat any content equally, they can't meter it out so that their websites go faster.
SOPA says if you do something infringing, or if you just seem like you've infringed, or if somebody who has infringed uses your website, then that website can be taken down FOR EVERYBODY. Nobody, anywhere on the internet, using ANY ISP, can connect AT ALL. Your site has been blocked, shut down, banned.
Net Neutrality is about controlling corporations who might try to squeeze extra money from certain major providers. ISPs would want to control traffic going over THEIR network. It would unfortunately massively hamstring the internet, whose value comes from the ability for so many people to put up their own content. But having net neutrality so that companies can't control their own traffic and give preferential treatment doesn't mean you can't have other regulations.
SOPA is about the government being able to control THE INTERNET ITSELF, ALL NETWORKS, ALL ISPs and shut down anything they don't like.
Also incumbency is way too powerful in the house and senate, terms should have limits.
And maybe you should have to pass a basic political quiz before you're allowed to vote. I'm not talking about "literacy tests" to keep out minorities, I'm talking about do you even know which party this person is a member of? Do you know this person's view on ____ important policy?
End the two-party system. That is the only way we're going to get ANY kind of accountability or responsibility from the American government. We need the alternative vote NOW, and we need to end the electoral college.
The United States aren't a democracy, and we're not even a republic anymore. We don't have the right to vote on matters of policy, nor do we have the right to vote for the president and his cabinet. We participate in a shell game they set up through gerrymandering and the threat that your vote will be meaningless if you don't vote for one of the two approved party candidates.
There is NO legitimate excuse why we shouldn't have the alternative vote in America, except that the Democrats and Republicans don't want it. There is NO legitimate excuse as to why we need the electoral college in America, we don't even have ballots anymore, it is all done electronically.
It would be foolish to expect Google to stand up for you any more than their bottom line dictates
That's the exact same line we've heard for decades excusing evil acts from all sorts of corporations. That is exactly the kind of reasoning Google should avoid if they were ever serious about "Don't Be Evil". Turns out that they weren't.
If you take what he said IN CONTEXT and don't completely IGNORE everything else he wrote, which was quite a lot, you'll see that he was merely making a concession; they MAY be evil, but even IF we accept that as a given, THEN it still doesn't apply here. Google, whether evil or not, would not want to do this, so google being evil has nothing to do with it. This does not give evidence towards Google being evil or not evil, both are equally likely from this data.
That's a good thought. You've got to maintain a consistent downhill angle then though, all the way across the boarder. Not sure what the elevation map looks like around the boarder, but I get the feeling that going north towards the US you'd be going up in altitude, making that more difficult.
2. Legalizing and then taxing drugs would lead to... wait for it... black market for untaxed or cheaper drugs ! (see cigarettes, alcohol, past attempts at legalizing drugs like opium)
Yeah, and we legalized alcohol, and now there's a GIANT black market for alcohol, isn't there? Oh wait, no, MOST CITIZENS PREFER USING LEGITIMATE BUSINESSES WHERE THEY WON'T GET MOONSHINE (aka drugs cut 50% with baking soda).
3. Legalizing and sanctioning drugs would lead to drugs with potentially limited potency due to Government control on the product which leads to.. black market
Again, this totally happened with alcohol and is a legitimate concern. Oh wait, no it didn't. The government can't take the alcohol molecule and modify it so that everybody has to use a different thing. Do you understand basic chemistry?
4. Drug dealers, runners, and general baddies are not going to suddenly because good citizens just because drugs can be purchased over the counter. The sell this shit for money, cause they want money... See #2 and #3 - they won't be out of a job anyways.
No, they won't suddenly stop. But they'll have no money, and so they'll have a MUCH harder time funding these hi-tech drug tunnels, or buying all kinds of automatic weapons, or paying for top-notch attorneys, or...
Right now, the cops have no money, because our country is in a recession and the government is bleeding debt like crazy. Meanwhile the drug gangs have a state-sponsored monopoly, so they make insane profits that legitimate owners can't even dream of. This pushes people into crime that might not otherwise care for it, just for the crazy profits which they justify.
You take away the money, you hamstring their ability to do ANYTHING.
Not to mention, they're only in it FOR THE MONEY IN THE FIRST PLACE. Take away the money and it ends. People don't follow orders from drug lords because its fun.
Just thinking this through, you're talking about miles and miles of pipe. So to flush through that, you'd need a great amount of water. Even at the drug cartel's level of drug smuggling, that's a much greater amount of solution than substance to dissolve. So, either you're going to end up with a MASSIVELY dilute huge vat of water, that you then need to dehydrate. I suppose you could leave it all out in the sun somewhere and wait for it to evaporate, but I feel like there are going to be huge losses (water left in the pipes). You could try sending through the initial highly saturated solution and then pump it through with just regular water, but then you're going to need a way to time it and separate the two as they come out...
Course I'm a software engineer, my knowledge of chemistry and modern hydraulics is pretty limited. There's probably a machine to do it easy, but anyways, it'd take some engineering.
That means that even if we make this whole country a police state, even if we literally lock up every single citizen and treat them all as criminals from the get-go, we STILL WOULD NOT WIN THE WAR ON DRUGS. IT CANNOT HAPPEN. Not to mention the idea is so anti-freedom, so un-American it makes me sick.
Its funny, there are other countries that serve as a perfect case study to this very thing you are describing. Many European countries do not have punishment for drug abuse at all, instead the only "sentence" is an optional free psychological session, so that you can get help if you need it.
And have they been overwhelmed with an epidemic of addicts? Nope. SURPRISE!
Its unbelievable how illogical most of the counter arguments are. They just do not think it through. There was a prohibition round table, they had a medical dispensary owner and a doctor and a cop, and they were agreeing that legalization would shut down the black market and improve public health in so many ways, but this one guy just couldn't get it. "You guys are missing it. The drug cartels aren't going to just roll over if you legalize. They're going to keep selling and pushing."
But YOU'RE missing it, because the whole reason that drugs are profitable is because of the MASSIVE ARTIFICIAL PROFITS instilled by making it illegal. That gives a MONOPOLY to drug companies. Massive insane profit is not inherent to drugs, WE MAKE IT THAT WAY. But people grew up in the environment, thinking one way, thinking inside their little existence, and they cannot imagine a life otherwise.
It is a matter of history that the president drank during prohibition. I believe that fact alone shows how obviously disregarded and disliked the law was.
Don't have a link or a citation on me right now, but I could probably google if I had to.
Sadly those opposed are opposed to any form of logic, and so these arguments won't get anywhere.
Anybody who knows anything about prohibition knows its bad for everything it is supposed to "help".
Ever heard of LEAP? Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Even COPS know its wrong.
But you get a bunch of crazy people who drink the kool-aid and buy into all the government propaganda and paper company propaganda and drug company lobbyists and crazy religious nutjobs and they convince themselves it has to be this way. Sadly those people can't be forced to learn, they're too brainwashed.
Go read up on prohibition. It works as a perfect case study. The ONLY amendment to the US Constitution to EVER be repealed. That doesn't happen easy. We did it for a reason. Prohibition causes massive crime by creating a huge black market. Repealing that prohibition and then allowing the licensed sale of alcohol was the ONLY way to stop the crime wave that bootlegging created. Hell, they had to get Al Capone on TAX EVASION, and he was shooting people in the streets. It just gives them TOO MUCH MONEY, it makes them impossible to fight.
If you take away the black market by making the drugs legal and controlled like alcohol, suddenly the massive profit margins of the thugs go away, and the thugs find that fighting law enforcement becomes far more difficult. Maybe not NO thugs, but certainly will result in less thugs. Go read up on prohibition, it works as a perfect case study. We tried this experiment before, and it failed. Note that it was and is the ONLY amendment to the US Constitution to ever be repealed. That doesn't happen easy. It causes overwhelming crime.
One other point: this student attends Oak Ridge High School. How much do you bet she has a parent (or at least a close adviser) who works at Oak Ridge National Lab within their biological systems division.
All the Siemens competition students have a PHD professor as a "mentor", so yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
No justice in the US anymore, just money and power.
And lets not forget that 91% is an all-time low. Linux has been slowly gaining market share. Windows has had a 95%+ market share for over a decade.
Then there's the fact that the EU is suing MS for millions and millions for their practices with IE, but over here in the US, its A-OK.
Really? I know Microsoft Bashing is a sport here on /. and all, but it just blows my mind that we let MS do as they will but Google needs to be checked out. Hm.
Google has like 64% (google market share), with competitors Bing and Yahoo (now powered by Bing), and some others.
Microsoft has a 91% market share ( windows market share) with competitors Linux (FOSS) and Mac OSX (only available on Apple hardware, Apple openly sues you for building hackintoshes).
And yet GOOGLE is the one who needs investigating? Really?
Oh wait, I forgot, Microsoft is all buddy-buddy with congressmen.
Ah, that does sound good. :)
... yeah.
I would say the president being limited to 2 terms is already enough. If you were allowed to be president more than 2 times, then I would agree with the on/off rule for the president as well.
As it stands, with unlimited terms for office, congress certainly needs to be limited. On/off would be a great way to break up the incumbency.
Course, then you get the problem of having a politician be in office, then since he can't any more, his wife or son or somebody "runs", when in reality they are just a puppet for continued terms. I guess in theory the person in office would still have a chance to overwrite them, but
As I said above, the whole problem with American politics is the two-party system. There's no accountability, they both point the blame at the other one, and we just get apathetic and leave them to it (which is what they want). We NEED the alternative vote in The United States, there is NO legitimate legal or moral reason we shouldn't have it, especially with modern electronic voting the process would be nearly instantaneous to calculate, and it would massively increase responsibility in politicians. Now instead of having a "left" or a "right" which both pander to the extremes and the middle, making promises that they have no intentions to keep, you'd have a system with at least 3 parties, a "left" for the extreme left, a "right" for the extreme right, and a "moderate" which would gain the most attention (lots of voters closer to the middle, more like a bell curve). So if the "left" party wanted to take some of those "moderate" votes, they'd have to give up their "left" votes. All it takes is the alternative vote, so we can have a third party and vote for them without everybody just knowing their votes are getting thrown away, so nobody votes that way, so one of the 2 main parties always wins.
Wrong. Net neutrality says ISPs have to treat any content equally, they can't meter it out so that their websites go faster.
SOPA says if you do something infringing, or if you just seem like you've infringed, or if somebody who has infringed uses your website, then that website can be taken down FOR EVERYBODY. Nobody, anywhere on the internet, using ANY ISP, can connect AT ALL. Your site has been blocked, shut down, banned.
Net Neutrality is about controlling corporations who might try to squeeze extra money from certain major providers. ISPs would want to control traffic going over THEIR network. It would unfortunately massively hamstring the internet, whose value comes from the ability for so many people to put up their own content. But having net neutrality so that companies can't control their own traffic and give preferential treatment doesn't mean you can't have other regulations.
SOPA is about the government being able to control THE INTERNET ITSELF, ALL NETWORKS, ALL ISPs and shut down anything they don't like.
Also incumbency is way too powerful in the house and senate, terms should have limits.
And maybe you should have to pass a basic political quiz before you're allowed to vote. I'm not talking about "literacy tests" to keep out minorities, I'm talking about do you even know which party this person is a member of? Do you know this person's view on ____ important policy?
End the two-party system. That is the only way we're going to get ANY kind of accountability or responsibility from the American government. We need the alternative vote NOW, and we need to end the electoral college.
The United States aren't a democracy, and we're not even a republic anymore. We don't have the right to vote on matters of policy, nor do we have the right to vote for the president and his cabinet. We participate in a shell game they set up through gerrymandering and the threat that your vote will be meaningless if you don't vote for one of the two approved party candidates.
There is NO legitimate excuse why we shouldn't have the alternative vote in America, except that the Democrats and Republicans don't want it. There is NO legitimate excuse as to why we need the electoral college in America, we don't even have ballots anymore, it is all done electronically.
It would be foolish to expect Google to stand up for you any more than their bottom line dictates
That's the exact same line we've heard for decades excusing evil acts from all sorts of corporations. That is exactly the kind of reasoning Google should avoid if they were ever serious about "Don't Be Evil". Turns out that they weren't.
If you take what he said IN CONTEXT and don't completely IGNORE everything else he wrote, which was quite a lot, you'll see that he was merely making a concession; they MAY be evil, but even IF we accept that as a given, THEN it still doesn't apply here. Google, whether evil or not, would not want to do this, so google being evil has nothing to do with it. This does not give evidence towards Google being evil or not evil, both are equally likely from this data.
That's a good thought. You've got to maintain a consistent downhill angle then though, all the way across the boarder. Not sure what the elevation map looks like around the boarder, but I get the feeling that going north towards the US you'd be going up in altitude, making that more difficult.
2. Legalizing and then taxing drugs would lead to... wait for it... black market for untaxed or cheaper drugs ! (see cigarettes, alcohol, past attempts at legalizing drugs like opium)
Yeah, and we legalized alcohol, and now there's a GIANT black market for alcohol, isn't there? Oh wait, no, MOST CITIZENS PREFER USING LEGITIMATE BUSINESSES WHERE THEY WON'T GET MOONSHINE (aka drugs cut 50% with baking soda).
3. Legalizing and sanctioning drugs would lead to drugs with potentially limited potency due to Government control on the product which leads to.. black market
Again, this totally happened with alcohol and is a legitimate concern. Oh wait, no it didn't. The government can't take the alcohol molecule and modify it so that everybody has to use a different thing. Do you understand basic chemistry?
4. Drug dealers, runners, and general baddies are not going to suddenly because good citizens just because drugs can be purchased over the counter. The sell this shit for money, cause they want money... See #2 and #3 - they won't be out of a job anyways.
No, they won't suddenly stop. But they'll have no money, and so they'll have a MUCH harder time funding these hi-tech drug tunnels, or buying all kinds of automatic weapons, or paying for top-notch attorneys, or...
Right now, the cops have no money, because our country is in a recession and the government is bleeding debt like crazy. Meanwhile the drug gangs have a state-sponsored monopoly, so they make insane profits that legitimate owners can't even dream of. This pushes people into crime that might not otherwise care for it, just for the crazy profits which they justify.
You take away the money, you hamstring their ability to do ANYTHING.
Not to mention, they're only in it FOR THE MONEY IN THE FIRST PLACE. Take away the money and it ends. People don't follow orders from drug lords because its fun.
Agreed. But that doesn't mean saying "You can't have this!" is the answer, nor locking up those who do in jail.
Just thinking this through, you're talking about miles and miles of pipe. So to flush through that, you'd need a great amount of water. Even at the drug cartel's level of drug smuggling, that's a much greater amount of solution than substance to dissolve. So, either you're going to end up with a MASSIVELY dilute huge vat of water, that you then need to dehydrate. I suppose you could leave it all out in the sun somewhere and wait for it to evaporate, but I feel like there are going to be huge losses (water left in the pipes). You could try sending through the initial highly saturated solution and then pump it through with just regular water, but then you're going to need a way to time it and separate the two as they come out...
Course I'm a software engineer, my knowledge of chemistry and modern hydraulics is pretty limited. There's probably a machine to do it easy, but anyways, it'd take some engineering.
mission accomplished
There are drugs in prison.
Think about that fact.
That means that even if we make this whole country a police state, even if we literally lock up every single citizen and treat them all as criminals from the get-go, we STILL WOULD NOT WIN THE WAR ON DRUGS. IT CANNOT HAPPEN. Not to mention the idea is so anti-freedom, so un-American it makes me sick.
Its funny, there are other countries that serve as a perfect case study to this very thing you are describing. Many European countries do not have punishment for drug abuse at all, instead the only "sentence" is an optional free psychological session, so that you can get help if you need it.
And have they been overwhelmed with an epidemic of addicts? Nope. SURPRISE!
Its unbelievable how illogical most of the counter arguments are. They just do not think it through. There was a prohibition round table, they had a medical dispensary owner and a doctor and a cop, and they were agreeing that legalization would shut down the black market and improve public health in so many ways, but this one guy just couldn't get it. "You guys are missing it. The drug cartels aren't going to just roll over if you legalize. They're going to keep selling and pushing."
But YOU'RE missing it, because the whole reason that drugs are profitable is because of the MASSIVE ARTIFICIAL PROFITS instilled by making it illegal. That gives a MONOPOLY to drug companies. Massive insane profit is not inherent to drugs, WE MAKE IT THAT WAY. But people grew up in the environment, thinking one way, thinking inside their little existence, and they cannot imagine a life otherwise.
It is a matter of history that the president drank during prohibition. I believe that fact alone shows how obviously disregarded and disliked the law was.
Don't have a link or a citation on me right now, but I could probably google if I had to.
Sadly those opposed are opposed to any form of logic, and so these arguments won't get anywhere. Anybody who knows anything about prohibition knows its bad for everything it is supposed to "help".
Ever heard of LEAP? Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Even COPS know its wrong.
But you get a bunch of crazy people who drink the kool-aid and buy into all the government propaganda and paper company propaganda and drug company lobbyists and crazy religious nutjobs and they convince themselves it has to be this way. Sadly those people can't be forced to learn, they're too brainwashed.
Go read up on prohibition. It works as a perfect case study. The ONLY amendment to the US Constitution to EVER be repealed. That doesn't happen easy. We did it for a reason. Prohibition causes massive crime by creating a huge black market. Repealing that prohibition and then allowing the licensed sale of alcohol was the ONLY way to stop the crime wave that bootlegging created. Hell, they had to get Al Capone on TAX EVASION, and he was shooting people in the streets. It just gives them TOO MUCH MONEY, it makes them impossible to fight.
If you take away the black market by making the drugs legal and controlled like alcohol, suddenly the massive profit margins of the thugs go away, and the thugs find that fighting law enforcement becomes far more difficult. Maybe not NO thugs, but certainly will result in less thugs. Go read up on prohibition, it works as a perfect case study. We tried this experiment before, and it failed. Note that it was and is the ONLY amendment to the US Constitution to ever be repealed. That doesn't happen easy. It causes overwhelming crime.
Crab-people, crab-people, walk like crab, talk like people, crab-people
Funny I was thinking they watched too much of The Great Escape
One other point: this student attends Oak Ridge High School. How much do you bet she has a parent (or at least a close adviser) who works at Oak Ridge National Lab within their biological systems division.
All the Siemens competition students have a PHD professor as a "mentor", so yeah.
This isn't a cure for cancer, RTFA and move along folks.