How about pressure? You'd have to have some sort of cut-off to the device that drops the little masks from the ceiling, but there would be much less danger of a hyper-allergic reaction.
Just a thought to bounce around, and admittedly one stolen from a steven king novela, but hey. If it wouldn't work for whatever reason, just tell me, don't flame me and we'll all be more knowlegeble and less stressed.:)
Translate all you want sir, I said what I meant and others understood it. Its very sad when people can't just except that another person can understand the situation just as well as they do, be just as inteligent, but still come to a different conclusion. Learn to accept ambiguity in the world. It will help.
Re:I have seen the enemy, and it is us.
on
The Timekeeper
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You're all at this party because it's the "cool" thing to do now. Protest the WTO but buy those Nikes. Complain about oppression but stockpile those "made in China" toys.
This is an incredibly insulting assumption that I have seen too many times. Why don't you find someone who actually went to Seattle and ask them where they buy their shoes? I couldn't go, I live on the other coast and don't make a lot of money. But you know what? When I talk about human rights abuses for profit, I'm not standing in "made in china" shoes. I have bought maybe five objects in the last year that were made in China or vietnam. Some were by accident, others were after I searched through several inventories of an item I needed and found that there were no products of the type I needed that weren't made there. In some of those cases, I will simply not get the item.
And I'm a pretty casual follower of the anti-slave labor philosophy as such things go. So don't go around calling people hypocrits on assumption. Some of us go to a lot of trouble to live by our own standards and I get sick and tired of people assuming we are hypocrits because they assume that we couldn't possibly be putting in effort that they aren't.
You know, I understand philoposhically what you are talking about, but for me, personally, it doesn't work that way. I was at a vigil last night for two women killed at Brookline women's health centers five years ago. When I was there, thinking about the people willing to harrass, to bomb and to kill because they object to this, I not only didn't feel safe, I did't feel free. But when my NICOE and I went to one of those clincs a few years ago (for the 90's kinda committment - lunch out and a blood test) and I went through a metal detector that had been installed since the shootings and handed my bag to a rent-a-cop to look through, and even when he asked to hold my pocket knife until I came out, do you know what? I didn't just feel more safe - I felt more free. Those percautions, even though some might feel they were an invasion of my privacy, or an erosion of my rights, gave me the freedom to attend to my own health without fear. Fear is an erosion of our freedom as well.
So when I have to walk through the dumb metal detectors, and they beep at me and make me check my pockets again, its a little annoying. Then again, when they board huge sections at once, and I'm in the back of that section and stand in the aisle while morons fights with their carry on baggage, that is annoying too. But the first one gives me the safety and thus the freedom to travel across the country in a few hours, and I consider it a benifit, not an intrusion.
Again, I understand the philosophy, especially at its more extreme examples. If I was living under effective marshal law, as has happened in some countries with a more widespread terrorism, I would feel that the balance had shifted too far, perhaps. But where I live, it is not the anti-terrorism actions that take away my freedom. It is the anti-abortion terrorists harrassing my sister when she just wanted her yearly exam, or the bastard who threw a military issue tear gas gernade into a gay pride parade in San Diego, making me wonder if its really worth going to my own march this year.
There is an assumption sometimes that our freedoms can only be taken away by the government. But for me, having my safety protected gives me the freedom to actually implement my rights to speech, to assocciation, to religion (or lack thereof).
Just a thought for the new year. Now I'm probably gonna read myself to sleep and hope that the world's still here when I wake up in the morning. Happy New Year.
Would you place road transporation in your "misconception as vital" category as well? Why not let people drive on any damn side of the road they choose? Cars and roads have become modern life needs and are subject to regulation. Or are you a disagreeable anarchist?
Wow, you are so sweet. How did you know I wasn't going out tonight and needed some entertainment at home?
Your original comment was objecting to regulations (in this case security) on the basis that air travel was such a necessity that they couldn't make it something you didn't want to do. Now you compare it to the highways, which you have to do hunderds of things you may not like to do in order to use them. So is a necessity something that you must have on your own terms, or something that is subject to regulation so that everyone can safely use it?
And while the ability to drive specifically is not a total necessity, the ability to travel is guarenteed within most countries. In fact, each method of travel has its own restrictions. To drive yourself, you must be liscensed, have a approved vehical and obey traffic laws. To be driven by a commercial interest you buy a ticket and obey their rules, some of which may be mandated to them by the government (no smoking, etc.) To fly, you must obey other rules. To walk or bicycle, you must find different routes than you would probably take driving.
The point is, that while it may often be a necessity to travel, it can rarely be considered a real necessity to do it by a particular method. Hence, you have no more right to fly on your terms than you have to drive on whichever side of the road you want.
I don't know why I'm bother to respond to this flame, but no it wasn't. This was recently, and it was Clinton. Perhaps it would help if you knew what you were talking about before you called other people names.
The true cost of terrorism isn't what the terrorist do to you. It is what you willingly do to your own freedoms and liberties as a result of terrorism.
Yeah, those guys on the Indian Airlines flight sure do have it easy. I mean, they're only being kidnapped and in some cases killed once. I've flown six times this year, and every single time I had to empty out my pocket stuff and step through this annoying machine! Once they even pulled me off to the side and used a hand-held wand to determine that it was my hiking boots that kept making it go off. The humiliation! The Horror!
Do you seriously mean this? Do you honestly think that the minor disclosures we make for something as optional as flying in an airplane are worse than what hostages go through or the death and injuries people have suffered at the hands of terrorists? How much of your privacy was "invaded" before you decided it was a greater cost than someone else's life? The metal detector? Turning on your laptop? Have you ever even been frisked?
Interestingly, the article mentions that the installations are part of a response to complaints of racial and other types of profiling. Specifically, there was an assertion that black women were being singled out for frisks. A thorough frisk I think would be far more upsetting a violation of privacy than someone seeing a grainy image. (and if the earier post was referencing real pictures, its nothing to get turned on about - you might as well be a maniquin.)
But the moment a service/product becomes so ubiquitous that it now serves the public/common good, it falls under different rules. Take electricity, water, phone, etc.
Water, yes, electricity, in many areas. Phones and airplanes, are you kidding? People live their lives never flying. People who are afraid of flying find other ways of getting around. Do you honestly think that a faster way of getting somewhere is comparable to safe drinking water?
What would you do if all water companies started putting some chemical in the water that 10% of the population was allergic too? There *ARE* other alternatives and you "don't have a right to every single convenience that some company has to offer." no? You could stock up on bottled water, dig a well, boil all your water before use. Right? Wrong. Air transportation is no different.
This is an awful analogy on so many levels.
1) An alergy is a physical reaction, possibly very serious. Not liking to go through security measures is a personal preference. No comparision.
2) Water is necassary for life. That simple. You don't drink water, you die. You don't take the plane, so what?
3) Going on a flight, you know in advance what may be coming and you know whether you have a problem with it or not. If there is something in the water, you have a ten percent chance, and you don't know one way or the other, necassarily.
Not only is air transportation so different from water avaliblity that it beggers the imagination, your analogy fails on the type of roadblock imposed. Try again.
BTW, this misconception of air travel as a vital interest allowed Clinton to shut down a strike of one airline's pilots and order them back to work with no negotiations. The more luxuries that selfish Americans redefine as necessities, the more classes of workers suffer.
For the record, in my submission of this story I did discuss the pros and cons, including that this is meant as an alternative to frisks (not necessarily strip searches) and my personal opinion that I would much prefer this to a hands-on frisk. I would have prefered to have my complete comments preserved as the "read more" section, but since its my first submission, I will accept editorial decisions with gratitude.;-)
Interesting. Examples of harmful broad and specific ways that people have decided it was necessary to "bend" fundamental principles and liberties for their various interests (as noble as they considered them) are, in your opinion "strawmen". I must conclude that either you really don't understand the meaning of the term or that you completely missed what I was saying. Or both.
Well, if you must....
I stated that I held many beliefs (freedom of action vs public saftey, etc) that often contridict each other but must be reconciled. You responded with an exagerated list of what I am perfectly willing to accept as egrerious abuses. The implication was that my philosophy was indistinguishable from such hypocrisy. I responded to this by giving more realisitic examples of situations in which things we believe in must at some point be compromised rather than fanatically carried out to the ends of the earth. The fact that you seem to agree with those examples means that they were chosen correctly, as my point was to elaborate what kind of compromises I was talking about originally, and distiguish them from your examples, which could be fairly regarded as abuses, not compromises.
Since it seems that we are in overall agreement on both the philosophical point that I brought up (in response to the assertion that anyone who would have reason to say "I'm a libertarian, but.." is not any sort of libertarian at all.) and at least some of the outlying reigons of application (both the very obvious and the very obviously hypocritical) I would chalk up the interveneing hostility to one of us not understanding what the other one meant to get across. Or possible both of us at different times.
Oh, but I have to say that describing your examples as people "bending" important rules for noble ends may not be very accurate. More commonly, such people do not actually respect the underlying rules at all, and will even say so if pushed. There is a huge difference between honestly trying to find where freedom of speech and public/individual safety intersect, and dealing with the 1st amendment as an annoying roadblock to the things you want to do.
Responsible sharing of information is even better. Part of the responsible sharing of information is acknowledging your relationship to the field you are discussing. Sometimes the acknowledgement is positive (eg, this rumor about the DVD release of TPM is closer to the source than most, cause my lover takes dictation in a LucasFilm office) and sometimes it is negitive (eg, this is what my doctor had me do in a similar situation, but not being a doctor, I don't know if your situation is similar in the right ways to make this good advice.)
Amoung people close to me, I tend to give a lot of medical advice. They take it as useful because I was a bio major in college, worked with a vet for a while and have had enough health problems of my own. But they also know that I'm not a doctor, or even a med student and take what I say under that advisement. When I give any advice or claim any info which falls under what I think of as "trade knowlege" I either explain why I'm qualified to say it, or make it clear that it is only meant to stimulate discussion, not as solid fact.
"I believe in free speech, but there's got to be an exception for dirty words/weird ideas/this thing I don't like."
I believe in freedom of speech, but lying in a transaction, or telling someone their cancer will clear up on its own are fraud and malpractice respectivly.
"I believe in open government, but they have to be able to keep secret things like how much money they spend on any "classified" military design project/their evidence justifying "anti-terrorist" actions/how the current war is really going."
I believe in open government, but if there had been full disclosure of code breaking techniques or the plans for D-day, we'd probably be living under a swastika now.
"I believe in due process, but in order to fight the drug war we have to have no-knock warrants/Army soldiers wandering around and ending up shooting goat-herders/ludicrous mandatory minimum laws/property confiscation laws."
I believe in due proccess, but when you have reasonable belief of a violent crime in process, you stop someone from being hurt or killed and argue the fine points later. And if you can't make that argument sufficiently, you take your lumps like a professional.
All noble compromises, certainly.
Actually, yours were strawmen, but thanks for trying.
As Ben Franklin pointed out, when you start trading away your freedoms for safety, you don't get either.
If Benny really believed that, he would have burned the Constitution and moved to a cabin in the woods (easier then than now.) Giving up freedoms for safety is what we call society. Knowing the difference between the freedom of personal religion and the freedom to randomly slug people who piss you off, and being willing to think about the less clear cut cases is what we call maturity.
Hint: Anyone who writes a sentence beginning with the phrase "I'm a Libertarian, but..."... isn't. The author is a hypocrite, or a Democrat, or something, but s/he is most emphatically NOT a Libertarian.
I dunno, I tend to respect people who can believe in the importance of some ideal or freedom without having to believe that it it of absolute unapproachable importance and can never be comprimised for any other ideal or freedom.
I can believe in freedom of action and still believe in protecting the public. I can believe in privacy and still believe in accountability. I can believe in parent's rights and children's rights at the same time. Parscing out what happens when two important freedoms/rights interfere with each other is what ethics (and being an adult) is all about.
A person who says "I'm a libertarian but..." may not be a libertarian. Or (s)he may just not be a fanatic.
As an earlier poster pointed out, the "problem" of idiots dosing themselves up with unstable combinations of things solves itself (much like the "problem" of people who drink Drano solves itself).
You (and the earlier poster) are, well, wrong. Trying to cast drug use (esp perscription drugs) as taking chances with your own health alone is not just selfish, but foolish. The drug you put in your body can endanger me, and that makes it a public issue, not a private one.
Someone has already mentioned antibiotic resistance. This can happen not just when you decide to take drugs you don't need, but when you don't take a full course. Ever notice how some drugs say "as needed" on the dosaging while others say "complete full course of perscription, even if symptoms reside"? It's not just doctors or pharmacists having a power trip, it's protecting the health of your entire community. If your ignorant self administration of drugs kills you, whatever. If it can give me a new and virelent strain of a disease, thats called public health.
And what about side effects? If the side effect is you getting liver disease or impotence, its not my problem. If the side effect is that one beer (which you as a responsible self controller have determined you are safe to drive on) puts you in a state where you get in an accident and kill my NICOE, you bet its my problem! And yes, there are drugs which have exactly this sort of combination effect with alcohol.
If making a bad choice in drug use had no more far reaching effect than drinking drano, you would have a consistent argument. (not one I would agree with, but thats a more fundemental philosophical issue). But far more people than the individual making the choice can be endangered, and that makes it my, your and everyone elses problem.
A neighborhood pharmacy might, for instance, setup a website so that regular customers can place perscription orders on-line and recieve email notification or instant messages when the perscription is ready to be picked up. They might also make arrangements with the local clinic or doctors.
Can't disagree that this would be annoying, but as someone already mentioned, even your local druggist already has to deal with the feds (DEA - hell, the vet I worked for had a DEA number. Pain killers and pheno-barb.) So depending on how well the law is integrated with current practices, it need not be a total headache.
And in this particular example, if the pharmacy is not actually shipping said drugs, I'm not sure the proposed legislation would effect them. Depends on the wording.
You don't need laws regulating the sale of medicine and requiring prescriptions in order to walk up to your pharmacist and ask him a few questions. Just open your mouth and ask. I myself always listen carefully to what the pharmacist tells me about a medicine, and read over any printed material accompanying the medicine.
Well, yeah, really, you do. See, without a perscription, you wouldn't neccassaryily have a friendly (or even surly) pharmacist. You wouldn't need one to get your drugs. And since someone who had gone to the bother of going to school and learning what he was doing would have to charge more overhead to pay back his school loans, buy regularly updated books on drug interactions and efficacy (and do the research to find out who paid for each of them to be printed and try to distill the truth out of them.) and maintain a database of what drugs you had bought from him so he could warn you about the interactions, he won't get the business. I know you want to believe that everyone would somehow know who was better or worse, but in the real world, it just doesn't work that way. The same insurance companies that only want to pay for "generic drugs" (which often have different side effects for different people and are not always interchangeable) would set a "fee for service" compensation level at the lowest end of the spectrum.
When you ask important questions about your perscriptions, you are not replacing the current system of protections, you're just taking full advantage of it. When you carefully research drugs before you decide to take them, you are using information which is only avalible in most cases because of FDA requirements. You are counting on a consistency of product between different manufacturers that again is due to regulation, not the market.
I think there are two kinds of free-market worshippers. There are those who believe that the ol' hidden hand actually will always produce the best possible product/standards/life if it is given free rein. Then there are those who don't always care if the end result is better or worse, the means of the free market is in and of itself the good that is being sought, and if people are hurt by being poor/less intelligent/lied to, it still shouldn't interfere with the higher good of the market. I still haven't decided which I like better, but I get a good view of each on/.
I wouldn't dream of disagreeing with your assessment of drug companies (who I generally believe to be one of the many spawns of satan plauging modern life) but I believe that what is being discussed here is pharmacists, nor pharmacuticals. That is, the individuals who dispense the drugs, not the corps that patent them.
It kind of bothers me that the liscensing for pharmacists is so diverse to begin with (can a person who has lost his liscense in one state just go to another?) and if they are going to be filling perscriptions and shipping drugs across state lines, some sort of federal overview seems neccassary, if for nothing else than to set up a "full faith and credit" system and moderate any disagreements between states with different liscensing rules.
As someone who takes several perscription medications, I want the government regulating standards of how they are mixed, packaged and dispensed. (Please don't tell me the free market would do it just as well. Lets just not have that fight, I'm sick today.)
And, fortunately or un, it seems to me that fixing the abuses of the pharmacutical industry on the macro level will actually require government intervention. So far as I know, most of the horror stories of taking established medicines (or cell lines, another nightmare) and making them proprietary has used abuses of traditional patent law, rather than any new legislation.
Reading one of these (il)legal notices, I came across an interesting turn of phrase... (all emphasis mine).
Before allowing their copyrighted motion pictures to be used on the DVD format, the motion picture companies insisted on a viable copy protection system to prevent users from making copies of the motion pictures. Such protection is necessary to prevent copying from discs that are rented or borrowed and, more importantly, to prevent broader scale piracy through widespread transmission of these motion pictures over the Internet and widespread distribution of "pirated" discs in competition with the authorized prerecorded discs...
CSS is proprietary technology that was developed to provide the protection demanded by the motion picture companies against unauthorized copying of their copyrighted material.
So their assertion is that this encryption is not (as one might reasonably assume) for a small group of manufacturers to hold onto a market and prevent generics from getting in on it (unless they join the little "non-profit" club to get the right - wonder what the dues/requirements are for being in on this) but rather something they absolutely had to do and have to keep proprietory, or no studios will let them make DVDs of their movies and the entire DVD technology industry will collapse. (Because the movie studios will be so much happier to go back to VHS, which is easy to pirate.)
Now, not to be entirely paranoid, but this sounds like BS. Studios put their movies on DVD because they want to sell them. I'm having a hard time envisioning how a DVD could be easier to pirate than a VHS tape, so why would the studio care more than the manufacturer about the proprietory strength of the encryption?
And can you get in trouble for lying on a summons, or does it have to be a deposition to count?;->
His original quote was, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Just curious, not a flame, but why were you so adamant about your explanation? If you were aware of his subsequent explanation (because you did get that part right), I'm surprised that you didn't know what he originally said.
My chronology of knowing what he said was something like this. Bunch of people start joking about how "Al Gore said he invented the internet" No actual quote associated, no context. (And no flaming here either, but I find it hard to believe that he just spontaneously remarked "By the way, I took initiative in creating the internet." Without seeing the interview, I don't know what was said before or after or if he was given a chance to expand after.) After it got bounced around and blown out of proportion to the point you would have thought he held a "creator of the internet" press conference, I read a letter to the editor (from a regular Joe, unless Gore has stealth spinners) which, if I remember correctly was along the line of "actually what he said was this and it is largely accurate."
Now, if I don't remember correctly, its possible that what the letter said was "this is what he did and it was important to the internet of today." I don't think so, but I don't have an edict memory, and won't pretend I do.
So, pending an actual look at the transcript of the interview (and since I don't even know what network it was on, I'm not gonna do the search.) my assessment is that
1) Al Gore said something unconsidered and easy to make fun of.
2) There are plenty of people willing to run with and exagerate something embarrassing Al Gore says.
3) Al Gore has a yuppie user's veiw of the internet (e-commerce and banner ads) rather than a geek's (the original system).
4) Some people have attempted to spin his statement into a considered lie by only mentioning the original starting point and not what his work in congress may have accomplished.
Random side note, his original quote says "creating" while the common joke is that he said he "invented" it. The former is dramatic but mostly apropriate when you're talking about funding infrastructure, while the latter make it sound like he was claiming to be a techno-genius. Just a thought from someone who pays a lot of attention to word choice, especially in the media.
An Al Gore hate site hardly strikes me as an objective place to go for the real story on what he said. It includes one quote with none of the followup comments to it and no context. But anyway...
On the original topic of PCs and the internet, my college unix account was always accessed from terminals in the computer lab. A few times when the lab was really full, I had to use the PCs to log in instead. It always took longer and was less user friendly. It took me a while to think of the internet as something you would ever want to do from a PC.
I don't blame anyone for moderating this down, but it really bugs me when I see as generally intelligent a group as this repeating the stupidest things never done line. (like a while ago when a thread about a law suit spawned allusions to the nigh-legendary mcdonalds coffee lawsuit.)
So, just to get it out of my system - Al Gore never said that he invented the internet, or anything even vaugly similar. He said that when he was in congress, he supported a spending bill that increased the accessability of the internet from what it was then. You can argue about what that bill actually acomplished, or even try to find the context of the quote and see if he was trying to claim hipness points or responding to a question about his priorities where it was relevant, but for the love of the Taco Bell dog, could people please stop ragging on the man for something he never said!
Ugh. I mean, if you want, I'll sneak some lexis-nexus time and find you a list of stupid things he actually did say, if you just want to insult Al Gore.
I could see the same sort of problem coming up with on-line education oppertunities as well. If it gets to the point where you can take more certification type tests on your computer (leaving aside the issues that they could only be open book, I can still see the value if they were timed) or on-line voting for more important things than the time person of the year, open source avalibility would raise the same issues. So where is open source appropriate and inappropriate?
And I understand the argument that "anyone who really wants to can hack closed source in a little more time" but I file it under the philosophy the nobody wants my bike. In brief this is the idea that, no, a kryptonite lock won't stop someone who really wants my bike, but it will cause someone who just wants "a" bike to look for an easier target, and add an extra component of time and therefore risk to disuade the casual thief. In the same way, it is unlikely that a casual cracker will suddenly turn into a devoted and more methodical cracker (or thief, mugger, corrupt politician, etc.) when faced with one more secure item.
This theory also applies to evolution, but thats another story.
This made it onto cruel.com once, but I don't know about/. My brother in law has a really split keyboard - he cut one in half, and hung the halves on either side of one of theose ergonomic kneeling chairs. He has another keyboard in the normal position to make it easier on others (such as my sister) using his machine, but he does most of his typing with his hands hanging down by his sides.
Wouldn't work for me cause I can't touch-type, and I imagine that the regular keyboard would be better for anything where you were using the mouse as much as the keys (maybe for a late xmas present I'll try to rig him up a foot controlled mouse... no, wouldn't work with the ergo-chair) but still pretty cool.
Will leave it up to him (he reads here) to decide if he wants to post the url and risk the/. effect or not.
This made it onto cruel.com once, but I don't know about/. My brother in law has a really split keyboard - he cut one in half, and hung the halves on either side of one of theose ergonomic kneeling chairs. He has another keyboard in the normal position to make it easier on others (such as my sister) using his machine, but he does most of his typing with his hands hanging down by his sides.
Wouldn't work for me cause I can't touch-type, and I imagine that the regular keyboard would be better for anything where you were using the mouse as much as the keys (maybe for a late xmas present I'll try to rig him up a foot controlled mouse... no, wouldn't work with the ergo-chair) but still pretty cool.
Will leave it up to him (he reads here) to decide if he wants to post the url and risk the/. effect or not.
Anyone here hacked your own hardware when they didn't sell something to your ergo standards?
Slashdot Mirror
Just a thought to bounce around, and admittedly one stolen from a steven king novela, but hey. If it wouldn't work for whatever reason, just tell me, don't flame me and we'll all be more knowlegeble and less stressed. :)
Translate all you want sir, I said what I meant and others understood it. Its very sad when people can't just except that another person can understand the situation just as well as they do, be just as inteligent, but still come to a different conclusion. Learn to accept ambiguity in the world. It will help.
This is an incredibly insulting assumption that I have seen too many times. Why don't you find someone who actually went to Seattle and ask them where they buy their shoes? I couldn't go, I live on the other coast and don't make a lot of money. But you know what? When I talk about human rights abuses for profit, I'm not standing in "made in china" shoes. I have bought maybe five objects in the last year that were made in China or vietnam. Some were by accident, others were after I searched through several inventories of an item I needed and found that there were no products of the type I needed that weren't made there. In some of those cases, I will simply not get the item.
And I'm a pretty casual follower of the anti-slave labor philosophy as such things go. So don't go around calling people hypocrits on assumption. Some of us go to a lot of trouble to live by our own standards and I get sick and tired of people assuming we are hypocrits because they assume that we couldn't possibly be putting in effort that they aren't.
So when I have to walk through the dumb metal detectors, and they beep at me and make me check my pockets again, its a little annoying. Then again, when they board huge sections at once, and I'm in the back of that section and stand in the aisle while morons fights with their carry on baggage, that is annoying too. But the first one gives me the safety and thus the freedom to travel across the country in a few hours, and I consider it a benifit, not an intrusion.
Again, I understand the philosophy, especially at its more extreme examples. If I was living under effective marshal law, as has happened in some countries with a more widespread terrorism, I would feel that the balance had shifted too far, perhaps. But where I live, it is not the anti-terrorism actions that take away my freedom. It is the anti-abortion terrorists harrassing my sister when she just wanted her yearly exam, or the bastard who threw a military issue tear gas gernade into a gay pride parade in San Diego, making me wonder if its really worth going to my own march this year.
There is an assumption sometimes that our freedoms can only be taken away by the government. But for me, having my safety protected gives me the freedom to actually implement my rights to speech, to assocciation, to religion (or lack thereof).
Just a thought for the new year. Now I'm probably gonna read myself to sleep and hope that the world's still here when I wake up in the morning. Happy New Year.
Wow, you are so sweet. How did you know I wasn't going out tonight and needed some entertainment at home?
Your original comment was objecting to regulations (in this case security) on the basis that air travel was such a necessity that they couldn't make it something you didn't want to do. Now you compare it to the highways, which you have to do hunderds of things you may not like to do in order to use them. So is a necessity something that you must have on your own terms, or something that is subject to regulation so that everyone can safely use it?
And while the ability to drive specifically is not a total necessity, the ability to travel is guarenteed within most countries. In fact, each method of travel has its own restrictions. To drive yourself, you must be liscensed, have a approved vehical and obey traffic laws. To be driven by a commercial interest you buy a ticket and obey their rules, some of which may be mandated to them by the government (no smoking, etc.) To fly, you must obey other rules. To walk or bicycle, you must find different routes than you would probably take driving.
The point is, that while it may often be a necessity to travel, it can rarely be considered a real necessity to do it by a particular method. Hence, you have no more right to fly on your terms than you have to drive on whichever side of the road you want.
I don't know why I'm bother to respond to this flame, but no it wasn't. This was recently, and it was Clinton. Perhaps it would help if you knew what you were talking about before you called other people names.
Yeah, those guys on the Indian Airlines flight sure do have it easy. I mean, they're only being kidnapped and in some cases killed once. I've flown six times this year, and every single time I had to empty out my pocket stuff and step through this annoying machine! Once they even pulled me off to the side and used a hand-held wand to determine that it was my hiking boots that kept making it go off. The humiliation! The Horror!
Do you seriously mean this? Do you honestly think that the minor disclosures we make for something as optional as flying in an airplane are worse than what hostages go through or the death and injuries people have suffered at the hands of terrorists? How much of your privacy was "invaded" before you decided it was a greater cost than someone else's life? The metal detector? Turning on your laptop? Have you ever even been frisked?
Sometimes I just don't know...
Interestingly, the article mentions that the installations are part of a response to complaints of racial and other types of profiling. Specifically, there was an assertion that black women were being singled out for frisks. A thorough frisk I think would be far more upsetting a violation of privacy than someone seeing a grainy image. (and if the earier post was referencing real pictures, its nothing to get turned on about - you might as well be a maniquin.)
Water, yes, electricity, in many areas. Phones and airplanes, are you kidding? People live their lives never flying. People who are afraid of flying find other ways of getting around. Do you honestly think that a faster way of getting somewhere is comparable to safe drinking water?
What would you do if all water companies started putting some chemical in the water that 10% of the population was allergic too? There *ARE* other alternatives and you "don't have a right to every single convenience that some company has to offer." no? You could stock up on bottled water, dig a well, boil all your water before use. Right? Wrong. Air transportation is no different.
This is an awful analogy on so many levels.
1) An alergy is a physical reaction, possibly very serious. Not liking to go through security measures is a personal preference. No comparision.
2) Water is necassary for life. That simple. You don't drink water, you die. You don't take the plane, so what?
3) Going on a flight, you know in advance what may be coming and you know whether you have a problem with it or not. If there is something in the water, you have a ten percent chance, and you don't know one way or the other, necassarily.
Not only is air transportation so different from water avaliblity that it beggers the imagination, your analogy fails on the type of roadblock imposed. Try again.
BTW, this misconception of air travel as a vital interest allowed Clinton to shut down a strike of one airline's pilots and order them back to work with no negotiations. The more luxuries that selfish Americans redefine as necessities, the more classes of workers suffer.
For the record, in my submission of this story I did discuss the pros and cons, including that this is meant as an alternative to frisks (not necessarily strip searches) and my personal opinion that I would much prefer this to a hands-on frisk. I would have prefered to have my complete comments preserved as the "read more" section, but since its my first submission, I will accept editorial decisions with gratitude. ;-)
Well, if you must....
I stated that I held many beliefs (freedom of action vs public saftey, etc) that often contridict each other but must be reconciled. You responded with an exagerated list of what I am perfectly willing to accept as egrerious abuses. The implication was that my philosophy was indistinguishable from such hypocrisy. I responded to this by giving more realisitic examples of situations in which things we believe in must at some point be compromised rather than fanatically carried out to the ends of the earth. The fact that you seem to agree with those examples means that they were chosen correctly, as my point was to elaborate what kind of compromises I was talking about originally, and distiguish them from your examples, which could be fairly regarded as abuses, not compromises.
Since it seems that we are in overall agreement on both the philosophical point that I brought up (in response to the assertion that anyone who would have reason to say "I'm a libertarian, but.." is not any sort of libertarian at all.) and at least some of the outlying reigons of application (both the very obvious and the very obviously hypocritical) I would chalk up the interveneing hostility to one of us not understanding what the other one meant to get across. Or possible both of us at different times.
Oh, but I have to say that describing your examples as people "bending" important rules for noble ends may not be very accurate. More commonly, such people do not actually respect the underlying rules at all, and will even say so if pushed. There is a huge difference between honestly trying to find where freedom of speech and public/individual safety intersect, and dealing with the 1st amendment as an annoying roadblock to the things you want to do.
On to a more current discussion.
Amoung people close to me, I tend to give a lot of medical advice. They take it as useful because I was a bio major in college, worked with a vet for a while and have had enough health problems of my own. But they also know that I'm not a doctor, or even a med student and take what I say under that advisement. When I give any advice or claim any info which falls under what I think of as "trade knowlege" I either explain why I'm qualified to say it, or make it clear that it is only meant to stimulate discussion, not as solid fact.
I believe in freedom of speech, but lying in a transaction, or telling someone their cancer will clear up on its own are fraud and malpractice respectivly.
"I believe in open government, but they have to be able to keep secret things like how much money they spend on any "classified" military design project/their evidence justifying "anti-terrorist" actions/how the current war is really going."
I believe in open government, but if there had been full disclosure of code breaking techniques or the plans for D-day, we'd probably be living under a swastika now.
"I believe in due process, but in order to fight the drug war we have to have no-knock warrants/Army soldiers wandering around and ending up shooting goat-herders/ludicrous mandatory minimum laws/property confiscation laws."
I believe in due proccess, but when you have reasonable belief of a violent crime in process, you stop someone from being hurt or killed and argue the fine points later. And if you can't make that argument sufficiently, you take your lumps like a professional.
All noble compromises, certainly.
Actually, yours were strawmen, but thanks for trying.
As Ben Franklin pointed out, when you start trading away your freedoms for safety, you don't get either.
If Benny really believed that, he would have burned the Constitution and moved to a cabin in the woods (easier then than now.) Giving up freedoms for safety is what we call society. Knowing the difference between the freedom of personal religion and the freedom to randomly slug people who piss you off, and being willing to think about the less clear cut cases is what we call maturity.
I dunno, I tend to respect people who can believe in the importance of some ideal or freedom without having to believe that it it of absolute unapproachable importance and can never be comprimised for any other ideal or freedom.
I can believe in freedom of action and still believe in protecting the public. I can believe in privacy and still believe in accountability. I can believe in parent's rights and children's rights at the same time. Parscing out what happens when two important freedoms/rights interfere with each other is what ethics (and being an adult) is all about.
A person who says "I'm a libertarian but..." may not be a libertarian. Or (s)he may just not be a fanatic.
You (and the earlier poster) are, well, wrong. Trying to cast drug use (esp perscription drugs) as taking chances with your own health alone is not just selfish, but foolish. The drug you put in your body can endanger me, and that makes it a public issue, not a private one.
Someone has already mentioned antibiotic resistance. This can happen not just when you decide to take drugs you don't need, but when you don't take a full course. Ever notice how some drugs say "as needed" on the dosaging while others say "complete full course of perscription, even if symptoms reside"? It's not just doctors or pharmacists having a power trip, it's protecting the health of your entire community. If your ignorant self administration of drugs kills you, whatever. If it can give me a new and virelent strain of a disease, thats called public health.
And what about side effects? If the side effect is you getting liver disease or impotence, its not my problem. If the side effect is that one beer (which you as a responsible self controller have determined you are safe to drive on) puts you in a state where you get in an accident and kill my NICOE, you bet its my problem! And yes, there are drugs which have exactly this sort of combination effect with alcohol.
If making a bad choice in drug use had no more far reaching effect than drinking drano, you would have a consistent argument. (not one I would agree with, but thats a more fundemental philosophical issue). But far more people than the individual making the choice can be endangered, and that makes it my, your and everyone elses problem.
Can't disagree that this would be annoying, but as someone already mentioned, even your local druggist already has to deal with the feds (DEA - hell, the vet I worked for had a DEA number. Pain killers and pheno-barb.) So depending on how well the law is integrated with current practices, it need not be a total headache.
And in this particular example, if the pharmacy is not actually shipping said drugs, I'm not sure the proposed legislation would effect them. Depends on the wording.
Well, yeah, really, you do. See, without a perscription, you wouldn't neccassaryily have a friendly (or even surly) pharmacist. You wouldn't need one to get your drugs. And since someone who had gone to the bother of going to school and learning what he was doing would have to charge more overhead to pay back his school loans, buy regularly updated books on drug interactions and efficacy (and do the research to find out who paid for each of them to be printed and try to distill the truth out of them.) and maintain a database of what drugs you had bought from him so he could warn you about the interactions, he won't get the business. I know you want to believe that everyone would somehow know who was better or worse, but in the real world, it just doesn't work that way. The same insurance companies that only want to pay for "generic drugs" (which often have different side effects for different people and are not always interchangeable) would set a "fee for service" compensation level at the lowest end of the spectrum.
When you ask important questions about your perscriptions, you are not replacing the current system of protections, you're just taking full advantage of it. When you carefully research drugs before you decide to take them, you are using information which is only avalible in most cases because of FDA requirements. You are counting on a consistency of product between different manufacturers that again is due to regulation, not the market.
I think there are two kinds of free-market worshippers. There are those who believe that the ol' hidden hand actually will always produce the best possible product/standards/life if it is given free rein. Then there are those who don't always care if the end result is better or worse, the means of the free market is in and of itself the good that is being sought, and if people are hurt by being poor/less intelligent/lied to, it still shouldn't interfere with the higher good of the market. I still haven't decided which I like better, but I get a good view of each on /.
It kind of bothers me that the liscensing for pharmacists is so diverse to begin with (can a person who has lost his liscense in one state just go to another?) and if they are going to be filling perscriptions and shipping drugs across state lines, some sort of federal overview seems neccassary, if for nothing else than to set up a "full faith and credit" system and moderate any disagreements between states with different liscensing rules.
As someone who takes several perscription medications, I want the government regulating standards of how they are mixed, packaged and dispensed. (Please don't tell me the free market would do it just as well. Lets just not have that fight, I'm sick today.)
And, fortunately or un, it seems to me that fixing the abuses of the pharmacutical industry on the macro level will actually require government intervention. So far as I know, most of the horror stories of taking established medicines (or cell lines, another nightmare) and making them proprietary has used abuses of traditional patent law, rather than any new legislation.
But anyway...
Before allowing their copyrighted motion pictures to be used on the DVD format, the motion picture companies insisted on a viable copy protection system to prevent users from making copies of the motion pictures. Such protection is necessary to prevent copying from discs that are rented or borrowed and, more importantly, to prevent broader scale piracy through widespread transmission of these motion pictures over the Internet and widespread distribution of "pirated" discs in competition with the authorized prerecorded discs...
CSS is proprietary technology that was developed to provide the protection demanded by the motion picture companies against unauthorized copying of their copyrighted material.
So their assertion is that this encryption is not (as one might reasonably assume) for a small group of manufacturers to hold onto a market and prevent generics from getting in on it (unless they join the little "non-profit" club to get the right - wonder what the dues/requirements are for being in on this) but rather something they absolutely had to do and have to keep proprietory, or no studios will let them make DVDs of their movies and the entire DVD technology industry will collapse. (Because the movie studios will be so much happier to go back to VHS, which is easy to pirate.)
Now, not to be entirely paranoid, but this sounds like BS. Studios put their movies on DVD because they want to sell them. I'm having a hard time envisioning how a DVD could be easier to pirate than a VHS tape, so why would the studio care more than the manufacturer about the proprietory strength of the encryption?
And can you get in trouble for lying on a summons, or does it have to be a deposition to count? ;->
Just curious, not a flame, but why were you so adamant about your explanation? If you were aware of his subsequent explanation (because you did get that part right), I'm surprised that you didn't know what he originally said.
My chronology of knowing what he said was something like this. Bunch of people start joking about how "Al Gore said he invented the internet" No actual quote associated, no context. (And no flaming here either, but I find it hard to believe that he just spontaneously remarked "By the way, I took initiative in creating the internet." Without seeing the interview, I don't know what was said before or after or if he was given a chance to expand after.) After it got bounced around and blown out of proportion to the point you would have thought he held a "creator of the internet" press conference, I read a letter to the editor (from a regular Joe, unless Gore has stealth spinners) which, if I remember correctly was along the line of "actually what he said was this and it is largely accurate."
Now, if I don't remember correctly, its possible that what the letter said was "this is what he did and it was important to the internet of today." I don't think so, but I don't have an edict memory, and won't pretend I do.
So, pending an actual look at the transcript of the interview (and since I don't even know what network it was on, I'm not gonna do the search.) my assessment is that
1) Al Gore said something unconsidered and easy to make fun of.
2) There are plenty of people willing to run with and exagerate something embarrassing Al Gore says.
3) Al Gore has a yuppie user's veiw of the internet (e-commerce and banner ads) rather than a geek's (the original system).
4) Some people have attempted to spin his statement into a considered lie by only mentioning the original starting point and not what his work in congress may have accomplished.
Random side note, his original quote says "creating" while the common joke is that he said he "invented" it. The former is dramatic but mostly apropriate when you're talking about funding infrastructure, while the latter make it sound like he was claiming to be a techno-genius. Just a thought from someone who pays a lot of attention to word choice, especially in the media.
OK, this was way off topic. Bad Kahuna, no Karma.
An Al Gore hate site hardly strikes me as an objective place to go for the real story on what he said. It includes one quote with none of the followup comments to it and no context. But anyway...
On the original topic of PCs and the internet, my college unix account was always accessed from terminals in the computer lab. A few times when the lab was really full, I had to use the PCs to log in instead. It always took longer and was less user friendly. It took me a while to think of the internet as something you would ever want to do from a PC.
I don't blame anyone for moderating this down, but it really bugs me when I see as generally intelligent a group as this repeating the stupidest things never done line. (like a while ago when a thread about a law suit spawned allusions to the nigh-legendary mcdonalds coffee lawsuit.)
So, just to get it out of my system - Al Gore never said that he invented the internet, or anything even vaugly similar. He said that when he was in congress, he supported a spending bill that increased the accessability of the internet from what it was then. You can argue about what that bill actually acomplished, or even try to find the context of the quote and see if he was trying to claim hipness points or responding to a question about his priorities where it was relevant, but for the love of the Taco Bell dog, could people please stop ragging on the man for something he never said!
Ugh. I mean, if you want, I'll sneak some lexis-nexus time and find you a list of stupid things he actually did say, if you just want to insult Al Gore.
OK, that's out of my system.
And I understand the argument that "anyone who really wants to can hack closed source in a little more time" but I file it under the philosophy the nobody wants my bike. In brief this is the idea that, no, a kryptonite lock won't stop someone who really wants my bike, but it will cause someone who just wants "a" bike to look for an easier target, and add an extra component of time and therefore risk to disuade the casual thief. In the same way, it is unlikely that a casual cracker will suddenly turn into a devoted and more methodical cracker (or thief, mugger, corrupt politician, etc.) when faced with one more secure item.
This theory also applies to evolution, but thats another story.
Wouldn't work for me cause I can't touch-type, and I imagine that the regular keyboard would be better for anything where you were using the mouse as much as the keys (maybe for a late xmas present I'll try to rig him up a foot controlled mouse... no, wouldn't work with the ergo-chair) but still pretty cool.
Will leave it up to him (he reads here) to decide if he wants to post the url and risk the /. effect or not.
Wouldn't work for me cause I can't touch-type, and I imagine that the regular keyboard would be better for anything where you were using the mouse as much as the keys (maybe for a late xmas present I'll try to rig him up a foot controlled mouse... no, wouldn't work with the ergo-chair) but still pretty cool.
Will leave it up to him (he reads here) to decide if he wants to post the url and risk the /. effect or not.
Anyone here hacked your own hardware when they didn't sell something to your ergo standards?