If a carrier moves its R&D or engineering, its suppliers may follow. High-tech requires an ecosystem. CA succeeds with its amazingly high cost due to the existance of that ecosystem.
Currently, NONE of the major carriers operate out of California (Here's a more detailed article). Furthermore, these regulations don't affect operations, they affect how you treat consumers... so they don't particularly have an effect on the cost of operating out of California, only the cost of selling service here. So these concerns, while they sound compelling, don't actually have anything to do with this move.
With the advent of "overbuilders" such as RCN and satellite TV such as DirecTV and Dish Network, perhaps cable should be deregulated.
Regardless of how small the "dish" is, many apartment buildings prohibit installation of satellite TV. If they allow it, usually they've contracted with a particular company not of your choosing (in our building, we can get DirecTV if we want, or go with regular cable). There's still no way to choose a different cable company except by moving to another area.
Therefore, market competition still doesn't work for a pretty large percentage of urban consumers, and I'm happy to have cable service regulated.
It seems the Golden State has wrecked its economy by going too far with some socialistic ideals in the recent past
Uh... 1978 isn't that recent, and making it illegal for property tax revenues to keep up with inflation is hardly socialistic.
The 1978 tax revolt was inspired in large part by the fact that the California government had a large surplus of revenues. So this is a bad thing we're not allowed to do anymore. Therefore, when the dot-com boom made us temporarily flush, we had to spend all the money as quickly as possible, rather than saving it for the inevitable (but still somehow unforseen) bust.
We also did things like "temporarily" lowering the Vehicle License Fee from 2% of the car's value to 0.65%, then when we tried to put it back after we no longer had enough money to pay for stuff like fire and police, we got rid of our governor. Again, far from socialistic.
how could this guy not realize that copying papers and turning them in as his own is wrong?
It seems that his logic works much like a lot of people who get caught exploiting bugs in MMOGs, and get very upset when their account is suspended.
See, if they've been doing the same exploit all along, even if the company is pretty clear on what sorts of things are exploits, it's not *fair* that they didn't get a warning first. After all, the game engine allows it, so how are they supposed to realize that something that is obviously not working as intended and trivializes an encounter is wrong?
On the other hand, it makes a lot more sense in a computer game (where it's actually not possible to do most things that are "cheating") than in real life.
Yes folks, here in the US, unless you are the victem of the Patriot Act, you are not only untitled to a speedy trial, but a speedy arrest as well! Hmm.
Huh?
1) This was in England (Unless there's a University of Kent somewhere in the US that I don't know about, and they have a three-year degree program)
2) Is "untitled" supposed to be "entitled", "unentitled", or that you just don't have a title until you've gotten your speedy trial?
3) Does university internal discipline have anything whatsoever to do with constitutional rights?
News Flash: Coffee is HOT. That case is a perfect example of why our litigious society is so bogged down in paperwork and CYA procedures.
Next time you're at Starbuck's, maybe they'll hand you coffee that's 250 degrees. Your problem if you burn yourself, right? Coffee is HOT.
There's "hot, because the beverage tastes better that way, and people expect it to be that temperature" and "hot, to the degree that it makes it more convenient to run our business but several customers have complained about the temperature and the health department has told us to turn it down." Contrary to popular belief, businesses still do have a scrap of responsibility for not blatantly disregarding things like, oh say, health and safety codes.
She still spilled it. It wasn't like some guy from McDonalds poured it into her lap, she spilled it on herself. That automatically makes it her fault and no one else's.
Even though the cup and lid had suffered heat damage, and this was part of the reason why she spilled it?
So they serve it at a temperature that they've been told before is too hot, in cups that can't sustain that heat, and then when it collapses while someone's opening it, it's *still* their fault that they wind up with third degree burns on their lap? Theirs and no one else's?
If, on the other hand, you buy a substance which is well known to be hot, and considered to be MORE desirable when it is more hot, and then you dump it in your own lap, that is your fault.
You know, I can't right off the top of my head recall the last time I dumped hot coffee or tea or somesuch in my lap, but I know I've done it before. It's not usually a very memorable experience. You know why? Because it makes my skin red for a while, and might even stay that way for a couple days if it was REALLY hot.
I've never needed skin grafts from hot coffee. I've never even had it raise a blister. I think once I had BOILING water splash on my hand while cooking something and had a couple blisters. I haven't had a third degree burn that I can remember (I burned my feet badly on a floor heater when I was a toddler, but don't remember that, which is probably good).
Spilling hot coffee should not, under normal circumstances, cause disfiguring injury. It shouldn't even require a hospital visit. Most folks know this intuitively... or we wouldn't drink so much coffee, because it would be such a dangerous thing to do. Just apply a little common sense to the equation.
I'm 43 years old, and it has been common knowledge that smoking is bad for your health for my entire lifetime.
It's understandable that, since you were only a small child in 1965, you don't remember when the warnings started appearing on the cigarette packs, or the huge uproar the tobacco companies raised about putting them there. It probably had no relevance to a four-year-old. On the other hand, I'm 30, and since I *knew* the warnings had been there *my* whole life, I actually bothered to look up when it happened. Prior to those warnings, the tobacco companies were still insisting that smoking wasn't bad for you, really. As little as ten years earlier they had sponsors with medical degrees telling you how *good* it was for you.
Smoking appeals to stupid people. I don't care what your IQ or your GPA, if you started smoking from 1960 or after you are a stupid fucker.
Glad you exempted my mom from that blanket statement. She had her first cigarette in 1950, when she was seven. Her older sisters gave it to her to calm her down after a traumatic experience. She smoked for 31 years before finally quitting when I was 8.
A couple of years ago, she survived breast cancer. She has health insurance, so the group of people who shared the cost of her smoking is smaller than the entire State of California. But not everyone is so lucky. There's a lot of people who started smoking before 1960, and even who quit many years ago, who are costing us *all* a lot to take care of now, when the effects are finally showing up.
The fact that a stupid fuck addicted himself or herself to smoking isn't my problem. Their nasty smoke and ash, ruining my meal and making my clothes and hair stink, is my problem.
The fact that your health insurance premiums and tax dollars are helping to pay for the health effects of other people's smoking sounds like your problem to me. My problem too. But, if we started charging people a lot more for health insurance if they smoke, the tobacco companies would pull all their campaign contributions, because it might hurt their sales.
Our society doesn't make people take responsibility for their smoking. The reason we don't is because of tobacco industry lobbying. If we make people pay the costs of their own actions up-front, they will be less likely to smoke. The "gamble" on having cancer or emphysema way, way down the line (well, I'll quit eventually, you know) isn't enough for most people to compute.
I totally agree that there's no justification whatsoever for allowing people to smoke in public. Do nicotine? Sure, do whatever drug you want. Get a patch, get some gum, heck even chew it as long as you don't spit it on the ground. But no one has any right to force anyone *else* to do their drug of choice with them. (Big problem here is, smokers have no sense of smell, and definitely cannot smell their own smoke. So they don't realize that it's blowing your way.)
I knew it was deadly. There has been full disclosure of the dangers of cigarettes, right on the cigarette packs themselves, for several decades.
That's not actually possible. For starters, *just this week* a new study was published that finds a whole slew of new risks to smoking.
I'm only 30, and in my lifetime, the warnings on cigarette packs have changed from "Warning: the Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health" to the four rotating warnings, not all of which need to be on the same pack. Maybe you'll get the pack warning you about low birth weight babies, and I'll get the emphysema one... but that's not quite "full disclosure," now is it? And we've only had those for maybe 20 years... two decades, which isn't "several" in my little world.
Furthermore, the tobacco companies knew of many of these risks for a LONG time, while publicly denying them, before the government spent a whole lot of money to find them out and then to force the companies to disclose them. Not quite a responsible way of going about things, speaking of taking responsibility.
Quitting smoking is a really, really tough thing to do. I watched my mom do it after 31 years, when I was 8 years old. I have zero tolerance for people smoking around me, and have never touched a cigarette... but while I will enthusiastically encourage anyone who expresses the vaguest interest in quitting, I also won't badger them to do so when they aren't interested. It's a huge commitment, and really difficult to do, just like quitting any drug.
Smokers have to take responsibility for their own smoking. They cannot blame anyone else. This recent argument that tobacco advertisements can absolve people of their free will is bullshit.
People believe what they want to believe. Cigarette ads tell them that young, vibrant, healthy people smoke, and look cool doing it, and feel great about themselves. Those people you see dying of cancer and whatnot are difficult to identify with.
It's not like alcohol and other drugs, where a single incident of bad judgement can get you killed or land you in prison... or you can become a dysfunctional addict within a short time. You can be a major nicotine addict and be functional for decades before it *really* hits you. By that time, the damage is done. It's too late to realize your mistake.
People are animals. Some very smart people are very good at looking ahead and linking future consequences to present-day actions, but most aren't. You hit the lever, the pellet comes out, you learn to feed yourself. If the pellet doesn't come out right away, you don't learn the association. The ads are what are right there, right in front of folks, and we all let them be there, because of course it's the tobacco companies' god-given right to make money, no matter how many people get hurt. It would damage their *business* too much if they had to put a full warning on every pack, or *gasp* pay for their own research to determine if their drugs were safe before putting them on the market.
The money the states won in the tobacco lawsuits begins to pay off the damage done before the warning labels were ever put on the packs, but the costs are huge. How much do you suppose it's costing us, and has cost us, to take care of lifelong smokers who started before 1964? How about their children, who in addition to possibly having greater health risks, are a lot more likely to smoke due to a blend of environmental and chemical factors? What about the damage done by second-hand smoke... should all those waitresses and bartenders quit their jobs and find some new occupation, so that they can remain non-smokers?
There is only so much an individual can do in the face of a massive corporate effort to keep them from really knowing the dangers of their activities. Sure, people today should know that they shouldn't start smoking, and should know that they should minimize their exposure to other people's smoke. Are the tobacc
Bullshit. They had a product, a marketting campaign and a mascott. They marketted their product in order to make money. That's how capitalism works. If somebody doesn't like it - tough cookies.
So it's ok to market a product in a manner that is designed to make it appealing to people it is actually ILLEGAL to sell it to?
The tobacco lawsuits are bunk. "Everybody told me these were bad but I used them anyways and now I'm sick and want money." Tough shit. People back in WWII called cigarettes "coffin nails". I don't think there are many people alive today who don't realize that smoking is bad.
That are alive today, sure. When my mom was seven and they gave her her first cigarette (this was 1950), though, there were still doctors shilling for tobacco companies telling you all about how *good* cigarettes were for you.
British soldiers called them coffin nails. Perhaps a country with a national health system caught on a bit sooner. The tobacco companies were still blowing smoke up our collective ass about the safety and healthiness of cigarettes even after the Surgeon General forced them to put warnings on the packages, though (and that wasn't until the 1960's). In 1988, the Surgeon General came out with a 618-page report demonstrating that nicotine was powerfully addictive. The tobacco companies were still insisting at that time that it wasn't, not really.
How much can a company lie to you before it's not marketing anymore? If McDonald's told you that Quarter Pounders could not increase your risk of heart disease and had paid doctors to tell you in ads that french fries can help you slim down, would that be ok with you?
The schools need to practice an honesty-first method of administration, or they can expect that many students will cheat the system.
They do. They are quite up-front and honest about policies on plagarism and cheating. Heck, every Blue Book they sell at my school has a blurb about it on the cover. How much more honest can you get than telling people "this isn't allowed, and these are the consequences?"
My point is that any claim can be made by administration about how degrees have zero value, but if you consider the worth of these advancements, and there is a tangible value.
Many things have value, and many things have a price. Is the value of my degree equal to the fees I paid to obtain it? Probably not... it's probably worth a lot more than that. Therefore, the value of the degree is not measured by the fees paid, and it is not appropriate to judge the fees to be a price paid for a good.
On the other hand, folks across town at U$C are probably paying a lot more in tuition than their degrees are worth...;-) again, the tuition is not a price. It is a fee for a service. The value of the degree is not measured by the money paid for those services.
Unfortunately, this guy had an opportunity to learn a very, very valuable lesson from this university, and apparently failed to. Maybe he didn't pay enough?
Believe me, if every male out there were impervious to alcohol (as most of them would like to believe), I would agree with you wholeheartedly, but, they're not. Perpetuating gender myths is holding society back...
Erm, a few points, though:
- It is much harder, physically, for a drunk guy to have sex than a drunk girl. Truth is, with most guys, if he's drunk enough to not be able to consent legally, he's probably too drunk to get it up.
- A guy can wake up the next morning and think, "My god, what was I thinking?" and maybe fret for a while about diseases or if she will stop calling him. A girl can wake up from that and, aside from having a much higher risk of contracting an STD (simple biology... male to female transmission rates are higher for most things than female to male), she can end up pregnant.
Women are more likely to be victims of statutory rape than men, and generally have more compelling consequences to deal with. Yes, there are women who cry "rape!" when they should say "oops... won't do that again." But there are a lot fewer of those than women who actually *are* raped, whether date, statutory, or old-fashioned stranger-in-a-dark-alley style, and never report it.
Do any of you have settings that would be good in Outlook?
At my work, I finally filtered out all mail that was sent to the "-All Mail Recipients" list. It was almost always about supervisor training, safety standards that only applied to half the employees, someone's retirement or request for TOWP donations (I'm an intern, I don't get TOWP!) etc...
Devious suggestion: Buy misspellings of their domain, then capture all emails you receive. Hours of fun!
You'd think they'd be smart enough to have taken care of this already... but ditheyreadit.com is available, at least. That was the first common typo that came to my mind. If they didn't get that one, I'm guessing they didn't think to get quite a few of them...
When I was working for a no-longer-existent division of Turner Broadcasting, after the big AOL-TW merger, they decided that we should install AOL 6.0 on every computer in the office. Now, do I need to tell anyone here that AOL 6.0 was not designed for a business environment? No, we didn't have some special, custom install. We had the same one that showed up in everyone's home mailboxes.
In spite of this, it mostly went smoothly, except for this one laptop. After an hour and a half on the phone with AOL support (which actually WAS a special number just for those of us who had to try and install this stuff internally), our tech had learned exactly one thing: he could not simultaneously install AOL 6.0 *and* the network card. He had to choose between network connectivity and the software.
Finally, the AOL tech, who totally understood our frustration (since they also had to install this software on their computers), said, somewhat sheepishly... "Well, it *should* work."
No one could argue with that. In fact, we'd installed AOL 6.0 successfully on at least two laptops of the same exact model. So we knew that it *should* work. I felt somewhat proud of the guy on the other end for giving up, really.
The solution? Install AOL 5.0. (Then, a year later, realize it was a terrible idea to try to migrate a huge company to using AOL as their main email client, in part because it was a huge waste of employees' time to delete all that spam. But by then our division no longer existed and I had returned to grad school...)
The difference is that the mechanic that's charging you to look at your car isn't the company that made your car. I see a large difference in ethics between these two practices:
1- Charge someone money to diagnose what is faulty with someone ELSE's product.
2- Charge someone money to diagnose what it faulty with your OWN product.
And how often are tech support folks being asked about products their company didn't make?
Most calls to ISPs involve troubleshooting browser or email settings, or possibly third-party hardware (that was purchased by the consumer, and not from the ISP). Your boxed computer system tech support ends up with lots of calls for Windows and other software issues. Heck, half the support FAQs for online games are about troubleshooting your internet connection.
Sure, folks like most of us who post on/. actually call the company responsible for the problem, because we can do enough troubleshooting to know where the problem actually is. But most folks don't do that. And if you're on-site tech support for a company, you support *everything* even though you made none of it (though you may have made the decision to purchase it... or that might have been your idiot boss).
One common argument is that OS software is inherently more secure because everyone can review it. I'm sorry, but I don't think the number of people reviewing the software, looking for vulnerabilities in an effort to be a good citizen is astronomical.
It doesn't need to be.
The main point is that, with closed-source software, if the source gets out, the only people who can/will do anything with it are the black hats, because it's not legal to have it. If it's open source, then the good guys can do stuff too.
If the source stays secret, closed source is more effective. But the problem is that one-way door. If it gets out *just once*, you're completely blown. There's no going back. And *only* the bad guys benefit from it.
Here's my prediction of the effect that this will have on Cisco's sales, and on Cisco's share price. Zilch.
I don't know anyone who's choice of Cisco products was predicated on the closed source nature of IOS.
True, but... Cisco has just started up a massive ad campaign about their self-securing networks. The fact that they got hacked *at all* will have an effect on their sales, most likely... if they can't keep their own source code secure, why should you trust them with your network?
I'll bet many of the survivors of Sept. 11 2001 made it through because of cell phone communications.
In fact, we know that cell phone communications probably saved quite a number of lives on September 11, 2001. The folks on the fourth plane found out what was going on via their cell phones, and that's what made them decide to overwhelm the hijackers and crash in an empty field instead of whatever the intended target was.
Frankly, it's hard to kill someone with a cell phone. It's a lot easier to save someone with it. So taking away the ability for EVERYONE to use them in most cases will cause more harm than good.
Where the hell do you have the right to a telephone, anyway? Maybe the 9th amendment. But that's a stretch. Cell phones piss me off. seriously. Personally, I think they should be so prohibitly expensive that only doctors and drug dealers can afford them.
And what constitutional right of yours justifies trumping my ability to have a cell phone?
You may not like cell phones, but you have to put up with them. Don't use some political paranoia to justify your own personal convenience and comfort over others. Heck, maybe one of the times I've used my cell phone to report a drunk driver or something actually saved a life... I'm sure that your annoyance with them is FAR more important.
At what point do you start to care about communications being blocked to prevent some conceivable danger? Telephone land lines? Internet? Interpersonal communication? You're perfectly happy to have cell phones blocked because you personally find them inconvenient, but someone else might find YOU inconvenient one of these days. Think about it.
Sure, the guy would be found guilty of vote tampering and probably would be given jail time, but Diebold would hang as well for not producing a reliable voting machine which, in effect, ended up costing the state hundreds of thousands of dollars and plenty of man-hours finding out how to fix the bug or find another way to replace the Diebold machines.
You're *so* optimistic....
The machines have to be certified by the appropriate officials before they're used. Diebold, in this case, would claim that since they followed all the necessary procedures and were properly certified, they can't be held responsible. And they'd probably walk away from the whole thing (mostly) unscathed.
This is the problem with proprietary software running public elections... no one can *actually* inspect the system. But they have to pretend to anyway, which lets the company off the hook.
A computer system is not a unique person, but nowadays it's very much an extension of one. It has things I've written, things I've done, and important stuff I need to remember. If it's lost, a whole chunk of my life goes away.
Same with my house. When I leave my house, I lock the door. When I'm *home* I usually have the door locked too (this is more my husband's idea, though). Fortunately, Schlage generally has a good track record on not having easily-broken locks.
I think the preoccupation society as a whole has with people breaking into computers is sick, especially considering that many people are on the side of the person doing the attacks. And that disgusts me since I've seen what a horrible pain it is to recover from an attack.
Same with having your house burglarized. And yet, if you used a luggage lock to secure your front door, and your front door was right on the street, and there was no street lighting, neighborhood watch, etc., people would have a hard time sympathizing with you when you got ripped off. Especially if it was widely known that people keep getting broken into when they only use luggage locks to secure their personal belongings, and they're easily defeated (since they all pretty much have the same key).
For all the outrage I've gotten from my analogy, nobody's put a serious dent in my point: That people who do these things get away with it all the time, and that they somehow need to be stopped.
It's the risk-vs.-reward ratio. If you want to make it less attractive, the first thing to do is make it *harder*. When stealing someone's belongings doesn't require any breaking, just entering, it is more likely to happen. If you're homeless, your stuff gets stolen all the frickin' time. See how much the police care about tracking down the guy who stole it in *that* case. But a mansion in Beverly Hills with 24-hour armed response, noise- and motion-sensitive lighting and alarms, and guard dogs... sure they want to find out who did it, because that guy is *really* dangerous.
If you want to counteract my feelings and my analogy, let's hear some positive recommendations on how to deal with these people. What would you do to put the point in their heads that this kind of conduct hurts real people and has enormous costs?
First of all, you need to meet them halfway. People who keep their windows installs updated didn't get hit by Sasser. I'm one of them, and I don't even have automatic updates enabled... I just go there every so often and get what's critical (after actually deciding if I agree that it's critical... Outlook Express is NOT). That's basic. Using a firewall will also protect you from Sasser, as will using a non-Windows operating system.
People don't have much sympathy here for victims of these worms because they generally painted a big target on themselves and said "come and get me." That's the difference between how much we care about catching the perps in this case and in others... in a sense, these guys are doing us all a favor, because they're reminding people to lock their doors with something more than an ounce of cheap metal.
Everytime someone does the work in finding a specific piece of information, that information becomes easier to find. That's true of books too, of course, but I think google's advantage here is clear.
I hadn't thought about that. Actually, I first experienced this phenomenon in 1987 or so, at my local library (or, actually, the one in the next city over, because they had a computerized card catalog and were much larger).
Our history teacher gave us an extra credit question: "What make and model of car was the Archbishop Franz Ferdinand riding in when he was assassinated, touching off the first World War?" I went to the library right after school, and went straight to the reference desk to ask them how I would find that. Turns out, he asked the same question the year before, the reference librarian remembered it, and had written the information down on a 3x5 card and filed it after helping the student find it, in case it came up again.;-) After getting to the library, it took me all of 2 minutes to get the info, no Google required.
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If a carrier moves its R&D or engineering, its suppliers may follow. High-tech requires an ecosystem. CA succeeds with its amazingly high cost due to the existance of that ecosystem.
Currently, NONE of the major carriers operate out of California (Here's a more detailed article). Furthermore, these regulations don't affect operations, they affect how you treat consumers... so they don't particularly have an effect on the cost of operating out of California, only the cost of selling service here. So these concerns, while they sound compelling, don't actually have anything to do with this move.
With the advent of "overbuilders" such as RCN and satellite TV such as DirecTV and Dish Network, perhaps cable should be deregulated.
Regardless of how small the "dish" is, many apartment buildings prohibit installation of satellite TV. If they allow it, usually they've contracted with a particular company not of your choosing (in our building, we can get DirecTV if we want, or go with regular cable). There's still no way to choose a different cable company except by moving to another area.
Therefore, market competition still doesn't work for a pretty large percentage of urban consumers, and I'm happy to have cable service regulated.
It seems the Golden State has wrecked its economy by going too far with some socialistic ideals in the recent past
Uh... 1978 isn't that recent, and making it illegal for property tax revenues to keep up with inflation is hardly socialistic.
The 1978 tax revolt was inspired in large part by the fact that the California government had a large surplus of revenues. So this is a bad thing we're not allowed to do anymore. Therefore, when the dot-com boom made us temporarily flush, we had to spend all the money as quickly as possible, rather than saving it for the inevitable (but still somehow unforseen) bust.
We also did things like "temporarily" lowering the Vehicle License Fee from 2% of the car's value to 0.65%, then when we tried to put it back after we no longer had enough money to pay for stuff like fire and police, we got rid of our governor. Again, far from socialistic.
What the heck was your point again?
how could this guy not realize that copying papers and turning them in as his own is wrong?
It seems that his logic works much like a lot of people who get caught exploiting bugs in MMOGs, and get very upset when their account is suspended.
See, if they've been doing the same exploit all along, even if the company is pretty clear on what sorts of things are exploits, it's not *fair* that they didn't get a warning first. After all, the game engine allows it, so how are they supposed to realize that something that is obviously not working as intended and trivializes an encounter is wrong?
On the other hand, it makes a lot more sense in a computer game (where it's actually not possible to do most things that are "cheating") than in real life.
Yes folks, here in the US, unless you are the victem of the Patriot Act, you are not only untitled to a speedy trial, but a speedy arrest as well! Hmm.
Huh?
1) This was in England (Unless there's a University of Kent somewhere in the US that I don't know about, and they have a three-year degree program)
2) Is "untitled" supposed to be "entitled", "unentitled", or that you just don't have a title until you've gotten your speedy trial?
3) Does university internal discipline have anything whatsoever to do with constitutional rights?
Who do you think dreamt up this travesty of a lawsuit? Do you think he woke up one morning after being expelled, with lawyers at his doorstep?
No, I think he probably searched Google for "expelled +unfair +plagarism" and stole the idea from someone else...
News Flash: Coffee is HOT. That case is a perfect example of why our litigious society is so bogged down in paperwork and CYA procedures.
Next time you're at Starbuck's, maybe they'll hand you coffee that's 250 degrees. Your problem if you burn yourself, right? Coffee is HOT.
There's "hot, because the beverage tastes better that way, and people expect it to be that temperature" and "hot, to the degree that it makes it more convenient to run our business but several customers have complained about the temperature and the health department has told us to turn it down." Contrary to popular belief, businesses still do have a scrap of responsibility for not blatantly disregarding things like, oh say, health and safety codes.
She still spilled it. It wasn't like some guy from McDonalds poured it into her lap, she spilled it on herself. That automatically makes it her fault and no one else's.
Even though the cup and lid had suffered heat damage, and this was part of the reason why she spilled it?
So they serve it at a temperature that they've been told before is too hot, in cups that can't sustain that heat, and then when it collapses while someone's opening it, it's *still* their fault that they wind up with third degree burns on their lap? Theirs and no one else's?
If, on the other hand, you buy a substance which is well known to be hot, and considered to be MORE desirable when it is more hot, and then you dump it in your own lap, that is your fault.
You know, I can't right off the top of my head recall the last time I dumped hot coffee or tea or somesuch in my lap, but I know I've done it before. It's not usually a very memorable experience. You know why? Because it makes my skin red for a while, and might even stay that way for a couple days if it was REALLY hot.
I've never needed skin grafts from hot coffee. I've never even had it raise a blister. I think once I had BOILING water splash on my hand while cooking something and had a couple blisters. I haven't had a third degree burn that I can remember (I burned my feet badly on a floor heater when I was a toddler, but don't remember that, which is probably good).
Spilling hot coffee should not, under normal circumstances, cause disfiguring injury. It shouldn't even require a hospital visit. Most folks know this intuitively... or we wouldn't drink so much coffee, because it would be such a dangerous thing to do. Just apply a little common sense to the equation.
I'm 43 years old, and it has been common knowledge that smoking is bad for your health for my entire lifetime.
It's understandable that, since you were only a small child in 1965, you don't remember when the warnings started appearing on the cigarette packs, or the huge uproar the tobacco companies raised about putting them there. It probably had no relevance to a four-year-old. On the other hand, I'm 30, and since I *knew* the warnings had been there *my* whole life, I actually bothered to look up when it happened. Prior to those warnings, the tobacco companies were still insisting that smoking wasn't bad for you, really. As little as ten years earlier they had sponsors with medical degrees telling you how *good* it was for you.
Smoking appeals to stupid people. I don't care what your IQ or your GPA, if you started smoking from 1960 or after you are a stupid fucker.
Glad you exempted my mom from that blanket statement. She had her first cigarette in 1950, when she was seven. Her older sisters gave it to her to calm her down after a traumatic experience. She smoked for 31 years before finally quitting when I was 8.
A couple of years ago, she survived breast cancer. She has health insurance, so the group of people who shared the cost of her smoking is smaller than the entire State of California. But not everyone is so lucky. There's a lot of people who started smoking before 1960, and even who quit many years ago, who are costing us *all* a lot to take care of now, when the effects are finally showing up.
The fact that a stupid fuck addicted himself or herself to smoking isn't my problem. Their nasty smoke and ash, ruining my meal and making my clothes and hair stink, is my problem.
The fact that your health insurance premiums and tax dollars are helping to pay for the health effects of other people's smoking sounds like your problem to me. My problem too. But, if we started charging people a lot more for health insurance if they smoke, the tobacco companies would pull all their campaign contributions, because it might hurt their sales.
Our society doesn't make people take responsibility for their smoking. The reason we don't is because of tobacco industry lobbying. If we make people pay the costs of their own actions up-front, they will be less likely to smoke. The "gamble" on having cancer or emphysema way, way down the line (well, I'll quit eventually, you know) isn't enough for most people to compute.
I totally agree that there's no justification whatsoever for allowing people to smoke in public. Do nicotine? Sure, do whatever drug you want. Get a patch, get some gum, heck even chew it as long as you don't spit it on the ground. But no one has any right to force anyone *else* to do their drug of choice with them. (Big problem here is, smokers have no sense of smell, and definitely cannot smell their own smoke. So they don't realize that it's blowing your way.)
I knew it was deadly. There has been full disclosure of the dangers of cigarettes, right on the cigarette packs themselves, for several decades.
That's not actually possible. For starters, *just this week* a new study was published that finds a whole slew of new risks to smoking.
I'm only 30, and in my lifetime, the warnings on cigarette packs have changed from "Warning: the Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health" to the four rotating warnings, not all of which need to be on the same pack. Maybe you'll get the pack warning you about low birth weight babies, and I'll get the emphysema one... but that's not quite "full disclosure," now is it? And we've only had those for maybe 20 years... two decades, which isn't "several" in my little world.
Furthermore, the tobacco companies knew of many of these risks for a LONG time, while publicly denying them, before the government spent a whole lot of money to find them out and then to force the companies to disclose them. Not quite a responsible way of going about things, speaking of taking responsibility.
Quitting smoking is a really, really tough thing to do. I watched my mom do it after 31 years, when I was 8 years old. I have zero tolerance for people smoking around me, and have never touched a cigarette... but while I will enthusiastically encourage anyone who expresses the vaguest interest in quitting, I also won't badger them to do so when they aren't interested. It's a huge commitment, and really difficult to do, just like quitting any drug.
Smokers have to take responsibility for their own smoking. They cannot blame anyone else. This recent argument that tobacco advertisements can absolve people of their free will is bullshit.
People believe what they want to believe. Cigarette ads tell them that young, vibrant, healthy people smoke, and look cool doing it, and feel great about themselves. Those people you see dying of cancer and whatnot are difficult to identify with.
It's not like alcohol and other drugs, where a single incident of bad judgement can get you killed or land you in prison... or you can become a dysfunctional addict within a short time. You can be a major nicotine addict and be functional for decades before it *really* hits you. By that time, the damage is done. It's too late to realize your mistake.
People are animals. Some very smart people are very good at looking ahead and linking future consequences to present-day actions, but most aren't. You hit the lever, the pellet comes out, you learn to feed yourself. If the pellet doesn't come out right away, you don't learn the association. The ads are what are right there, right in front of folks, and we all let them be there, because of course it's the tobacco companies' god-given right to make money, no matter how many people get hurt. It would damage their *business* too much if they had to put a full warning on every pack, or *gasp* pay for their own research to determine if their drugs were safe before putting them on the market.
The money the states won in the tobacco lawsuits begins to pay off the damage done before the warning labels were ever put on the packs, but the costs are huge. How much do you suppose it's costing us, and has cost us, to take care of lifelong smokers who started before 1964? How about their children, who in addition to possibly having greater health risks, are a lot more likely to smoke due to a blend of environmental and chemical factors? What about the damage done by second-hand smoke... should all those waitresses and bartenders quit their jobs and find some new occupation, so that they can remain non-smokers?
There is only so much an individual can do in the face of a massive corporate effort to keep them from really knowing the dangers of their activities. Sure, people today should know that they shouldn't start smoking, and should know that they should minimize their exposure to other people's smoke. Are the tobacc
Bullshit. They had a product, a marketting campaign and a mascott. They marketted their product in order to make money. That's how capitalism works. If somebody doesn't like it - tough cookies.
So it's ok to market a product in a manner that is designed to make it appealing to people it is actually ILLEGAL to sell it to?
The tobacco lawsuits are bunk. "Everybody told me these were bad but I used them anyways and now I'm sick and want money." Tough shit. People back in WWII called cigarettes "coffin nails". I don't think there are many people alive today who don't realize that smoking is bad.
That are alive today, sure. When my mom was seven and they gave her her first cigarette (this was 1950), though, there were still doctors shilling for tobacco companies telling you all about how *good* cigarettes were for you.
British soldiers called them coffin nails. Perhaps a country with a national health system caught on a bit sooner. The tobacco companies were still blowing smoke up our collective ass about the safety and healthiness of cigarettes even after the Surgeon General forced them to put warnings on the packages, though (and that wasn't until the 1960's). In 1988, the Surgeon General came out with a 618-page report demonstrating that nicotine was powerfully addictive. The tobacco companies were still insisting at that time that it wasn't, not really.
How much can a company lie to you before it's not marketing anymore? If McDonald's told you that Quarter Pounders could not increase your risk of heart disease and had paid doctors to tell you in ads that french fries can help you slim down, would that be ok with you?
The schools need to practice an honesty-first method of administration, or they can expect that many students will cheat the system.
;-) again, the tuition is not a price. It is a fee for a service. The value of the degree is not measured by the money paid for those services.
They do. They are quite up-front and honest about policies on plagarism and cheating. Heck, every Blue Book they sell at my school has a blurb about it on the cover. How much more honest can you get than telling people "this isn't allowed, and these are the consequences?"
My point is that any claim can be made by administration about how degrees have zero value, but if you consider the worth of these advancements, and there is a tangible value.
Many things have value, and many things have a price. Is the value of my degree equal to the fees I paid to obtain it? Probably not... it's probably worth a lot more than that. Therefore, the value of the degree is not measured by the fees paid, and it is not appropriate to judge the fees to be a price paid for a good.
On the other hand, folks across town at U$C are probably paying a lot more in tuition than their degrees are worth...
Unfortunately, this guy had an opportunity to learn a very, very valuable lesson from this university, and apparently failed to. Maybe he didn't pay enough?
Believe me, if every male out there were impervious to alcohol (as most of them would like to believe), I would agree with you wholeheartedly, but, they're not. Perpetuating gender myths is holding society back...
Erm, a few points, though:
- It is much harder, physically, for a drunk guy to have sex than a drunk girl. Truth is, with most guys, if he's drunk enough to not be able to consent legally, he's probably too drunk to get it up.
- A guy can wake up the next morning and think, "My god, what was I thinking?" and maybe fret for a while about diseases or if she will stop calling him. A girl can wake up from that and, aside from having a much higher risk of contracting an STD (simple biology... male to female transmission rates are higher for most things than female to male), she can end up pregnant.
Women are more likely to be victims of statutory rape than men, and generally have more compelling consequences to deal with. Yes, there are women who cry "rape!" when they should say "oops... won't do that again." But there are a lot fewer of those than women who actually *are* raped, whether date, statutory, or old-fashioned stranger-in-a-dark-alley style, and never report it.
Do any of you have settings that would be good in Outlook?
At my work, I finally filtered out all mail that was sent to the "-All Mail Recipients" list. It was almost always about supervisor training, safety standards that only applied to half the employees, someone's retirement or request for TOWP donations (I'm an intern, I don't get TOWP!) etc...
Devious suggestion: Buy misspellings of their domain, then capture all emails you receive. Hours of fun!
You'd think they'd be smart enough to have taken care of this already... but ditheyreadit.com is available, at least. That was the first common typo that came to my mind. If they didn't get that one, I'm guessing they didn't think to get quite a few of them...
When I was working for a no-longer-existent division of Turner Broadcasting, after the big AOL-TW merger, they decided that we should install AOL 6.0 on every computer in the office. Now, do I need to tell anyone here that AOL 6.0 was not designed for a business environment? No, we didn't have some special, custom install. We had the same one that showed up in everyone's home mailboxes.
In spite of this, it mostly went smoothly, except for this one laptop. After an hour and a half on the phone with AOL support (which actually WAS a special number just for those of us who had to try and install this stuff internally), our tech had learned exactly one thing: he could not simultaneously install AOL 6.0 *and* the network card. He had to choose between network connectivity and the software.
Finally, the AOL tech, who totally understood our frustration (since they also had to install this software on their computers), said, somewhat sheepishly... "Well, it *should* work."
No one could argue with that. In fact, we'd installed AOL 6.0 successfully on at least two laptops of the same exact model. So we knew that it *should* work. I felt somewhat proud of the guy on the other end for giving up, really.
The solution? Install AOL 5.0. (Then, a year later, realize it was a terrible idea to try to migrate a huge company to using AOL as their main email client, in part because it was a huge waste of employees' time to delete all that spam. But by then our division no longer existed and I had returned to grad school...)
The difference is that the mechanic that's charging you to look at your car isn't the company that made your car. I see a large difference in ethics between these two practices:
/. actually call the company responsible for the problem, because we can do enough troubleshooting to know where the problem actually is. But most folks don't do that. And if you're on-site tech support for a company, you support *everything* even though you made none of it (though you may have made the decision to purchase it... or that might have been your idiot boss).
1- Charge someone money to diagnose what is faulty with someone ELSE's product.
2- Charge someone money to diagnose what it faulty with your OWN product.
And how often are tech support folks being asked about products their company didn't make?
Most calls to ISPs involve troubleshooting browser or email settings, or possibly third-party hardware (that was purchased by the consumer, and not from the ISP). Your boxed computer system tech support ends up with lots of calls for Windows and other software issues. Heck, half the support FAQs for online games are about troubleshooting your internet connection.
Sure, folks like most of us who post on
One common argument is that OS software is inherently more secure because everyone can review it. I'm sorry, but I don't think the number of people reviewing the software, looking for vulnerabilities in an effort to be a good citizen is astronomical.
It doesn't need to be.
The main point is that, with closed-source software, if the source gets out, the only people who can/will do anything with it are the black hats, because it's not legal to have it. If it's open source, then the good guys can do stuff too.
If the source stays secret, closed source is more effective. But the problem is that one-way door. If it gets out *just once*, you're completely blown. There's no going back. And *only* the bad guys benefit from it.
Here's my prediction of the effect that this will have on Cisco's sales, and on Cisco's share price. Zilch.
I don't know anyone who's choice of Cisco products was predicated on the closed source nature of IOS.
True, but... Cisco has just started up a massive ad campaign about their self-securing networks. The fact that they got hacked *at all* will have an effect on their sales, most likely... if they can't keep their own source code secure, why should you trust them with your network?
I'll bet many of the survivors of Sept. 11 2001 made it through because of cell phone communications.
In fact, we know that cell phone communications probably saved quite a number of lives on September 11, 2001. The folks on the fourth plane found out what was going on via their cell phones, and that's what made them decide to overwhelm the hijackers and crash in an empty field instead of whatever the intended target was.
Frankly, it's hard to kill someone with a cell phone. It's a lot easier to save someone with it. So taking away the ability for EVERYONE to use them in most cases will cause more harm than good.
Where the hell do you have the right to a telephone, anyway? Maybe the 9th amendment. But that's a stretch. Cell phones piss me off. seriously. Personally, I think they should be so prohibitly expensive that only doctors and drug dealers can afford them.
And what constitutional right of yours justifies trumping my ability to have a cell phone?
You may not like cell phones, but you have to put up with them. Don't use some political paranoia to justify your own personal convenience and comfort over others. Heck, maybe one of the times I've used my cell phone to report a drunk driver or something actually saved a life... I'm sure that your annoyance with them is FAR more important.
At what point do you start to care about communications being blocked to prevent some conceivable danger? Telephone land lines? Internet? Interpersonal communication? You're perfectly happy to have cell phones blocked because you personally find them inconvenient, but someone else might find YOU inconvenient one of these days. Think about it.
Sure, the guy would be found guilty of vote tampering and probably would be given jail time, but Diebold would hang as well for not producing a reliable voting machine which, in effect, ended up costing the state hundreds of thousands of dollars and plenty of man-hours finding out how to fix the bug or find another way to replace the Diebold machines.
You're *so* optimistic....
The machines have to be certified by the appropriate officials before they're used. Diebold, in this case, would claim that since they followed all the necessary procedures and were properly certified, they can't be held responsible. And they'd probably walk away from the whole thing (mostly) unscathed.
This is the problem with proprietary software running public elections... no one can *actually* inspect the system. But they have to pretend to anyway, which lets the company off the hook.
A computer system is not a unique person, but nowadays it's very much an extension of one. It has things I've written, things I've done, and important stuff I need to remember. If it's lost, a whole chunk of my life goes away.
Same with my house. When I leave my house, I lock the door. When I'm *home* I usually have the door locked too (this is more my husband's idea, though). Fortunately, Schlage generally has a good track record on not having easily-broken locks.
I think the preoccupation society as a whole has with people breaking into computers is sick, especially considering that many people are on the side of the person doing the attacks. And that disgusts me since I've seen what a horrible pain it is to recover from an attack.
Same with having your house burglarized. And yet, if you used a luggage lock to secure your front door, and your front door was right on the street, and there was no street lighting, neighborhood watch, etc., people would have a hard time sympathizing with you when you got ripped off. Especially if it was widely known that people keep getting broken into when they only use luggage locks to secure their personal belongings, and they're easily defeated (since they all pretty much have the same key).
For all the outrage I've gotten from my analogy, nobody's put a serious dent in my point: That people who do these things get away with it all the time, and that they somehow need to be stopped.
It's the risk-vs.-reward ratio. If you want to make it less attractive, the first thing to do is make it *harder*. When stealing someone's belongings doesn't require any breaking, just entering, it is more likely to happen. If you're homeless, your stuff gets stolen all the frickin' time. See how much the police care about tracking down the guy who stole it in *that* case. But a mansion in Beverly Hills with 24-hour armed response, noise- and motion-sensitive lighting and alarms, and guard dogs... sure they want to find out who did it, because that guy is *really* dangerous.
If you want to counteract my feelings and my analogy, let's hear some positive recommendations on how to deal with these people. What would you do to put the point in their heads that this kind of conduct hurts real people and has enormous costs?
First of all, you need to meet them halfway. People who keep their windows installs updated didn't get hit by Sasser. I'm one of them, and I don't even have automatic updates enabled... I just go there every so often and get what's critical (after actually deciding if I agree that it's critical... Outlook Express is NOT). That's basic. Using a firewall will also protect you from Sasser, as will using a non-Windows operating system.
People don't have much sympathy here for victims of these worms because they generally painted a big target on themselves and said "come and get me." That's the difference between how much we care about catching the perps in this case and in others... in a sense, these guys are doing us all a favor, because they're reminding people to lock their doors with something more than an ounce of cheap metal.
Everytime someone does the work in finding a specific piece of information, that information becomes easier to find. That's true of books too, of course, but I think google's advantage here is clear.
;-) After getting to the library, it took me all of 2 minutes to get the info, no Google required.
I hadn't thought about that. Actually, I first experienced this phenomenon in 1987 or so, at my local library (or, actually, the one in the next city over, because they had a computerized card catalog and were much larger).
Our history teacher gave us an extra credit question: "What make and model of car was the Archbishop Franz Ferdinand riding in when he was assassinated, touching off the first World War?" I went to the library right after school, and went straight to the reference desk to ask them how I would find that. Turns out, he asked the same question the year before, the reference librarian remembered it, and had written the information down on a 3x5 card and filed it after helping the student find it, in case it came up again.