"Look at these pictures from my city (Vancouver, Canada). I have lots of friends raising families in the city"
Are you fucking kidding me?
Perhaps if your friends are super rich they can afford to live in vancouver city proper. MOST people with kids live in the suburbs, unless they live in their parents old house or some other stroke of luck. There was even an article on it in the tyee recently: Vancouvers Downtown Chases out kids
Not to mention the fact that EVERYONE drives in the lower mainland.. EVERYONE.. Taking the transit is simply not an option as its between 3.75 to 5.00 each way from any suburb. Which is MORE than it costs for gasoline on the same trip, even with gas being 1.31/L currently. Source
Vancouver is HORRIBLY designed. We have very poor density compared to many other urban centres, with sprawling "vancouver special" houses which are built wide, not tall due to regulations. You have these choke points of bridges which clog up and waste tonnes of time every day. Even in my 7km commute to downtown (read BARELY in the suburbs), generally takes an 30-45 minutes in rush hour. And thats using plenty of shortcuts.
Now these condos you mentioned, from your image it looks to be olympic village. Want to know what it costs to live there? Go take a look: Olympic Village Pricing. You will see that it costs 500k -1M for a 2 bedroom 800sqft apartment in your "city planners with vision" utopia. How the fuck is that affordable for a family??? Sure if you think its a good idea to raise a family in an 800sqft shoebox with only concord pacifics Ãvisionà of "shared green space" (2 acres for like 10k people to relax in) Source. But honestly, i think you are rich, terribly deluded, dont have kids over 4 years old, or simply misinformed.
The bottom line is that you are wrong to use vancouver as a good model of anything sustainable or affordable. Vancouver, where you cant get a 1200sqft house for under 850k. Vancouver, where there is a whole site making fun of the fact that you cant tell million dollar houses from crack house.
Vancouver has a LONG way to go before it is hospitable to families or even pedestrians! When was the last time you walked to surrey from downtown? To burnaby? To richmond?
"Think about it. He's all powerful. He's all caring. He creates a universe with deterministic laws which will undoubtedly create a very specific result... and we're the best he could do?"
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God!
I have gone through this all as well. The grand parent either really sucks at their job, or is just lying out their ass. You are NOT supposed to store credit card numbers from mag stripe, and if you are ever audited for PCI compliance and they find out that you are storing them, you will be shut down.
"There is no need, nor is it allowed, to store data from the magnetic stripe on the back of a payment card."
Its industry "illegal" because you will not be able to take credit card numbers if you do this. So effectively, its like the bank is shutting you down and blacklisting you. You are playing a semantics game maybe but semantics are not going to save your sorry ass.
"Of course, since our CIO hates anything that isn't Microsoft, we can't install Fx or anything else"
Well he is right for hating firefox on the domain as it has no GPO or centralized management. I personally love firefox and dislike chrome, but chrome comes with msi's and gpos. So it was trivial to push that out to everyone on my network.
I would seriously look into that. Especially given the fact that there will be no more new IE releases for XP. It should be a no brainer for even the most incompetent sysadmin. Users with custom apps can always fall back to IE.
The only crime is forcing their broken phone verification system on everyone in seemingly every category. I haven't been able to post CL ad's for months and emails to their support address are never returned. I have tried 3 different phone numbers as well so I am pretty sure it is there system.
Anyways the point is they do these stupid things to prevent crime and it just makes the site less usable! Crime will always occur. People need to take responsibility and stop dumbing down services to the point where they are horribly broken in order to try and prevent the unpreventable, on a system wide scale.
Well speak for yourself. If you have a tv or projector running at 720p or 1080p, you should be downloading 720p or higher content for that. Its very easy to tell a dvdrip from a 720p source on a large screen like a projector. I hope you are not arguing there is no quality difference. If so, i would ask you to try and download the 720p and the SD version of a programme like BBC horizon and compare them. I would argue that this makes a good reason to "acquire" higher resolution content.
I have also done some bluray ripping for work (which is trivial with dvdfab). That program bypasses all the drm on the dics that I have tried, and even though i cannot actually VIEW the bluray disc (as in play it directly), i can rip it first and then play it fine in media player classic. So DRM is of course easy to get by.
Your simply dreaming. What about peak uranium? or are you just ignoring that... The sun has ALL the energy we need. It has nothing to do with environmentalism and everything to do with almost FREE energy.
Whats the statistic? The Sahara covered in solar panels would provide enough power for the entire earth 100x over?
Conceptually, which do you think is easier; generating power, or simply harvesting it?
Seems like qwest technicians are too busy browsing slashdot to do their job right. There is absolutely no excuse for this, no matter how "assholish" the customer. Just looks bad on you the technician anyways.
If your local municipality has locked out competition via a "Franchise Agreement", well, now is an excellent time to vote those bastards out of office, or start getting involved in local politics.
Thats funny, i thought that you americans did just that by electing someone who was FOR net neutrality. It didn't end up mattering who got voted in though, because as you are no doubt aware money = power, and it seems a "right wing liberal" is just a corrupt as a "right wing conservative".
"Voting against "net neutrality" is voting for the rights of property holders to do what they want with the property they have paid good money for."
FUCK. PROPERTY. HOLDERS. I am so tired of the ballad of the oppressed capitalist. You are seriously deluded if you think you will ever be wealthy enough to be in control, if that is what you are betting on. This is about censorship and control, only you, the plutocrat apologist, has decided that FOR PROFIT corporations are more trustworthy than the government that you ELECT. In america it doesn't seem to matter, as you have all broken the system so much that politicans are just paid shills for corporations, but dont you dare use your broken ass "democratic" system to discredit good ideas such as net neutrality.
Do corporations get to dictate who you call on the telephone? Does the government get to decide on what you can use your electrical power? Do they get to decide which plants you can water? Does the post office get to refuse your mail to certain individuals? Or does it not matter who you send a letter to, as long as you pay equally.
Internet is a utility, and should be protected as such. You people need to nationalize the internet. Corporations are unaccountable and corrupt, by nature as they are trying to create profit first and foremost. Utilities should NOT have profit as the bottom line goal! Its amazing in 2010, with all the evidence of life behind you, that this still must be explained.
Also you could get the 8 second time if all the bombs were exploded inside their launchers / storage facilities. People in this thread are assuming the missiles need to be launched to cause world wide destruction.
KENT BROCKMAN: With our utter annihilation imminent, our federal government has snapped into action. We go live now via satellite to the floor of the United States congress. SPEAKER: Then it is unanimous, we are going to approve the bill to evacuate the town of Springfield in the great state of-- CONGRESSMAN: Wait a second, I want to tack on a rider to that bill - $30 million of taxpayer money to support the perverted arts. SPEAKER: All in favor of the amended Springfield-slash-pervert bill? FLOOR: Boo! SPEAKER: Bill defeated.
Can't believe you guys haven't fixed this yet. How can a completely unrelated thing be tacked on like that? is it really just a congressmans whim? Everytime i hear the word "rider" in american politics, i think of that simpsons skit.
"Trouble is, of course, that there is only one reality actually out there"
People have been discussing the nature of "reality" for probably thousands of years. If you believe in subjective reality, everyone has their own reality dictated by a combination of events which happen to them over their life and also (probably) a genetic component. Simply doing some drugs should show you how subjective reality can be. I have a problem with people believing in the idea of one true reality that applies to everyone. It is a narrow minded view, that one can theoretically "know" everything that makes up a "one true reality" and be tuned into it. In my mind, it is virtually impossible to know all the facts in a situation. You can make an educated guess, based on substantial evidence (this is how we continue to function under these conditions), but saying this or that reality is the "one true one" or even that any human can perceive the "one true reality" is i think, a leap of faith. Its functional, but I disagree that it is "real". The distinction may make no difference to you however, I realize that.
Everyone would do much better to acknowledge that everyone has their own personal reality, and to try and approach understanding by coming up with compromises and workarounds in that framework. A very simplistic example is the one of the crime victim who then associates a certain area / type of person with crime from then on. "Reality" for you may be that this person is crazy for thinking what they think, but as i believe perception defines reality, that person is 100% correct in their beliefs, again from their personal perspective. I think this is where alot of peoples brains fall down, as most are not able to perceive other peoples realities, or indeed their perspectives - to truely see the world through others eyes. Its most definitely a skill that needs to be taught and practiced more in life and especially in western culture.
Another wonderful example of subjective reality is traffic accidents. It is rare for someone to blame themselves for a traffic accident. They almost always blame the other party, or a third party (the environment, the car, a passenger, etc). Some people are steadfastly convinced that the light truly was red or green - they can even see it in their mind. This is because reality only exists in the mind. It is a construction of your senses and memory - your perception - with your brain doing its best at filling in the blanks.
Saying that you believe in one true reality says to me that you have been able to overcome the perception filter on your mind. This is something that I think is impossible and possibly transcendent.
You are of course right in that congregating around one version of reality has the effect of narrowing your view considerably, which is bad for everyone, especially society.
I remember watching a documentary on I think cognition, and they said that people as they age tend to forget about the bad things in their past and focus on the good things, which leads them to paint a rosier picture of the past. Perhaps it was a horizon documentary? Cant recall... They did scientifically determine this, but 10 minutes of google searching did not turn up the name of the programme or study.
Yeah the cloud is all well and good, untill the US government decides that it doesn't like what you are posting and shuts you down. The whole wikileaks crackdown should make any serious organization think twice about reliance on the cloud. What did it take, a few phone calls, and an entire non profit as well as anyone remotely associated with them was taken offline. Their payment processor, a non profit, was banned from taking payment, not just for wikileaks, but for every site they processed payment for!
... it's worth noting that PayPal didn't take action against Wikileaks; they took it against the Wau Holland Foundation, a charitable foundation who had been supporting Wikileaks as one of several activities driven by their charter. They are now unable to use PayPal to collect donations for anything.
"Rights are SELF evident, meaning they don't require anything from anyone else."
My rights to my personal freedom sure do interfere with the governments perceived right to be able to take that right away from me for say, smoking weed. I wish my rights never involved anyone else, but i am sure you can agree that there are plenty of people out there who would deprive me of my rights for whatever reason they choose. So we have established that we live in a world where the allowance of me to observe my rights must be protected from OUTSIDERS, thus implicitly involving them in my rights. The right to freedom ideally does not involve anyone else, but in practice it definitely does. Plenty of people would try and enslave me if we didnt have laws to stop them. That is why we as a community, make laws to enforce these philosophical statements or concepts such as 'freedom'.
The second point, how is the right to life not explicitly, a right to healthcare? Is the right to freedom still valid in your mind if you are "free" to stay in your cage? Is the right to life in your precious constitution, the right to live the rest of my life bleeding out in a ditch because i cant pay?
Should only the rich be free? Should they only have that "right"?
If you tried to actually understand the passages that you are quoting and referring to, you could see that they are not just empty words handed down from above. They have meanings and intents behind them. I cannot imagine an interpretation of the phrase "right to LIFE" that doesnt some how have to do with medical care. Medical care is what preserves life.
"Why should routine health care not be a personal responsibility like anything else in life?"
Because healthcare isnt a "routine expense". A routine expense is something like a phone bill or a power bill, which you generally know beforehand the expected amount and expected date that you need to pay it by. Healthcare is the polar opposite of this. You don't have any idea when you will need medical care. You could be hit by a bus later today and have absolutely no way to plan for that. As I understand the american healthcare system as a non american, you would need to have 200k or so in a "healthcare savings" account, just to cover you if you, as mentioned previously, got hit by a bus and were in traction for months.
To say that people should plan their healthcare problems says to me that either you or a loved one has never had a serious healthcare problem, which means you are either young or lucky. Mark my words though, one day you will have to pay with the american system. That much is guaranteed. Whereas in a civilized country, medical costs are socialized. This means that everyone pays a little (which they would pay anyways) and everyone also never has to pay a bill for any emergency proceedure. Also, many non emergency procedures are covered as well, such as requiring blood, or getting a tetnus shot. For context, I pay BC MSP (medical services plan) 100$ a month (50 for me and 50 for the wife, kids under 18 are free) and we are covered for pretty much everything that you would consider routine, AND especially anything major. How much would that cost you in the private system? 500$/mo? 1000$/mo?
You just have no idea how much money you are pissing away, how much waste there is in getting for profit corporations to take a cut at every conceivable level. I do still have to pay for more maintenance type things like non emergency dental work, flu vaccines and eye glasses, but no system is perfect. You would probably even like that part, as those things one might consider routine and something that is needed to be saved up for. The main difference, is all the things that it does not cover, are generally under 1000$ proceedures, which should be easily affordable by most. The most expensive thing i have ever had done (and needed medical insurance to pay for) was having four wisdom teeth pulled out which cost about 1400$. Of that, my insurance paid 1200 and i paid the extra 200$. If it was threatening my life however, i could have gone to the hospital and had them removed for free.
HA! that reminds me, i just did that a few months ago. I was straightening some pins on a CPU i had stupidly dropped and suddenly one of the pins broke!
I gasped, but thought about it and cut a pin off of a pentium pro cpu i had on my desk. Put it in the socket where the regular pin should be, slap the cpu on top and lo and behold the machine booted and ran fine!
The machine is still working in my company right now. I wonder how common it is of a hack. I was quite surprised that it actually worked, and stayed fixed!
Yes, heaven forbid people know anything about their cars. Less knowledge! Thats what drives society forward!
"Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two. It should go >100k without much in the way of repairs, and get mileage that cars in the 1950's couldn't even get close to."
Well thats the 'new car buyers' attitude all right, and you are paying a premium for that "luxury". Most people in the world however, drive cars with hundreds of thousands of kilometres on them and like to know what tire pressure is or what an alternator does. You don't have to be an electrical engineer to fix a car, and you dont have to be a hardware engineer to troubleshoot a computer. You make it seem like its so dificult and so much fuss to learn these things. If you cant do it on your own, take a course. Just like driving, or basic car repair for women that a co worker took recently - there are courses out there which will make you feel better about yourself. *Fun fact that I didnt even know that she learned in that course, if you turn the air conditioning on in the winter for a minute or so, it will suck all the moisture off of your windows and defog them much better than the fans do. Thats the kind of thing that really makes peoples lives a bit easier. Thats the kind of thing that a little knowledge brings.
Dumbing down and locking down systems has ALWAYS been what macs are about. This is why people hated them in the 90s, this is why people hate them today. You evidently want to buy into a world where you don't know how anything works and always have to rely on others to fix your problems for you. Sure its "liberating", but so is "finding god". What you call liberation, I call enslavement. Perception is everything I guess.
Politics dictates large potions of peoples lives, whether they choose to participate in it or not. Sure the apathetic can rationalize their indifference, but i would like to think that most citizens do give a damn about what goes on around them. Obviously this depends on where you live, but everyone should care and should vote at election time.
Hacking tools are one thing; this puts the keys into the hands of the everyman.
Are you seriously making the argument that because you find hacking tools to be too difficult to use, that they shouldn't be available to everyone? Only some arbitrary definition of elite hacker that you dreamed up should be able to use security tools?
A tool is a tool. Sure one could argue that a gun is mostly used for killing and the firesheep will mostly be used for abuse, but in the end its just a tool. Its up to society to dictate which tools are too far to the side of antisocial. A good example would be cel phone/gps jammers.
The onus here, like so many other security problems, is on the VENDOR of the exploited software! Not on the tool that brings this security hole to light. If these popular websites are getting by with cookie auth only, well whoes problem is that? The laziest way of doing security is an administrative ban on something. The proper way is to engineer your system in such a way as the attack becomes useless.
Your statement is stupid. Who is going to pay the deductable if there was no damage to the vehicle and there was nothing of value in the vehicle? Insurance companies need not be involved. Why should they? Over the crackhead change in your centre console?
Look around you! So many eurasian peoples have pronounced brow ridges, deep or wide eyes, large noses, etc... There are people out there who "look" completely Neanderthal! How can you explain that if we didnt at one point cross breed?
Even the idea of good and evil can be theoretically traced to an ingrained concept of "us" and "them". All the evidence seems to point to us and them living at the same time, most likely interbreeding.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you fucking kidding me?
Perhaps if your friends are super rich they can afford to live in vancouver city proper. MOST people with kids live in the suburbs, unless they live in their parents old house or some other stroke of luck. There was even an article on it in the tyee recently: Vancouvers Downtown Chases out kids
Not to mention the fact that EVERYONE drives in the lower mainland.. EVERYONE.. Taking the transit is simply not an option as its between 3.75 to 5.00 each way from any suburb. Which is MORE than it costs for gasoline on the same trip, even with gas being 1.31/L currently. Source
Vancouver is HORRIBLY designed. We have very poor density compared to many other urban centres, with sprawling "vancouver special" houses which are built wide, not tall due to regulations. You have these choke points of bridges which clog up and waste tonnes of time every day. Even in my 7km commute to downtown (read BARELY in the suburbs), generally takes an 30-45 minutes in rush hour. And thats using plenty of shortcuts.
Now these condos you mentioned, from your image it looks to be olympic village. Want to know what it costs to live there? Go take a look: Olympic Village Pricing. You will see that it costs 500k -1M for a 2 bedroom 800sqft apartment in your "city planners with vision" utopia. How the fuck is that affordable for a family???
Sure if you think its a good idea to raise a family in an 800sqft shoebox with only concord pacifics Ãvisionà of "shared green space" (2 acres for like 10k people to relax in) Source. But honestly, i think you are rich, terribly deluded, dont have kids over 4 years old, or simply misinformed.
The bottom line is that you are wrong to use vancouver as a good model of anything sustainable or affordable. Vancouver, where you cant get a 1200sqft house for under 850k. Vancouver, where there is a whole site making fun of the fact that you cant tell million dollar houses from crack house.
Vancouver has a LONG way to go before it is hospitable to families or even pedestrians! When was the last time you walked to surrey from downtown? To burnaby? To richmond?
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God!
-- Epicurus, philosopher (c. 341-270 BCE)
I have gone through this all as well. The grand parent either really sucks at their job, or is just lying out their ass. You are NOT supposed to store credit card numbers from mag stripe, and if you are ever audited for PCI compliance and they find out that you are storing them, you will be shut down.
http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/pcifaqs.php#myth16
You can also take a look at page 15 in this document https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/pci_ssc_quick_guide.pdf which clearly states that you are NOT allowed to store magnetic data. Period.
Its industry "illegal" because you will not be able to take credit card numbers if you do this. So effectively, its like the bank is shutting you down and blacklisting you. You are playing a semantics game maybe but semantics are not going to save your sorry ass.
Well he is right for hating firefox on the domain as it has no GPO or centralized management. I personally love firefox and dislike chrome, but chrome comes with msi's and gpos. So it was trivial to push that out to everyone on my network.
I would seriously look into that. Especially given the fact that there will be no more new IE releases for XP. It should be a no brainer for even the most incompetent sysadmin. Users with custom apps can always fall back to IE.
The only crime is forcing their broken phone verification system on everyone in seemingly every category. I haven't been able to post CL ad's for months and emails to their support address are never returned. I have tried 3 different phone numbers as well so I am pretty sure it is there system.
Anyways the point is they do these stupid things to prevent crime and it just makes the site less usable! Crime will always occur. People need to take responsibility and stop dumbing down services to the point where they are horribly broken in order to try and prevent the unpreventable, on a system wide scale.
Well speak for yourself. If you have a tv or projector running at 720p or 1080p, you should be downloading 720p or higher content for that. Its very easy to tell a dvdrip from a 720p source on a large screen like a projector. I hope you are not arguing there is no quality difference. If so, i would ask you to try and download the 720p and the SD version of a programme like BBC horizon and compare them. I would argue that this makes a good reason to "acquire" higher resolution content.
I have also done some bluray ripping for work (which is trivial with dvdfab). That program bypasses all the drm on the dics that I have tried, and even though i cannot actually VIEW the bluray disc (as in play it directly), i can rip it first and then play it fine in media player classic. So DRM is of course easy to get by.
Your simply dreaming. What about peak uranium? or are you just ignoring that... The sun has ALL the energy we need. It has nothing to do with environmentalism and everything to do with almost FREE energy.
Whats the statistic? The Sahara covered in solar panels would provide enough power for the entire earth 100x over?
Conceptually, which do you think is easier; generating power, or simply harvesting it?
is that under account? if so this is what i get in firefox: http://imgur.com/45N5S
only google analytics is blocked by adblock. unless you are doing it with flash (flashblock), but thats seems mighty retarded.
Seems like qwest technicians are too busy browsing slashdot to do their job right. There is absolutely no excuse for this, no matter how "assholish" the customer. Just looks bad on you the technician anyways.
Thats funny, i thought that you americans did just that by electing someone who was FOR net neutrality. It didn't end up mattering who got voted in though, because as you are no doubt aware money = power, and it seems a "right wing liberal" is just a corrupt as a "right wing conservative".
FUCK. PROPERTY. HOLDERS. I am so tired of the ballad of the oppressed capitalist. You are seriously deluded if you think you will ever be wealthy enough to be in control, if that is what you are betting on. This is about censorship and control, only you, the plutocrat apologist, has decided that FOR PROFIT corporations are more trustworthy than the government that you ELECT. In america it doesn't seem to matter, as you have all broken the system so much that politicans are just paid shills for corporations, but dont you dare use your broken ass "democratic" system to discredit good ideas such as net neutrality.
Do corporations get to dictate who you call on the telephone?
Does the government get to decide on what you can use your electrical power?
Do they get to decide which plants you can water?
Does the post office get to refuse your mail to certain individuals? Or does it not matter who you send a letter to, as long as you pay equally.
Internet is a utility, and should be protected as such. You people need to nationalize the internet. Corporations are unaccountable and corrupt, by nature as they are trying to create profit first and foremost. Utilities should NOT have profit as the bottom line goal! Its amazing in 2010, with all the evidence of life behind you, that this still must be explained.
Actually, they did build it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_(nuclear_war)
Also you could get the 8 second time if all the bombs were exploded inside their launchers / storage facilities. People in this thread are assuming the missiles need to be launched to cause world wide destruction.
KENT BROCKMAN: With our utter annihilation imminent, our federal government has snapped into action. We go live now via satellite to the floor of the United States congress.
SPEAKER: Then it is unanimous, we are going to approve the bill to evacuate the town of Springfield in the great state of--
CONGRESSMAN: Wait a second, I want to tack on a rider to that bill - $30 million of taxpayer money to support the perverted arts.
SPEAKER: All in favor of the amended Springfield-slash-pervert bill?
FLOOR: Boo!
SPEAKER: Bill defeated.
Can't believe you guys haven't fixed this yet. How can a completely unrelated thing be tacked on like that? is it really just a congressmans whim? Everytime i hear the word "rider" in american politics, i think of that simpsons skit.
People have been discussing the nature of "reality" for probably thousands of years. If you believe in subjective reality, everyone has their own reality dictated by a combination of events which happen to them over their life and also (probably) a genetic component. Simply doing some drugs should show you how subjective reality can be. I have a problem with people believing in the idea of one true reality that applies to everyone. It is a narrow minded view, that one can theoretically "know" everything that makes up a "one true reality" and be tuned into it. In my mind, it is virtually impossible to know all the facts in a situation. You can make an educated guess, based on substantial evidence (this is how we continue to function under these conditions), but saying this or that reality is the "one true one" or even that any human can perceive the "one true reality" is i think, a leap of faith. Its functional, but I disagree that it is "real". The distinction may make no difference to you however, I realize that.
Everyone would do much better to acknowledge that everyone has their own personal reality, and to try and approach understanding by coming up with compromises and workarounds in that framework.
A very simplistic example is the one of the crime victim who then associates a certain area / type of person with crime from then on. "Reality" for you may be that this person is crazy for thinking what they think, but as i believe perception defines reality, that person is 100% correct in their beliefs, again from their personal perspective. I think this is where alot of peoples brains fall down, as most are not able to perceive other peoples realities, or indeed their perspectives - to truely see the world through others eyes. Its most definitely a skill that needs to be taught and practiced more in life and especially in western culture.
Another wonderful example of subjective reality is traffic accidents. It is rare for someone to blame themselves for a traffic accident. They almost always blame the other party, or a third party (the environment, the car, a passenger, etc). Some people are steadfastly convinced that the light truly was red or green - they can even see it in their mind. This is because reality only exists in the mind. It is a construction of your senses and memory - your perception - with your brain doing its best at filling in the blanks.
Saying that you believe in one true reality says to me that you have been able to overcome the perception filter on your mind. This is something that I think is impossible and possibly transcendent.
You are of course right in that congregating around one version of reality has the effect of narrowing your view considerably, which is bad for everyone, especially society.
I remember watching a documentary on I think cognition, and they said that people as they age tend to forget about the bad things in their past and focus on the good things, which leads them to paint a rosier picture of the past. Perhaps it was a horizon documentary? Cant recall... They did scientifically determine this, but 10 minutes of google searching did not turn up the name of the programme or study.
Yeah the cloud is all well and good, untill the US government decides that it doesn't like what you are posting and shuts you down. The whole wikileaks crackdown should make any serious organization think twice about reliance on the cloud. What did it take, a few phone calls, and an entire non profit as well as anyone remotely associated with them was taken offline. Their payment processor, a non profit, was banned from taking payment, not just for wikileaks, but for every site they processed payment for!
article link
My rights to my personal freedom sure do interfere with the governments perceived right to be able to take that right away from me for say, smoking weed. I wish my rights never involved anyone else, but i am sure you can agree that there are plenty of people out there who would deprive me of my rights for whatever reason they choose. So we have established that we live in a world where the allowance of me to observe my rights must be protected from OUTSIDERS, thus implicitly involving them in my rights. The right to freedom ideally does not involve anyone else, but in practice it definitely does. Plenty of people would try and enslave me if we didnt have laws to stop them. That is why we as a community, make laws to enforce these philosophical statements or concepts such as 'freedom'.
The second point, how is the right to life not explicitly, a right to healthcare? Is the right to freedom still valid in your mind if you are "free" to stay in your cage? Is the right to life in your precious constitution, the right to live the rest of my life bleeding out in a ditch because i cant pay?
Should only the rich be free? Should they only have that "right"?
If you tried to actually understand the passages that you are quoting and referring to, you could see that they are not just empty words handed down from above. They have meanings and intents behind them. I cannot imagine an interpretation of the phrase "right to LIFE" that doesnt some how have to do with medical care. Medical care is what preserves life.
Because healthcare isnt a "routine expense". A routine expense is something like a phone bill or a power bill, which you generally know beforehand the expected amount and expected date that you need to pay it by. Healthcare is the polar opposite of this. You don't have any idea when you will need medical care. You could be hit by a bus later today and have absolutely no way to plan for that. As I understand the american healthcare system as a non american, you would need to have 200k or so in a "healthcare savings" account, just to cover you if you, as mentioned previously, got hit by a bus and were in traction for months.
To say that people should plan their healthcare problems says to me that either you or a loved one has never had a serious healthcare problem, which means you are either young or lucky. Mark my words though, one day you will have to pay with the american system. That much is guaranteed.
Whereas in a civilized country, medical costs are socialized. This means that everyone pays a little (which they would pay anyways) and everyone also never has to pay a bill for any emergency proceedure. Also, many non emergency procedures are covered as well, such as requiring blood, or getting a tetnus shot. For context, I pay BC MSP (medical services plan) 100$ a month (50 for me and 50 for the wife, kids under 18 are free) and we are covered for pretty much everything that you would consider routine, AND especially anything major. How much would that cost you in the private system? 500$/mo? 1000$/mo?
You just have no idea how much money you are pissing away, how much waste there is in getting for profit corporations to take a cut at every conceivable level. I do still have to pay for more maintenance type things like non emergency dental work, flu vaccines and eye glasses, but no system is perfect. You would probably even like that part, as those things one might consider routine and something that is needed to be saved up for. The main difference, is all the things that it does not cover, are generally under 1000$ proceedures, which should be easily affordable by most. The most expensive thing i have ever had done (and needed medical insurance to pay for) was having four wisdom teeth pulled out which cost about 1400$. Of that, my insurance paid 1200 and i paid the extra 200$. If it was threatening my life however, i could have gone to the hospital and had them removed for free.
HA! that reminds me, i just did that a few months ago. I was straightening some pins on a CPU i had stupidly dropped and suddenly one of the pins broke!
I gasped, but thought about it and cut a pin off of a pentium pro cpu i had on my desk. Put it in the socket where the regular pin should be, slap the cpu on top and lo and behold the machine booted and ran fine!
The machine is still working in my company right now. I wonder how common it is of a hack. I was quite surprised that it actually worked, and stayed fixed!
You dont use the delete key? how do you delete files? right click?!?
You do know timothy, that backspace is not delete right?
Yes, heaven forbid people know anything about their cars. Less knowledge! Thats what drives society forward!
Well thats the 'new car buyers' attitude all right, and you are paying a premium for that "luxury". Most people in the world however, drive cars with hundreds of thousands of kilometres on them and like to know what tire pressure is or what an alternator does. You don't have to be an electrical engineer to fix a car, and you dont have to be a hardware engineer to troubleshoot a computer. You make it seem like its so dificult and so much fuss to learn these things. If you cant do it on your own, take a course. Just like driving, or basic car repair for women that a co worker took recently - there are courses out there which will make you feel better about yourself. *Fun fact that I didnt even know that she learned in that course, if you turn the air conditioning on in the winter for a minute or so, it will suck all the moisture off of your windows and defog them much better than the fans do. Thats the kind of thing that really makes peoples lives a bit easier. Thats the kind of thing that a little knowledge brings.
Dumbing down and locking down systems has ALWAYS been what macs are about. This is why people hated them in the 90s, this is why people hate them today. You evidently want to buy into a world where you don't know how anything works and always have to rely on others to fix your problems for you. Sure its "liberating", but so is "finding god". What you call liberation, I call enslavement. Perception is everything I guess.
It would if you had dark fibre in that final mile!
Because the alternative to that is apathy?
Politics dictates large potions of peoples lives, whether they choose to participate in it or not. Sure the apathetic can rationalize their indifference, but i would like to think that most citizens do give a damn about what goes on around them. Obviously this depends on where you live, but everyone should care and should vote at election time.
Are you seriously making the argument that because you find hacking tools to be too difficult to use, that they shouldn't be available to everyone? Only some arbitrary definition of elite hacker that you dreamed up should be able to use security tools?
A tool is a tool. Sure one could argue that a gun is mostly used for killing and the firesheep will mostly be used for abuse, but in the end its just a tool. Its up to society to dictate which tools are too far to the side of antisocial. A good example would be cel phone/gps jammers.
The onus here, like so many other security problems, is on the VENDOR of the exploited software! Not on the tool that brings this security hole to light. If these popular websites are getting by with cookie auth only, well whoes problem is that?
The laziest way of doing security is an administrative ban on something. The proper way is to engineer your system in such a way as the attack becomes useless.
Your statement is stupid. Who is going to pay the deductable if there was no damage to the vehicle and there was nothing of value in the vehicle?
Insurance companies need not be involved. Why should they? Over the crackhead change in your centre console?
Look around you! So many eurasian peoples have pronounced brow ridges, deep or wide eyes, large noses, etc... There are people out there who "look" completely Neanderthal! How can you explain that if we didnt at one point cross breed?
Even the idea of good and evil can be theoretically traced to an ingrained concept of "us" and
"them". All the evidence seems to point to us and them living at the same time, most likely interbreeding.