It's not as if you had a choice to retroactively take the tax money that was used to pay for the public roads, withdraw it, and use it to build the roads privately and perhaps more efficiently instead.
Just because the money used to build the roads passed through the hands of the government doesn't mean that the government involvement produced any benefit compared to no government involvement. If I confiscate your car, sell it, keep half the money and use the other half to buy you a crappy car, I don't get to take credit for you owning a car, even though your car was bought by me.
The truth is, the public demonstration of the willingness to investigate and prosecute your own, publicly demonstrates integrity and proves the value of democracy and justice.
Assange is one of our own. So there you go.
Also, he's not a "whistleblower". It's not as if he picked items which show the US doing bad things and released only those.
The fact that the people renting such things may riot is taken into account in the price of the rental--the rental company charges enough that they'll make a profit even given the possibility of riots (or charges enough that they can buy insurance to compensate them in the event of a riot, which amounts to the same thing). I would imagine that's one of the reason the prices seem like ripoffs in the first place: they know very well that their customers may riot and destroy everything, and they have to charge more to make up for that. Riots aren't free.
There isn't any dispute that the inhabitants really are happy that it is under British rule. Spain says that the wishes of the inhabitants don't affect who owns it; Spain does not say that Britain is lying about the wishes of the inhabitants.
By the way, Spain itself owns little pieces of land next to Morocco similar to Gibraltar. Of course Spain insists that the situation is completely different since Spain conquered them in the 1500's instead of the 1700's.
By these criteria one of the most honest entities is a rock. It just sits there and never cheats or steals.
Given that only humans can form the mental concepts necessary to cheat or steal, of course only humans will do so. It's like praising people without hands for never pickpocketing.
If you vote with your wallet and don't see their movies, they then go to the government and say "see, our profits are down, it must be piracy" and use that as a further excuse for further crackdowns, DRM, etc.
What was the previous record? This is a lousy article, since it gives us no reason to think that this is really a breakthrough. From the description it sounds like an aerogel.
If you look at Amazon's normal bookstore, there is, or at least was until recently, a rash of fakers who automatically generated printouts of Wikipedia articles, titled them with a random title from one of the articles, and sold it as a "book". People constantly complained about these fake books.
Looks like they're trying to prevent that sort of thing,
Not everyone codes in their spare time and has stuff to submit, especially since they're already spending 8 or more hours a day doing the same thing. And for obvious reasons it's usually not possible to submit code you wrote at work.
This is absurd. First of all, the things you describe doing with the C64 most people will never do in their whole lives. The kid's not a geek. The question was what the kid could use to learn about normal non-geek computer use.
Second, when you were a kid and used a C64, modems, and a BBS, those things were the latest technology. You were motivated to learn because a C64 was something that you liked using anyway and you found it interesting to learn more about the same machine that you used to play Maniac Mansion or Elite. To 99% of modern kids, learning about a C64 would be learning about something that has no connection to anything he'd want to use outside the lesson.
The answer to this question is *not* "the same thing I used as a kid".
The reason such personnel aren't going to prison in droves is that the government is exercising discretion, and you can't rely on that. If the police or judge think you look like a creep, they can arrest you for it. They're not going to think that security personnel look like creeps, in general.
A normal computer, but he always uses it with you being there with him to use it. You're a parent; that's a parent's job. Don't leave him alone with the computer.
And that assumes there's something meaningful he could do with a computer, which I doubt. His reading level probably isn't enough for the Internet or even Facebook and most sites don't want anyone under 13 anyway), and he's probably not going to have to do his homework on a word processor. Once he knows how to use a mouse and put a disk in a drive, all he's really going to need it for are games. Get him a Wii.
If he recorded it on video there are probably three or more frames in the video, so that wouldn't apply to him if the judge decided a conviction was good for his career.
Also, he has to know enough about the law not to have shown the images to his lawyer, which he probably wouldn't know.
It's a paranoid fantasy (involving some kind of uber-nerd/uber-hipster cross) about the government coming down harder on witnesses of a crime than the actual perpetrator.
If you also read the comments they mention two cases where this actually happened. They are in Swedish, but Google Translate does a fairly good job on them.
Relying on government's discretion to prevent people from being prosecuted for something that the law says is illegal will only work until you run into someone with an agenda, or a mindless bureaucrat. or a fanatic who happens to be in government.
Ah. If right-wingers promote a conspiracy it's a right-wing issue, but if left-wingers promote a conspiracy, it "isn't a right-wing or left-wing issue".
If you really don't think the anti-vac crowd, the 9/11 Truthers, or Michael Moore count as left-wing conspiracy theorists, then people who reject climate change or the link between cigarettes and cancer shouldn't count as right-wing conspiracy theorists either.
Also, many of the HIV conspiracy theorists are actually left-wingers as well. Look at Louis Farrakhan, for a famous example. (Wikipedia leaves it out, but interestingly they do mention he's a conspiracy theorist about the flu vaccine.)
Yeah, you're right about that. There are people who have conspiracy theories about vaccines, or just believe wrong things about vaccines. They are calling people names, rejecting science, and have emotional management and anger issues.
They are also associated with the left.
Read the Wikipedia article on "Thiomersal controversy". Robert F. Kennedy. Rolling Stone magazine. Oprah Winfrey Show. Real free market people, all of these guys.
It's not about the impact to the victim, it's about the impact to society. Blackmailing someone to change the result of the election is far worse than blackmailing someone just to get some cash.
If the tax returns are fake, then they don't influence the election. If they are real, they only influence the election by giving voters more information on which to vote.
If the tax returns are real, they selectively give the voters more information. Imagine that both sides' tax returns are equally bad, but only one side is blackmailed. The result would be a benefit for the other side. Although it's truthful information about misdeeds, it is truthful information about misdeeds that is selectively released for one side, which falsely makes that side look worse.
And this doesn't even consider the possibility that the returns are fake, but they influence the election anyway.
The reason that companies treat rich customers better is that on average, doing so will get more profit than allocating their limited attention and resources to scruffy-looking customers. The fact that one particular scruffy-looking customer would have brought them more profit doesn't mean that this is an unprofitable policy on average; a particular policy may make more money at some times and less at others, and in the long run, the loss to this scruffy-looking customer will be more than balanced by an extra truck here and a truck there from richer-looking customers. That's how averages work.
"I have this story about a car insurance company. They insisted on giving higher premiums to people with bad traffic records and lower premiums to people with good records. There was this one time where they charged someone with a good record a low premium and he had an accident the next day! And there was another case where they charged someone with a bad record a high premium, and he got fed up and went to another company. He never had an accident after that so driving him away cost them thousands of dollars!"
If the amount that they previously earned was reduced by some percentage because of taxes, they invested that much less, and therefore have that percentage less in gains.
By that reasoning, Al Qaeda has every reason to distrust the US as well.
If they want to be able to trust the US the first thing they should do is stop being Al Qaeda. The same goes for Iran, Syria, and Hizballah. (And don't you find it a bit scary that that means "the party of God"?)
Now that I read closer, I may have been too charitable even saying this. Look at the first two contributors: assistant to Vietnam's deputy prime minister. Chairman of the Jordan Atomic Energy Commission and former minister of energy. In other words, they are high-ranking government officials in non-democratic, anti-US countries. Tell me why we should pay attention to such guys?
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a left-wing publication that makes pretenses to be based around the scientific expertise of their scientists, many of whom aren't even atomic scientists. Remember some months back where Slashdot had an article about them moving the doomsday clock and Slashdotters managed to figure out how nonsensical it is?
Having an international nuclear fuel bank will fail for one simple reason: countries such as Iran want nuclear weapons. Their peaceful use of nuclear fuel is a cover for the development of nuclear weapons, not the other way around. When Iran tells us that all they want is peaceful nuclear energy and they aren't interested in nuclear weapons, they're lying. A nuclear fuel bank that actually promotes peaceful nuclear energy and avoids nuclear weapons is going to be rejected by Iran because, hey, lie.
It's just that given the political bias of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, they assume that Iran is telling the truth and so they think this hair-brained scheme will actually work.
I don't know. Which is more inconvenient, not being able to sit in the front of the bus for a 30 minute bus ride, or not being able to watch a 30 minute episode of a TV show?
They both last the same length of time and you can do perfectly well living your life without either one. The bus discrimination can be repeated, but of course so can not being able to watch a TV show. The only substantial difference is that it's equal opportunity oppression that screws over everyone, instead of just screwing over blacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot covered that before.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/29/1249215/house-kills-effort-to-stop-workplace-requests-for-facebook-passwords
The Slashdot story blamed the Republicans as well, but some posters were smart enough to do the research to figure out what had actually happened:
It's not as if you had a choice to retroactively take the tax money that was used to pay for the public roads, withdraw it, and use it to build the roads privately and perhaps more efficiently instead.
Just because the money used to build the roads passed through the hands of the government doesn't mean that the government involvement produced any benefit compared to no government involvement. If I confiscate your car, sell it, keep half the money and use the other half to buy you a crappy car, I don't get to take credit for you owning a car, even though your car was bought by me.
Assange is one of our own. So there you go.
Also, he's not a "whistleblower". It's not as if he picked items which show the US doing bad things and released only those.
The fact that the people renting such things may riot is taken into account in the price of the rental--the rental company charges enough that they'll make a profit even given the possibility of riots (or charges enough that they can buy insurance to compensate them in the event of a riot, which amounts to the same thing). I would imagine that's one of the reason the prices seem like ripoffs in the first place: they know very well that their customers may riot and destroy everything, and they have to charge more to make up for that. Riots aren't free.
There isn't any dispute that the inhabitants really are happy that it is under British rule. Spain says that the wishes of the inhabitants don't affect who owns it; Spain does not say that Britain is lying about the wishes of the inhabitants.
By the way, Spain itself owns little pieces of land next to Morocco similar to Gibraltar. Of course Spain insists that the situation is completely different since Spain conquered them in the 1500's instead of the 1700's.
By these criteria one of the most honest entities is a rock. It just sits there and never cheats or steals.
Given that only humans can form the mental concepts necessary to cheat or steal, of course only humans will do so. It's like praising people without hands for never pickpocketing.
If you vote with your wallet and don't see their movies, they then go to the government and say "see, our profits are down, it must be piracy" and use that as a further excuse for further crackdowns, DRM, etc.
It's not a solution.
What was the previous record? This is a lousy article, since it gives us no reason to think that this is really a breakthrough. From the description it sounds like an aerogel.
If you look at Amazon's normal bookstore, there is, or at least was until recently, a rash of fakers who automatically generated printouts of Wikipedia articles, titled them with a random title from one of the articles, and sold it as a "book". People constantly complained about these fake books.
Looks like they're trying to prevent that sort of thing,
Not everyone codes in their spare time and has stuff to submit, especially since they're already spending 8 or more hours a day doing the same thing. And for obvious reasons it's usually not possible to submit code you wrote at work.
This is absurd. First of all, the things you describe doing with the C64 most people will never do in their whole lives. The kid's not a geek. The question was what the kid could use to learn about normal non-geek computer use.
Second, when you were a kid and used a C64, modems, and a BBS, those things were the latest technology. You were motivated to learn because a C64 was something that you liked using anyway and you found it interesting to learn more about the same machine that you used to play Maniac Mansion or Elite. To 99% of modern kids, learning about a C64 would be learning about something that has no connection to anything he'd want to use outside the lesson.
The answer to this question is *not* "the same thing I used as a kid".
The reason such personnel aren't going to prison in droves is that the government is exercising discretion, and you can't rely on that. If the police or judge think you look like a creep, they can arrest you for it. They're not going to think that security personnel look like creeps, in general.
A normal computer, but he always uses it with you being there with him to use it. You're a parent; that's a parent's job. Don't leave him alone with the computer.
And that assumes there's something meaningful he could do with a computer, which I doubt. His reading level probably isn't enough for the Internet or even Facebook and most sites don't want anyone under 13 anyway), and he's probably not going to have to do his homework on a word processor. Once he knows how to use a mouse and put a disk in a drive, all he's really going to need it for are games. Get him a Wii.
If he recorded it on video there are probably three or more frames in the video, so that wouldn't apply to him if the judge decided a conviction was good for his career.
Also, he has to know enough about the law not to have shown the images to his lawyer, which he probably wouldn't know.
If you also read the comments they mention two cases where this actually happened. They are in Swedish, but Google Translate does a fairly good job on them.
Relying on government's discretion to prevent people from being prosecuted for something that the law says is illegal will only work until you run into someone with an agenda, or a mindless bureaucrat. or a fanatic who happens to be in government.
Ah. If right-wingers promote a conspiracy it's a right-wing issue, but if left-wingers promote a conspiracy, it "isn't a right-wing or left-wing issue".
If you really don't think the anti-vac crowd, the 9/11 Truthers, or Michael Moore count as left-wing conspiracy theorists, then people who reject climate change or the link between cigarettes and cancer shouldn't count as right-wing conspiracy theorists either.
Also, many of the HIV conspiracy theorists are actually left-wingers as well. Look at Louis Farrakhan, for a famous example. (Wikipedia leaves it out, but interestingly they do mention he's a conspiracy theorist about the flu vaccine.)
Yeah, you're right about that. There are people who have conspiracy theories about vaccines, or just believe wrong things about vaccines. They are calling people names, rejecting science, and have emotional management and anger issues.
They are also associated with the left.
Read the Wikipedia article on "Thiomersal controversy". Robert F. Kennedy. Rolling Stone magazine. Oprah Winfrey Show. Real free market people, all of these guys.
It's not about the impact to the victim, it's about the impact to society. Blackmailing someone to change the result of the election is far worse than blackmailing someone just to get some cash.
If the tax returns are real, they selectively give the voters more information. Imagine that both sides' tax returns are equally bad, but only one side is blackmailed. The result would be a benefit for the other side. Although it's truthful information about misdeeds, it is truthful information about misdeeds that is selectively released for one side, which falsely makes that side look worse.
And this doesn't even consider the possibility that the returns are fake, but they influence the election anyway.
The reason that companies treat rich customers better is that on average, doing so will get more profit than allocating their limited attention and resources to scruffy-looking customers. The fact that one particular scruffy-looking customer would have brought them more profit doesn't mean that this is an unprofitable policy on average; a particular policy may make more money at some times and less at others, and in the long run, the loss to this scruffy-looking customer will be more than balanced by an extra truck here and a truck there from richer-looking customers. That's how averages work.
"I have this story about a car insurance company. They insisted on giving higher premiums to people with bad traffic records and lower premiums to people with good records. There was this one time where they charged someone with a good record a low premium and he had an accident the next day! And there was another case where they charged someone with a bad record a high premium, and he got fed up and went to another company. He never had an accident after that so driving him away cost them thousands of dollars!"
If the amount that they previously earned was reduced by some percentage because of taxes, they invested that much less, and therefore have that percentage less in gains.
By that reasoning, Al Qaeda has every reason to distrust the US as well.
If they want to be able to trust the US the first thing they should do is stop being Al Qaeda. The same goes for Iran, Syria, and Hizballah. (And don't you find it a bit scary that that means "the party of God"?)
Now that I read closer, I may have been too charitable even saying this. Look at the first two contributors: assistant to Vietnam's deputy prime minister. Chairman of the Jordan Atomic Energy Commission and former minister of energy. In other words, they are high-ranking government officials in non-democratic, anti-US countries. Tell me why we should pay attention to such guys?
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a left-wing publication that makes pretenses to be based around the scientific expertise of their scientists, many of whom aren't even atomic scientists. Remember some months back where Slashdot had an article about them moving the doomsday clock and Slashdotters managed to figure out how nonsensical it is?
Having an international nuclear fuel bank will fail for one simple reason: countries such as Iran want nuclear weapons. Their peaceful use of nuclear fuel is a cover for the development of nuclear weapons, not the other way around. When Iran tells us that all they want is peaceful nuclear energy and they aren't interested in nuclear weapons, they're lying. A nuclear fuel bank that actually promotes peaceful nuclear energy and avoids nuclear weapons is going to be rejected by Iran because, hey, lie.
It's just that given the political bias of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, they assume that Iran is telling the truth and so they think this hair-brained scheme will actually work.
I don't know. Which is more inconvenient, not being able to sit in the front of the bus for a 30 minute bus ride, or not being able to watch a 30 minute episode of a TV show?
They both last the same length of time and you can do perfectly well living your life without either one. The bus discrimination can be repeated, but of course so can not being able to watch a TV show. The only substantial difference is that it's equal opportunity oppression that screws over everyone, instead of just screwing over blacks.