Source? This sounds like the sort of heavily distorted (or outright fabricated) story that one might hear from Rush Limbaugh or some other professional liar.
Corporations can, at will, strip any human of their constitutional rights, simply by inserting a clause in a contract. They can give unlimited, anonymous bribes to politicians. They pay little to no taxes. They can never be sentenced to prison. If by some miracle you do manage to sue them, they can give you the legal run around for decades -- they don't have a biological clock ticking away.
If you could be granted the legal rights of a corporation instead of those of a human, wouldn't you spring for the chance? In the eyes of modern American law, they are better than us in every way.
The Supremes already ruled on this, and unsuprisingly we got a 5-4 ruling that corporations are better than people. Until the conservative stranglehold on the SCOTUS is broken, Americans won't be allowed to sue any company they've entered into a contract with. Now, maybe EULAs don't count for this. But given the court's corporatist bent, I wouldn't count on it.
They already do this in baseball. Ever see a spray chart? Here's Aaron Hill from 2009. Managers eventually caught wise. He went from ~30 HRs a year to 8 last year, because pitchers started pitching him away. And he wasn't just slumping either -- his OBP stayed about the same. He can still hit the ball just fine no matter where you throw it, but he only has the strength to knock it out of the park if its pitched inside. That's a bit of an extreme case, but managers do look at this stuff for every batter they go up against, and plan pitching strategies and field positions accordingly. Ever watch Teixeira at bat? I'm pretty sure the third baseman gets lonely, being the only one left on that half of the field.
Now, I do feel that baseball is too slow to adapt new technology. If I were commish, we'd not only have instant replay challenges, we'd be using some of that nifty cricket technology to call balls and strikes.
But speed up the game? Aside from a few match-ups (I'm lookin' at you, Yankees-Sox), the pace is fine. A bit under three hours, same as football. I could do with fewer commercial breaks, but we all know that won't happen. And a shorter season? Why? They sell around 30k tickets a game, and the parks can't seat 60k. Besides, one of my favorite things about the game is that it's there whenever I want it. I don't need to wait for a particular day.
Nah, netbooks are still great for portable work. If you travel a lot, and need a computer primarily for office apps and web browsing, then nothing beats a netbook. Tablets are more oriented towards media consumption -- games, video, that sort of thing.
I agree with you on 90% of that, but the suggestion that it's gender inequality that men and women aren't made to shower together is bunk. It's not that the men can't control their animal impulses. It's that the situation is potentially embarrassing for everyone involved. Women don't want to be ogled. Men don't want to be visibly aroused in front of everyone. You're essentially arguing that we shouldn't need clothing at all.
When arguing with bigots, it's tempting to contradict everything they say, because you understandably don't want to agree with them about anything. But it's important to be careful not to let yourself slip into the same sort of thoughtless extremism in your beliefs that they suffer from.
No, it was $2T. There was $50B/yr in spending cuts and $150B/yr in new revenue. Plus, we'll get another $100B/yr with the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And we'll get another $300B/yr if we ever let the Bush tax cuts expire. And an estimated $300B/yr once the economy picks up steam. So under that plan, by 2020, we could have the deficit down to $600B/yr, less than half what it currently is.
Not perfect, but a good start, and much better than any alternative proposed thus far.
I was a Republican until 2008. Voted for Bush twice. I greatly regret it, and take some solace in the fact that my vote wouldn't have changed the outcome. I went into the 2008 election planning to vote for McCain, and only changed my mind after he brought in Palin and sold his soul to the same Rovian politics used against him 8 years earier (did you know McCain fathered an illegitimate black baby?).
I am in no way "listening to the reward centers of my brain". Anyone who puts aside their preconceptions and takes a critical view of American politics of the past few years will see that the Democrats are ineffective, but mostly well intentioned. Sometimes their good intentions have harmful effects, but the point is they're trying to help. The same cannot be said of the Republicans.
The Republicans are trying to destroy the United States government. They openly admit it, saying their plan is to "starve the beast". They want a country with no central government, because that will allow absolute rule by the 1%. They (the 1%) have all the power, in the form of near limitless wealth. Our only tools against them are being slowly taken away. Unions are dying, public programs are being underfunded or privatized, our ability to sue has been replaced by "arbiters" who find for the corporation 97% of the time, and the government itself is being strangled to death. It's class warfare, declared by the rich, and the rich are winning. They will leave this country an empty husk, and retire to some nice Carribbean isles, while we're left behind -- destitute, and looking for someone to blame.
It's already been covered how stupid it is to think a company only has IT policies as a power trip. But beyond that, do you really think it's appropriate to view your coworkers as "enemies" who need to be "thwarted"? It's bad enough that the "CRUSH KILL MAIM!" rhetoric has broken into politics, do we really need it in the workplace next?
I spent twenty minutes yesterday trying to get Red Hat to recognize my flash drive. Complain about Windows all you like. It is still orders of magnitude more usable than Linux.
Look at Obama. He's honest, smart, and completely helpless. He wasted most of his first two years trying to negotiate with people who had no intention of ever working with him. All the while, his opponents spread vicious lies about "death panels". They accused him of trying to indoctrinate school children when he told them to stay in school. They demonized his wife for suggesting kids shouldn't eat fast food every day. They complained about him raising taxes ("Taxed Enough Already!") when he had actually cut taxes, as part of the stimulus. They lied and lied and lied and the drooling masses lapped it up, with the result that the liars gained power.
Stupidity and hatred will beat reason and cooperation every time. The GP is optimistic. A total economic collapse will not get the idiots to open their eyes. They'll blame the collapse on whomever Limbaugh tells them to blame. Spoiler alert: they're going to blame liberals, and immigrants, and Muslims, and gays. And the idiot masses will start killing.
You're misinformed. China owns a whopping 8% of the US debt. The country is nowhere near broke. Eliminating the Bush tax cuts and putting some common sense reforms in place in Medicare and Social Security (e.g. means testing, increase the payroll tax cap, allow young healthy people to buy into Medicare) are all we need to get back in the black.
Our problem is a political one, not an economic one. The Republicans have abandoned any notion of loyal opposition, and now view politics as a war in which one's opponent must be destroyed utterly, no matter the cost. So solutions that are entirely reasonable, such as Obama's proposed plan to reduce the deficit by $2 trillion, get torpedoed, simply because a Democrat proposed them. Instead we get plans like the super committee, which was supposed to cut $600B from each of domestic spending and the military. But even that's too much compromise for the Republicans, so now they're trying to weasel out of the very same deal that they insisted on a few months ago.
As long as voters continue to view politics as a team sport, we're screwed.
call or write your house members and let them know you DO NOT WANT SOPA in any form.
A thousand times this. For partisan bills, this won't work... Republicans will never agree to anything proposed by Obama no matter how much the people they supposedly represent beg. But for something like SOPA, it's not so much a partisan issue. If you call, they WILL listen. Sadly, most people don't bother, so they think we don't really care, and vote the way that gets them paid. But if enough people let them know that we DO care, most of them will listen.
Re:Its a battle win, maybe not victory.
on
No SOPA Vote Until 2012
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
That's how it used to work, but Wisconsin taught them a valuable lesson. Propose something, and if people scream: fuck 'em, push it through anyway! They won't get to vote you out for months or years, by which time many of them will have given up on democracy, allowing you to win in a landslide.
Consciously abstaining is the stupidest fucking thing imaginable. Vote for a third party, if you must, but better yet, vote for the less bad candidate. And vote in primaries, so you get better choices. People DIED because of Bush being elected. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands worldwide. Trillions of dollars were wasted. It was a complete, unmitigated disaster, and it was one that was obviously coming. That was several years ago... and the Republicans got your message loud and clear. They learned their lesson: that if they make things awful enough, you'll just give up and let them take whatever they want. Great job!
Most (all?) ebook readers let you adjust font and margin size. Formats like epub and mobi (azw) allow this to work without breaking the formatting. PDFs don't support that feature, so you have to either pan-n-scan or else be stuck with a tiny font size.
This is a pretty risky idea, FYI. If the cops can get even a partial plate number, combined with the make and model of your car, they can most likely track you down, and will have additional incentive to do so when they see the bright IR flash in the photo. You're better off just not speeding/running red lights. If you go a bit over the limit, or accidentally run a light by mistiming the yellow, then you probably won't get a ticket. The systems are not fully automated - they get screened and marginal cases are thrown out because they don't want to bother with a case that might actually go to court (can't make money on those!). Having plate obscuring systems is just going to draw unwanted attention to your car.
That's what I thought this was going to be... a cooler with IR floodlights to basically disable any digital photography in the area. Seems like that would be way more effective.
Hate crimes are different because they are in effect an act of terrorism against a particular group. A typical premeditated murder, while awful, doesn't really affect most people. With the extremely rare exception of serial killers, premeditated murders tend to be very personal in nature, and not something the typical person needs to worry about. But if some white supremacists decide to go out and find a black person to kill, it sends a message the entire black community that they need to live in fear, or else get out of that neighborhood, lest they be hunted and killed like animals. That mass intimidation is what earns the sentence extension.
I know your post was completely off-topic and probably just meant as flamebait (hate crimes and computer crimes have nothing in common), but I hear this canard about hate crimes trying to punish motivations all the time, and it's important not to let misinformation spread unimpeded.
Unless of course you do something dickish as part of anonymous, which is quite common. They're just a roving mob of thugs. Sometimes they attack someone who deserves it. Sometimes they attack someone who they thought deserves it, but is actually innocent. Sometimes they attack someone who did do something wrong, but their attacks are all out of proportion with the deserved punishment. Sometimes they just hurt random strangers for laughs.
They're basically a sterling example of why anarchist mob justice doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Source? This sounds like the sort of heavily distorted (or outright fabricated) story that one might hear from Rush Limbaugh or some other professional liar.
Corporations can, at will, strip any human of their constitutional rights, simply by inserting a clause in a contract. They can give unlimited, anonymous bribes to politicians. They pay little to no taxes. They can never be sentenced to prison. If by some miracle you do manage to sue them, they can give you the legal run around for decades -- they don't have a biological clock ticking away.
If you could be granted the legal rights of a corporation instead of those of a human, wouldn't you spring for the chance? In the eyes of modern American law, they are better than us in every way.
The Supremes already ruled on this, and unsuprisingly we got a 5-4 ruling that corporations are better than people. Until the conservative stranglehold on the SCOTUS is broken, Americans won't be allowed to sue any company they've entered into a contract with. Now, maybe EULAs don't count for this. But given the court's corporatist bent, I wouldn't count on it.
They already do this in baseball. Ever see a spray chart? Here's Aaron Hill from 2009. Managers eventually caught wise. He went from ~30 HRs a year to 8 last year, because pitchers started pitching him away. And he wasn't just slumping either -- his OBP stayed about the same. He can still hit the ball just fine no matter where you throw it, but he only has the strength to knock it out of the park if its pitched inside. That's a bit of an extreme case, but managers do look at this stuff for every batter they go up against, and plan pitching strategies and field positions accordingly. Ever watch Teixeira at bat? I'm pretty sure the third baseman gets lonely, being the only one left on that half of the field.
Baseball fan chiming in...
Now, I do feel that baseball is too slow to adapt new technology. If I were commish, we'd not only have instant replay challenges, we'd be using some of that nifty cricket technology to call balls and strikes.
But speed up the game? Aside from a few match-ups (I'm lookin' at you, Yankees-Sox), the pace is fine. A bit under three hours, same as football. I could do with fewer commercial breaks, but we all know that won't happen. And a shorter season? Why? They sell around 30k tickets a game, and the parks can't seat 60k. Besides, one of my favorite things about the game is that it's there whenever I want it. I don't need to wait for a particular day.
Sure, if you don't mind paying five times as much.
Nah, netbooks are still great for portable work. If you travel a lot, and need a computer primarily for office apps and web browsing, then nothing beats a netbook. Tablets are more oriented towards media consumption -- games, video, that sort of thing.
I agree with you on 90% of that, but the suggestion that it's gender inequality that men and women aren't made to shower together is bunk. It's not that the men can't control their animal impulses. It's that the situation is potentially embarrassing for everyone involved. Women don't want to be ogled. Men don't want to be visibly aroused in front of everyone. You're essentially arguing that we shouldn't need clothing at all.
When arguing with bigots, it's tempting to contradict everything they say, because you understandably don't want to agree with them about anything. But it's important to be careful not to let yourself slip into the same sort of thoughtless extremism in your beliefs that they suffer from.
No, it was $2T. There was $50B/yr in spending cuts and $150B/yr in new revenue. Plus, we'll get another $100B/yr with the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And we'll get another $300B/yr if we ever let the Bush tax cuts expire. And an estimated $300B/yr once the economy picks up steam. So under that plan, by 2020, we could have the deficit down to $600B/yr, less than half what it currently is.
Not perfect, but a good start, and much better than any alternative proposed thus far.
I was a Republican until 2008. Voted for Bush twice. I greatly regret it, and take some solace in the fact that my vote wouldn't have changed the outcome. I went into the 2008 election planning to vote for McCain, and only changed my mind after he brought in Palin and sold his soul to the same Rovian politics used against him 8 years earier (did you know McCain fathered an illegitimate black baby?).
I am in no way "listening to the reward centers of my brain". Anyone who puts aside their preconceptions and takes a critical view of American politics of the past few years will see that the Democrats are ineffective, but mostly well intentioned. Sometimes their good intentions have harmful effects, but the point is they're trying to help. The same cannot be said of the Republicans.
The Republicans are trying to destroy the United States government. They openly admit it, saying their plan is to "starve the beast". They want a country with no central government, because that will allow absolute rule by the 1%. They (the 1%) have all the power, in the form of near limitless wealth. Our only tools against them are being slowly taken away. Unions are dying, public programs are being underfunded or privatized, our ability to sue has been replaced by "arbiters" who find for the corporation 97% of the time, and the government itself is being strangled to death. It's class warfare, declared by the rich, and the rich are winning. They will leave this country an empty husk, and retire to some nice Carribbean isles, while we're left behind -- destitute, and looking for someone to blame.
It's already been covered how stupid it is to think a company only has IT policies as a power trip. But beyond that, do you really think it's appropriate to view your coworkers as "enemies" who need to be "thwarted"? It's bad enough that the "CRUSH KILL MAIM!" rhetoric has broken into politics, do we really need it in the workplace next?
I spent twenty minutes yesterday trying to get Red Hat to recognize my flash drive. Complain about Windows all you like. It is still orders of magnitude more usable than Linux.
Look at Obama. He's honest, smart, and completely helpless. He wasted most of his first two years trying to negotiate with people who had no intention of ever working with him. All the while, his opponents spread vicious lies about "death panels". They accused him of trying to indoctrinate school children when he told them to stay in school. They demonized his wife for suggesting kids shouldn't eat fast food every day. They complained about him raising taxes ("Taxed Enough Already!") when he had actually cut taxes, as part of the stimulus. They lied and lied and lied and the drooling masses lapped it up, with the result that the liars gained power.
Stupidity and hatred will beat reason and cooperation every time. The GP is optimistic. A total economic collapse will not get the idiots to open their eyes. They'll blame the collapse on whomever Limbaugh tells them to blame. Spoiler alert: they're going to blame liberals, and immigrants, and Muslims, and gays. And the idiot masses will start killing.
You're misinformed. China owns a whopping 8% of the US debt. The country is nowhere near broke. Eliminating the Bush tax cuts and putting some common sense reforms in place in Medicare and Social Security (e.g. means testing, increase the payroll tax cap, allow young healthy people to buy into Medicare) are all we need to get back in the black.
Our problem is a political one, not an economic one. The Republicans have abandoned any notion of loyal opposition, and now view politics as a war in which one's opponent must be destroyed utterly, no matter the cost. So solutions that are entirely reasonable, such as Obama's proposed plan to reduce the deficit by $2 trillion, get torpedoed, simply because a Democrat proposed them. Instead we get plans like the super committee, which was supposed to cut $600B from each of domestic spending and the military. But even that's too much compromise for the Republicans, so now they're trying to weasel out of the very same deal that they insisted on a few months ago.
As long as voters continue to view politics as a team sport, we're screwed.
call or write your house members and let them know you DO NOT WANT SOPA in any form.
A thousand times this. For partisan bills, this won't work... Republicans will never agree to anything proposed by Obama no matter how much the people they supposedly represent beg. But for something like SOPA, it's not so much a partisan issue. If you call, they WILL listen. Sadly, most people don't bother, so they think we don't really care, and vote the way that gets them paid. But if enough people let them know that we DO care, most of them will listen.
That's how it used to work, but Wisconsin taught them a valuable lesson. Propose something, and if people scream: fuck 'em, push it through anyway! They won't get to vote you out for months or years, by which time many of them will have given up on democracy, allowing you to win in a landslide.
Consciously abstaining is the stupidest fucking thing imaginable. Vote for a third party, if you must, but better yet, vote for the less bad candidate. And vote in primaries, so you get better choices. People DIED because of Bush being elected. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands worldwide. Trillions of dollars were wasted. It was a complete, unmitigated disaster, and it was one that was obviously coming. That was several years ago... and the Republicans got your message loud and clear. They learned their lesson: that if they make things awful enough, you'll just give up and let them take whatever they want. Great job!
And let's not forget the the magical electro-bunny!.
Don't feel too bad about Canada. We have the exact same restrictions on buying pseudoephedrine in the states, for the exact same reason.
Most (all?) ebook readers let you adjust font and margin size. Formats like epub and mobi (azw) allow this to work without breaking the formatting. PDFs don't support that feature, so you have to either pan-n-scan or else be stuck with a tiny font size.
This is a pretty risky idea, FYI. If the cops can get even a partial plate number, combined with the make and model of your car, they can most likely track you down, and will have additional incentive to do so when they see the bright IR flash in the photo. You're better off just not speeding/running red lights. If you go a bit over the limit, or accidentally run a light by mistiming the yellow, then you probably won't get a ticket. The systems are not fully automated - they get screened and marginal cases are thrown out because they don't want to bother with a case that might actually go to court (can't make money on those!). Having plate obscuring systems is just going to draw unwanted attention to your car.
That's what I thought this was going to be... a cooler with IR floodlights to basically disable any digital photography in the area. Seems like that would be way more effective.
Hate crimes are different because they are in effect an act of terrorism against a particular group. A typical premeditated murder, while awful, doesn't really affect most people. With the extremely rare exception of serial killers, premeditated murders tend to be very personal in nature, and not something the typical person needs to worry about. But if some white supremacists decide to go out and find a black person to kill, it sends a message the entire black community that they need to live in fear, or else get out of that neighborhood, lest they be hunted and killed like animals. That mass intimidation is what earns the sentence extension.
I know your post was completely off-topic and probably just meant as flamebait (hate crimes and computer crimes have nothing in common), but I hear this canard about hate crimes trying to punish motivations all the time, and it's important not to let misinformation spread unimpeded.
Update: Common Sense has been missing for years, and is presumed dead.
Unless of course you do something dickish as part of anonymous, which is quite common. They're just a roving mob of thugs. Sometimes they attack someone who deserves it. Sometimes they attack someone who they thought deserves it, but is actually innocent. Sometimes they attack someone who did do something wrong, but their attacks are all out of proportion with the deserved punishment. Sometimes they just hurt random strangers for laughs.
They're basically a sterling example of why anarchist mob justice doesn't work.