It is interesting that some individuals think that their personal experience represents factual data regarding the use of libraries across a wide range of geographies, cultures, and socio-economic realities, and are suggesting public policy be made based on their personal experience. I think it is fortunate that most libraries are maintained by local governments whose population is most likely able to decide for themselves whether or not their local library has outlived its usefulness.
My local library is a vibrant community resource, offering not only real physical books and other media, but ebooks as well, and organizing/hosting a variety of community speakers, educational programs, and kids activities related to knowledge and learning. It also provides study spaces for students of all ages, Internet access both through library computers and free WiFi to Internet access, and comfortable book/magazine reading areas (with a large number of subscriptions to magazines popular in the community). Yours may be a moribund tomb, populated only by the ghosts of a past literary age, but that doesn't mean that they all are.
The belief that one's own personal experience/opinion is everyone's experience/opinion is egotistical and is not likely to survive a wide-spread airing. There are "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy".
Mutual funds are pretty much a scam these days with so many fees, front-end load, back-end loaded side-loaded, and brokers who outright lie about the fees. You'd probably make more money putting your money under a mattress than a mutual fund.
Depends on what mutual funds you choose. If you pick an S&P 500 index, a mid-cap index, and a small-cap index from a vendor like Schwab, Fidelity, or Vanguard, you get a reasonably good deal. Vanguard is well-known for low administrative fees. Its boring, but boring is good.
If you envision having employees numbering in the 10s of thousands, consider adding middle initial (firstname..lastname). That was a significant benefit to avoiding namespace collisions when planning e-mail naming for a 40,000 employee company in the US (we ran the numbers on various ways to encode names into e-mail addresses to see what worked best). Of course, we had the benefit of knowing that we had 10s of thousands of employees BEFORE we created the standardized e-mail namespace. This was a while ago when creating a standardized e-mail namespace was relatively new even for a company with many employees.
I'm not sure that the people who are providing the "voice command" interfaces are motivated to provide a local-only response capability. If they aren't, then we'll continue to see cloud-based behavior even if the smarts can be self-contained. I have an iPhone, and it has a "voice dial" feature that doesn't require Siri, so that is what I use in order to keep things local. Having Siri turned on just results in a bad experience when I'm in a poor data service area, anyway.
If some states are registering to vote anyone who gets a driver's license, without guaranteeing citizenship first, then even being registered to vote doesn't guarantee citizenship.
Please tell me you don't believe that particular misrepresentation that runs rampant through right-wing media.
Voter disenfranchisement is a real and documented problem. Registration of noncitizens who get drivers licenses is not, with few examples and far outnumbered by even those citizens who aren't able to prove their citizenship.
I don't know whether to believe the claim or not, unfortunately. It seems far-fetched for it to be true, but I don't have the resources to visit the jurisdictions in question and establish what their processes are myself. I also thought it was far-fetched for a state government to pass a law forbidding people from cooperating with federal law enforcement.
I also thought that it was far-fetched for a county/ state that had a votable-verifiable paper ballot that was electronically counted (but could be verified through a manual recount) to switch to an all-electronic system that removed voter verification and just about all auditing capabilities, but that is exactly what happened in my last state of residence (Maryland).
I know that I currently live in a state for which I had to get an "enhanced" driver's license in order for it to be used as a federal ID (something that is required in my work, as well as to board civil aircraft) because the ordinary driver's license did not meet the US governments citizenship or basic proof of identity needs. I also know that my daughter, who was recently licensed to drive, was automatically registered to vote at the same time that she received her license. I do not know specifically which part of the driver's licensing process checked her citizenship (not necessary for a driver's license) before registering her to vote.
I've seen enough stupidity to stop believing that just because something is far-fetched it isn't possible.
I am against disenfranchising voters. I am not necessarily willing to give up ensuring only authorized voters are voting, and then only voting once per election, in order to prevent all disenfranchising of any voter, however. I think both needs can be met. Perhaps we can do statistical testing (such as is used for quality control to establish whether a lot should be accepted or not based on sampling items in the lot) using randomly chosen voters, which can be tuned for both false acceptance and false rejection rates.
I think you missed my point, but by missing it, perhaps made it for others. I actually wanted to have a discussion about whether one needed to be a citizen to vote.
Seems like you could have had one, if you'd tried, but for some reason, you avoided it.
I wanted to have a discussion. I asked a question of someone because I was genuinely interested in the answer (i.e., whether or not they believed someone needed to be a citizen to vote in a federal election). I got an answer that had relatively little to do with my question. How is it that you think I was avoiding the discussion?
I used hyperbole when I said it would be "madness" to allow non-citizens to vote, but I can expand upon that. If non-citizens could vote in US federal elections, then the elected representatives of the US population, making laws and carrying out those laws, could be chosen by persons other than those bound under those laws, there being far more non-citizens in the world than US citizens. To my mind, that would be madness. I am of the opinion that the original framers of the Constitution did not expect to be governed by representatives chosen by people outside of the country.
Of course, it wouldn't be all bad, I guess. We could stop being concerned about how much influence the Russians had in the recent federal elections. If non-citizens can vote, surely non-citizens can take part in the debate leading up to the election as well.
But due process should be followed. Citizens are presumed innocent until proven guilty. And to deny someone's birthright and essential right of citizenship? By default? Without any evidence of wrong doing? Is that who we are?
This isn't about due process (Due Process being a right described in the Constitution's fifth and fourteenth amendments in relation to being deprived of life, liberty, or property when accused of a crime), or evidence of wrong doing. It is about access control. Perhaps we should not require passwords on logon to operating systems unless we have evidence that people have been logging on fraudulently. Perhaps we should not require proof of ID to cash checks until we have evidence that people are cashing checks fraudulently. Perhaps we should not require ID or a permit to carry a firearm (another constitutional right). If the voting system was generally only accessible to citizens, then perhaps we wouldn't need such access control. But it is easily accessible to non-citizens, based on the number of non-citizens resident in the United States. If some states are registering to vote anyone who gets a driver's license, without guaranteeing citizenship first, then even being registered to vote doesn't guarantee citizenship. Try using a Voter Registration card to prove you are a citizen the next time you do business with the federal government...
If, in fact, only citizen's are supposed to be voting, then it is not depriving anyone of a right to make sure that they ARE a citizen before allowing them to vote, so long as the process of validating their citizenship isn't itself used to disenfranchise someone. And there is the rub, isn't it?
So basically you are providing your own narrative account, and telling a story. So what? You think people haven't asked a dozen screaming "Voter ID" firebreathers and don't have their own stories about how someone like Kris Kobach totally frazzled the question of why he can't provide proof of his allegations?
Yes, I provided my own narrative, and told a story. I'm not sure what else you think I *could* do, given that I didn't wiretap my conversation.
I think you missed my point, but by missing it, perhaps made it for others. I actually wanted to have a discussion about whether one needed to be a citizen to vote. I happen to believe that one clearly has to be a citizen, because to allow non-citizens to vote would be madness, whether or not the US Constitution says anything about it. But I didn't get to have the discussion, because of a knee-jerk reaction to my question that apparently assumed I had an agenda other than having that discussion. Unlike the person in my story, though, you went on to put words in my mouth that I didn't say, and then attacked those words. Clearly it is difficult to have a discussion with someone who thinks that they can anticipate your points, and responds to what they have anticipated, rather than working with what has actually been said. Sigh.
Is that true? I'm reaching way back in my history classes, but I thought you had to be a citizen to vote... it's not a human right, it's a civil right.
Just for grins, ask a hardcore liberal whether being a citizen is a requirement in order to vote in a federal, state, or local election. I asked this of an NPR news director of the Baltimore NPR station (no knowledge of his political affiliation, just an semi-educated guess on my part). The response that I got was along the lines that there is no problem with the voting system, there is no credible proof that there is any kind of fraud with voting, and all of these questions have been answered before. (This is NOT an exact quote). I did not get an responsive answer to the question that I asked.
I think the question is a good indicator of whether someone is an open borders "let everyone in" advocate, whether publicly or not. I believe one clearly has to be a citizen to vote in a federal election, and to deny that reality is, well, to be in denial. But I'm not so clear on whether you need to be a citizen of the US in order to vote in a US state or local election. Perhaps being a resident is enough.
What they are proposing is control over social thought. Unlike PACs or advertising, it's done without oversight or transparency. We complain about PACs not having enough transparency, and not knowing who pays for political ads - are we going to allow Google to be similarly opaque?
Much of the problem comes down to the transparency/visibility of the process. Open political debate depends on knowing who is proposing what, and being able to understand their motives. When the "nudging" and other pressures are being done behind the scenes, with a lack of transparency, and no information about motives, then the foundations of a free society are in jeopardy. Unfortunately, many who are in political power try to deliberately obfuscate their actions and motives, precisely because they know it will be more difficult to achieve their objectives if they don't. This is why we the people need to maintain a healthy cynicism about ALL political power.
Only significant differences I can think of are that they were much smaller, didn't actually collect the data themselves and analyzed the data just for external clients rather than their own gain.
You forgot about the part where they data was used to the possible benefit of conservative politicians instead of for liberal objectives. I'm not sure that that wasn't what goaded some folks into being really upset.
Hmmm. Rather than having everyone switch over to self-driving cars, perhaps what would work here is to have all cars equipped with a collision avoidance/following distance maintenance system with haptic feedback. The technology for maintaining following distances exists, although it is not usually tied to the accelerator with haptic feedback.
The idea is that your car's accelerator would behave normally until your car got within a speed-determined distance from the vehicle in front of you. At that point your accelerator would require much more force to depress it further. If the distance narrowed because the car ahead slowed down, the accelerator would actually push back, lowering the speed of the car (assuming the driver doesn't override the pedal pushback force). If the distance widened, the resistance to pressure on the pedal would decrease. As long as the driver maintains a slight forward pressure on the accelerator pedal (generally necessary to overcome the return spring on the accelerator anyway) then the car would accelerate/decelerate (slightly) as necessary to maintain the distance at the speed-dependent optimum. If for any reason it was necessary for the driver to accelerate or decelerate despite this causing a departure from the optimum distance, the driver would be able to do so, but with feedback from the vehicle.
If all cars had the same optimum distance by speed calculation, then it would be easy to drive in heavy traffic while maintaining safe following distances, and the waves would be diminished.
Doesn't Amazon pay taxes in Seattle/Washington? My understanding is that Washington businesses pay taxes based on their revenue, not their net profit. So even if Amazon has little/no profit, don't they pay their business and occupation tax? Doesn't Amazon employ a large number of people, to whom they pay a salaries, each of which spends their money in Seattle and the surrounding area in many ways, most if not all of which are taxed in order to fund the government of Washington? Washington derives a lot of its revenue from property taxes; doesn't Amazon pay property taxes like everyone else? How is Amazon getting away with being a parasite or freeloader - did they work some angle so that they didn't have to pay the taxes everyone else in Washington does?
Are you perhaps confusing the FTC and the FCC? It is the Federal Trade Commission that is regulating robocalls, not the Federal Communications Commission.
Filing complaints is a pain in the neck, and an imperfect process - agreed. I don't do it all of the time, but I try to do it some of the time. I want to get back to when I could answer the phone with a reasonable level of confidence that it was someone I wanted to talk to, especially when the CallerID shows a local call... so if we all do a bit, it will add up.
You fight back by registering a complaint with the FTC. Although you can't determine the actual number that they are calling from , you can register the circumstances of the call, which may eventually be used to bury the butthead. I suspect that those 80,000 verified scam calls could not have been verified without complaints detailing the call being filed.
My favorites to report are the ones where the robocall leaves a voicemail that includes a callback number... sometimes the crims like to help themselves get caught.
Bingo. This comment hits the nail on the head. The idea that Big Institution A wasn't stupid when they gave out cash, goods, or services to an individual who merely claimed someone elses identity without any proof is ridiculous. The fact that the legal system pins the problem on the innocent person who wasn't a party to the deal in the first place is criminal. Put the responsibility back where it belongs - in the hands of the Big Institution who is so eager to do business that they don't properly establish the identity of a person to whom they extend credit.
The individual used the public interface to the web site in a manner which the public interface was intended by the originators of that interface to be used. Altering a URL by editing the address line was anticipated by the protocol and is supported by practically every available client implementation of applications that support the protocol. It isn't "hacking" (whatever that is) to use an application in the manner in which it was intended to be used. The government's action in publishing the FOIA information in this way was tantamount to publishing a book with all FOIA query responses on separate pages, followed by citing specific pages to specific FOIA requestors. The government would never be able to claim "unauthorized access" if someone subsequently leafed through the pages to read all of the FOIA responses.
Conservatives don't believe in science, so until they pull their heads out of their oven-like assholes collectively, humanity is screwing itself like direct family members in red states.
I'm more conservative than not, and I definitely believe in science. I raised my kids with a periodic table of the elements shower curtain, taught them atomic theory/structure in elementary school, and didn't subject them to a meeting of organized religion adherents until they asked to go as part of one of their high school classes in religion. I'm a big fan of Skeptic magazine and the Skeptical Inquirer. I run programs for FIRST robotics so that kids can get introduced to STEM principles and concepts at an early age to see if they have a liking and an aptitude for pursuing STEM education. I believe in small(er) government and equal opportunity. I recognize that equal opportunity will not create equal outcomes, but don't think that leveling the outcomes is the right answer, either.
I personally like living an areas that trend towards rural and not urban, as I like having space and green things around me, and I value the tradeoff of those benefits more than the glamour of coffee shops, restaurants, and the other collective (claimed) benefits of cities. I am baffled by the trend towards preferring to live in cities, but since I believe in live and let live, I understand that there are those for whom having a crowd of humanity surrounding them at all times is comfortable even though it is not for me.
What I have trouble understanding is why those who want to live in urban environments seem to think that because they like it, everyone else should like it too. I don't understand why liberals who claim to support science feel free to ignore it when it doesn't advance their agenda. I am baffled by people who don't understand the simple concept that not everyone wants to live surrounded by teeming hordes of humanity, and that the psychological well being of people who don't want to live that way is perhaps a very good reason for why a "less efficient" more diffuse population environment is a perfectly reasonable choice for others to make. I deeply resent being constantly bombarded by memes that seek to shame me into supporting a degradation of my non-urban environment in the interests of various feel-good policies that aren't likely to achieve their stated objective of solving social ills. Last time I checked, urban areas were all more expensive to live in than non-urban areas and more harmful to life due to concentrated pollutants. The fact that urban dwellers must accept more controls on their life and their behavior as a consequence of living in such close proximity to each other is to me another reason to just say no to city life.
Why are liberals shoving their heads up their butts, concentrating humanity in cities often devoid of any vegetation other than carefully tended artificial plantings, ignoring the the fact that the "natural" state of humanity is to be part of a natural environment, not embedded in an entirely artificial matrix of glass concrete and asphalt?
12 million financial histories were not LOST. They were potentially disclosed to unknown person(s). As with other cases involving copies of digital data, language originally developed for a world of unique exemplars fails in the domain of easily replicated elements.
It's not censorship if it's their house, you are completely welcome to find another venue to promote whatever it is that Google doesn't want going on in their house.
A big "yes!", and at the same time a huge resounding "no!"
Censorship is not just something of the government. Censorship occurs any time anyone chooses what to say and what not to say, or what can be said and what can't be said. Most of us practice self-censorship in our lives; we choose not to be brutally honest about everything with everyone (Honey, do you think these pants make me look fat?). Google, Facebook, and Twitter (among others) censor some of the content expressed through their mediums of communication (contrast these with e-mail service providers that do not censor the communications across their platforms). In the United States, Hollywood (the "movie industry") practiced self-censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code then introduced a movie rating system to avoid government censorship of their products.
It is also a free speech issue. Communication providers used to have to make a decision - exert editorial control, and be responsible for all content, or keep their hands off (no editorial control), and have no responsibility for the content (i.e., allow free speech). The emergence of large corporations with extensive participation by the public in the mediums of communication provided by those corporations has brought with it new issues. Since the mediums are being used for public discourse, there IS an effect on free speech (even though it is not strictly a government regulation of free speech, something prohibited in the United States by the Constitution). Recent events have suggested that these large corporations be allowed to editorialize SOME of their content, while at the same time not being held responsible for ALL of their content. In other words, purely political pressures are regulating public speech in certain areas, and not others, which is expressly what the US Constitution prohibits the US government from doing. Since the regulation isn't being done by the US government, its not prohibited by the US Constitution. But that doesn't mean it's a good thing - the US Constitution prohibits government regulation of free speech for good reasons. Having large amounts of public communications take place over a "private" forum and having that private forum regulate the speech brings about the same results that the founders of the US sought to prevent; a small number of people making decisions about what CAN be discussed by the public at large. And these forums get to have it both ways - they can block speech they don't like, while at the same time refusing to admit responsibility for the speech that they chose not to block.
The Apple crowd is not terribly worried about the headphone jack for the most part. And those who want to use those 5 dollar Big Lots headphones that seem to be a touchstone for the people who are crapping their pants can simply plug their headphones into the little adapter that comes with every iPhone. If that's too much trouble, well, plugging in a charger is too much trouble, and even with wireless charging, putting the phone in the charger dock is a unacceptable abuse of the consumer.
All this umbrage and gnashing of teeth is just a "We hate everything Apple" crowd talking point.
And okay - whatever - it is hardly important that people who would never ever buy an Apple device have yet another thing to whine about.
If the headphone jack is the number one must have deal breaker for people who would never buy an iPhone....... Wait! that makes no sense.
I guess I'm a member of the "Apple crowd" (whatever that is) but not the "We hate everything Apple" crowd; I've owned Macs as my home computer since 1987 when I bought a Mac Plus, and I have had a iPod, iPod Touch, and now an iPhone as my portable music+data, Internet, and telephone communications device starting in 2008. With respect to the iPhone, I vastly prefer it over Android devices for a variety of reasons, including security as one of the big ones. However, I think Apple's "strategy" of dropping the headphone jack is stupid, and it will probably play a role in my future decision to replace my iPhone 5 with when it fails; it has certainly kept me from getting too excited about buying a new iPhone as my iPhone 5 gets longer in the tooth. I enjoy using my $150 pair of v-Moda over the hear headphones for listening to music and engaging in both Internet and cellular communications, and I'm not at all thrilled at the prospect of having to either carry around a(nother) dongle OR keep a Bluetooth device charged up for the same purpose. I've gone through a couple of Bluetooth earpieces (single ear) for hands-free calling purposes, and I find the simple nature of the headphones to be preferable when I don't need the unobtrusiveness of the small single earpiece. I don't think I'm likely to switch to an Android phone, however, just to gain the headphone jack.
I think the clamor and unhappiness about Apple's decision is at least partially rooted in the fact that there are people who vastly prefer Apple's approach to industrial design, user interfaces, and features/capabilities; but are not at all happy that Apple has chosen to drop a very simple, effective, and economical interface for enhanced listening in favor of what they regard to be inferior options. Apple has, in the past, been a harbinger of change for personal electronic device standards, including USB, optical drives (both starting to include them, and eliminating them), higher speed standardized interfaces (SCSI, Firewire), and others, but more than the usual number of people appear to be shaking their heads in disbelief over the elimination of the headphone jack.
If anything I am a little surprised no news media focused on how California's laws, making it so much more difficult to get semi-automatics rifles and big clips... may have reduced the impact of this crime, could even have something to do with California being 42nd out of the 50 states in gun homicide rate.
Semi-automatic rifles are rarely used in crime, although their has been a recent spate of well-publicized incidents involving semi-automatic rifles. I'll cite a Huffington Post article to avoid accusations of bias https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/assault-weapons-deaths_us_5763109de4b015db1bc8c123. It seems unlikely that California's laws restricting access to such firearms are responsible for the claimed ranking.
Slashdot Mirror
It is interesting that some individuals think that their personal experience represents factual data regarding the use of libraries across a wide range of geographies, cultures, and socio-economic realities, and are suggesting public policy be made based on their personal experience. I think it is fortunate that most libraries are maintained by local governments whose population is most likely able to decide for themselves whether or not their local library has outlived its usefulness.
My local library is a vibrant community resource, offering not only real physical books and other media, but ebooks as well, and organizing/hosting a variety of community speakers, educational programs, and kids activities related to knowledge and learning. It also provides study spaces for students of all ages, Internet access both through library computers and free WiFi to Internet access, and comfortable book/magazine reading areas (with a large number of subscriptions to magazines popular in the community). Yours may be a moribund tomb, populated only by the ghosts of a past literary age, but that doesn't mean that they all are.
The belief that one's own personal experience/opinion is everyone's experience/opinion is egotistical and is not likely to survive a wide-spread airing. There are "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy".
Isn't this just a practical application of the central limit theorem?
Depends on what mutual funds you choose. If you pick an S&P 500 index, a mid-cap index, and a small-cap index from a vendor like Schwab, Fidelity, or Vanguard, you get a reasonably good deal. Vanguard is well-known for low administrative fees. Its boring, but boring is good.
If you envision having employees numbering in the 10s of thousands, consider adding middle initial (firstname..lastname). That was a significant benefit to avoiding namespace collisions when planning e-mail naming for a 40,000 employee company in the US (we ran the numbers on various ways to encode names into e-mail addresses to see what worked best). Of course, we had the benefit of knowing that we had 10s of thousands of employees BEFORE we created the standardized e-mail namespace. This was a while ago when creating a standardized e-mail namespace was relatively new even for a company with many employees.
I'm not sure that the people who are providing the "voice command" interfaces are motivated to provide a local-only response capability. If they aren't, then we'll continue to see cloud-based behavior even if the smarts can be self-contained. I have an iPhone, and it has a "voice dial" feature that doesn't require Siri, so that is what I use in order to keep things local. Having Siri turned on just results in a bad experience when I'm in a poor data service area, anyway.
I don't know whether to believe the claim or not, unfortunately. It seems far-fetched for it to be true, but I don't have the resources to visit the jurisdictions in question and establish what their processes are myself. I also thought it was far-fetched for a state government to pass a law forbidding people from cooperating with federal law enforcement.
I also thought that it was far-fetched for a county/ state that had a votable-verifiable paper ballot that was electronically counted (but could be verified through a manual recount) to switch to an all-electronic system that removed voter verification and just about all auditing capabilities, but that is exactly what happened in my last state of residence (Maryland).
I know that I currently live in a state for which I had to get an "enhanced" driver's license in order for it to be used as a federal ID (something that is required in my work, as well as to board civil aircraft) because the ordinary driver's license did not meet the US governments citizenship or basic proof of identity needs. I also know that my daughter, who was recently licensed to drive, was automatically registered to vote at the same time that she received her license. I do not know specifically which part of the driver's licensing process checked her citizenship (not necessary for a driver's license) before registering her to vote.
I've seen enough stupidity to stop believing that just because something is far-fetched it isn't possible.
I am against disenfranchising voters. I am not necessarily willing to give up ensuring only authorized voters are voting, and then only voting once per election, in order to prevent all disenfranchising of any voter, however. I think both needs can be met. Perhaps we can do statistical testing (such as is used for quality control to establish whether a lot should be accepted or not based on sampling items in the lot) using randomly chosen voters, which can be tuned for both false acceptance and false rejection rates.
I wanted to have a discussion. I asked a question of someone because I was genuinely interested in the answer (i.e., whether or not they believed someone needed to be a citizen to vote in a federal election). I got an answer that had relatively little to do with my question. How is it that you think I was avoiding the discussion?
I used hyperbole when I said it would be "madness" to allow non-citizens to vote, but I can expand upon that. If non-citizens could vote in US federal elections, then the elected representatives of the US population, making laws and carrying out those laws, could be chosen by persons other than those bound under those laws, there being far more non-citizens in the world than US citizens. To my mind, that would be madness. I am of the opinion that the original framers of the Constitution did not expect to be governed by representatives chosen by people outside of the country.
Of course, it wouldn't be all bad, I guess. We could stop being concerned about how much influence the Russians had in the recent federal elections. If non-citizens can vote, surely non-citizens can take part in the debate leading up to the election as well.
This isn't about due process (Due Process being a right described in the Constitution's fifth and fourteenth amendments in relation to being deprived of life, liberty, or property when accused of a crime), or evidence of wrong doing. It is about access control. Perhaps we should not require passwords on logon to operating systems unless we have evidence that people have been logging on fraudulently. Perhaps we should not require proof of ID to cash checks until we have evidence that people are cashing checks fraudulently. Perhaps we should not require ID or a permit to carry a firearm (another constitutional right). If the voting system was generally only accessible to citizens, then perhaps we wouldn't need such access control. But it is easily accessible to non-citizens, based on the number of non-citizens resident in the United States. If some states are registering to vote anyone who gets a driver's license, without guaranteeing citizenship first, then even being registered to vote doesn't guarantee citizenship. Try using a Voter Registration card to prove you are a citizen the next time you do business with the federal government...
If, in fact, only citizen's are supposed to be voting, then it is not depriving anyone of a right to make sure that they ARE a citizen before allowing them to vote, so long as the process of validating their citizenship isn't itself used to disenfranchise someone. And there is the rub, isn't it?
Yes, I provided my own narrative, and told a story. I'm not sure what else you think I *could* do, given that I didn't wiretap my conversation.
I think you missed my point, but by missing it, perhaps made it for others. I actually wanted to have a discussion about whether one needed to be a citizen to vote. I happen to believe that one clearly has to be a citizen, because to allow non-citizens to vote would be madness, whether or not the US Constitution says anything about it. But I didn't get to have the discussion, because of a knee-jerk reaction to my question that apparently assumed I had an agenda other than having that discussion. Unlike the person in my story, though, you went on to put words in my mouth that I didn't say, and then attacked those words. Clearly it is difficult to have a discussion with someone who thinks that they can anticipate your points, and responds to what they have anticipated, rather than working with what has actually been said. Sigh.
Just for grins, ask a hardcore liberal whether being a citizen is a requirement in order to vote in a federal, state, or local election. I asked this of an NPR news director of the Baltimore NPR station (no knowledge of his political affiliation, just an semi-educated guess on my part). The response that I got was along the lines that there is no problem with the voting system, there is no credible proof that there is any kind of fraud with voting, and all of these questions have been answered before. (This is NOT an exact quote). I did not get an responsive answer to the question that I asked.
I think the question is a good indicator of whether someone is an open borders "let everyone in" advocate, whether publicly or not. I believe one clearly has to be a citizen to vote in a federal election, and to deny that reality is, well, to be in denial. But I'm not so clear on whether you need to be a citizen of the US in order to vote in a US state or local election. Perhaps being a resident is enough.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-paid-250-million-in-washington-state-and-local-taxes-in-2017-source-says/
Much of the problem comes down to the transparency/visibility of the process. Open political debate depends on knowing who is proposing what, and being able to understand their motives. When the "nudging" and other pressures are being done behind the scenes, with a lack of transparency, and no information about motives, then the foundations of a free society are in jeopardy. Unfortunately, many who are in political power try to deliberately obfuscate their actions and motives, precisely because they know it will be more difficult to achieve their objectives if they don't. This is why we the people need to maintain a healthy cynicism about ALL political power.
You forgot about the part where they data was used to the possible benefit of conservative politicians instead of for liberal objectives. I'm not sure that that wasn't what goaded some folks into being really upset.
Hmmm. Rather than having everyone switch over to self-driving cars, perhaps what would work here is to have all cars equipped with a collision avoidance/following distance maintenance system with haptic feedback. The technology for maintaining following distances exists, although it is not usually tied to the accelerator with haptic feedback.
The idea is that your car's accelerator would behave normally until your car got within a speed-determined distance from the vehicle in front of you. At that point your accelerator would require much more force to depress it further. If the distance narrowed because the car ahead slowed down, the accelerator would actually push back, lowering the speed of the car (assuming the driver doesn't override the pedal pushback force). If the distance widened, the resistance to pressure on the pedal would decrease. As long as the driver maintains a slight forward pressure on the accelerator pedal (generally necessary to overcome the return spring on the accelerator anyway) then the car would accelerate/decelerate (slightly) as necessary to maintain the distance at the speed-dependent optimum. If for any reason it was necessary for the driver to accelerate or decelerate despite this causing a departure from the optimum distance, the driver would be able to do so, but with feedback from the vehicle.
If all cars had the same optimum distance by speed calculation, then it would be easy to drive in heavy traffic while maintaining safe following distances, and the waves would be diminished.
Doesn't Amazon pay taxes in Seattle/Washington? My understanding is that Washington businesses pay taxes based on their revenue, not their net profit. So even if Amazon has little/no profit, don't they pay their business and occupation tax? Doesn't Amazon employ a large number of people, to whom they pay a salaries, each of which spends their money in Seattle and the surrounding area in many ways, most if not all of which are taxed in order to fund the government of Washington? Washington derives a lot of its revenue from property taxes; doesn't Amazon pay property taxes like everyone else? How is Amazon getting away with being a parasite or freeloader - did they work some angle so that they didn't have to pay the taxes everyone else in Washington does?
Are you perhaps confusing the FTC and the FCC? It is the Federal Trade Commission that is regulating robocalls, not the Federal Communications Commission.
Filing complaints is a pain in the neck, and an imperfect process - agreed. I don't do it all of the time, but I try to do it some of the time. I want to get back to when I could answer the phone with a reasonable level of confidence that it was someone I wanted to talk to, especially when the CallerID shows a local call... so if we all do a bit, it will add up.
You fight back by registering a complaint with the FTC. Although you can't determine the actual number that they are calling from , you can register the circumstances of the call, which may eventually be used to bury the butthead. I suspect that those 80,000 verified scam calls could not have been verified without complaints detailing the call being filed.
My favorites to report are the ones where the robocall leaves a voicemail that includes a callback number... sometimes the crims like to help themselves get caught.
Bingo. This comment hits the nail on the head. The idea that Big Institution A wasn't stupid when they gave out cash, goods, or services to an individual who merely claimed someone elses identity without any proof is ridiculous. The fact that the legal system pins the problem on the innocent person who wasn't a party to the deal in the first place is criminal. Put the responsibility back where it belongs - in the hands of the Big Institution who is so eager to do business that they don't properly establish the identity of a person to whom they extend credit.
The individual used the public interface to the web site in a manner which the public interface was intended by the originators of that interface to be used. Altering a URL by editing the address line was anticipated by the protocol and is supported by practically every available client implementation of applications that support the protocol. It isn't "hacking" (whatever that is) to use an application in the manner in which it was intended to be used. The government's action in publishing the FOIA information in this way was tantamount to publishing a book with all FOIA query responses on separate pages, followed by citing specific pages to specific FOIA requestors. The government would never be able to claim "unauthorized access" if someone subsequently leafed through the pages to read all of the FOIA responses.
I'm more conservative than not, and I definitely believe in science. I raised my kids with a periodic table of the elements shower curtain, taught them atomic theory/structure in elementary school, and didn't subject them to a meeting of organized religion adherents until they asked to go as part of one of their high school classes in religion. I'm a big fan of Skeptic magazine and the Skeptical Inquirer. I run programs for FIRST robotics so that kids can get introduced to STEM principles and concepts at an early age to see if they have a liking and an aptitude for pursuing STEM education. I believe in small(er) government and equal opportunity. I recognize that equal opportunity will not create equal outcomes, but don't think that leveling the outcomes is the right answer, either.
I personally like living an areas that trend towards rural and not urban, as I like having space and green things around me, and I value the tradeoff of those benefits more than the glamour of coffee shops, restaurants, and the other collective (claimed) benefits of cities. I am baffled by the trend towards preferring to live in cities, but since I believe in live and let live, I understand that there are those for whom having a crowd of humanity surrounding them at all times is comfortable even though it is not for me.
What I have trouble understanding is why those who want to live in urban environments seem to think that because they like it, everyone else should like it too. I don't understand why liberals who claim to support science feel free to ignore it when it doesn't advance their agenda. I am baffled by people who don't understand the simple concept that not everyone wants to live surrounded by teeming hordes of humanity, and that the psychological well being of people who don't want to live that way is perhaps a very good reason for why a "less efficient" more diffuse population environment is a perfectly reasonable choice for others to make. I deeply resent being constantly bombarded by memes that seek to shame me into supporting a degradation of my non-urban environment in the interests of various feel-good policies that aren't likely to achieve their stated objective of solving social ills. Last time I checked, urban areas were all more expensive to live in than non-urban areas and more harmful to life due to concentrated pollutants. The fact that urban dwellers must accept more controls on their life and their behavior as a consequence of living in such close proximity to each other is to me another reason to just say no to city life.
Why are liberals shoving their heads up their butts, concentrating humanity in cities often devoid of any vegetation other than carefully tended artificial plantings, ignoring the the fact that the "natural" state of humanity is to be part of a natural environment, not embedded in an entirely artificial matrix of glass concrete and asphalt?
12 million financial histories were not LOST. They were potentially disclosed to unknown person(s). As with other cases involving copies of digital data, language originally developed for a world of unique exemplars fails in the domain of easily replicated elements.
A big "yes!", and at the same time a huge resounding "no!"
Censorship is not just something of the government. Censorship occurs any time anyone chooses what to say and what not to say, or what can be said and what can't be said. Most of us practice self-censorship in our lives; we choose not to be brutally honest about everything with everyone (Honey, do you think these pants make me look fat?). Google, Facebook, and Twitter (among others) censor some of the content expressed through their mediums of communication (contrast these with e-mail service providers that do not censor the communications across their platforms). In the United States, Hollywood (the "movie industry") practiced self-censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code then introduced a movie rating system to avoid government censorship of their products.
It is also a free speech issue. Communication providers used to have to make a decision - exert editorial control, and be responsible for all content, or keep their hands off (no editorial control), and have no responsibility for the content (i.e., allow free speech). The emergence of large corporations with extensive participation by the public in the mediums of communication provided by those corporations has brought with it new issues. Since the mediums are being used for public discourse, there IS an effect on free speech (even though it is not strictly a government regulation of free speech, something prohibited in the United States by the Constitution). Recent events have suggested that these large corporations be allowed to editorialize SOME of their content, while at the same time not being held responsible for ALL of their content. In other words, purely political pressures are regulating public speech in certain areas, and not others, which is expressly what the US Constitution prohibits the US government from doing. Since the regulation isn't being done by the US government, its not prohibited by the US Constitution. But that doesn't mean it's a good thing - the US Constitution prohibits government regulation of free speech for good reasons. Having large amounts of public communications take place over a "private" forum and having that private forum regulate the speech brings about the same results that the founders of the US sought to prevent; a small number of people making decisions about what CAN be discussed by the public at large. And these forums get to have it both ways - they can block speech they don't like, while at the same time refusing to admit responsibility for the speech that they chose not to block.
I guess I'm a member of the "Apple crowd" (whatever that is) but not the "We hate everything Apple" crowd; I've owned Macs as my home computer since 1987 when I bought a Mac Plus, and I have had a iPod, iPod Touch, and now an iPhone as my portable music+data, Internet, and telephone communications device starting in 2008. With respect to the iPhone, I vastly prefer it over Android devices for a variety of reasons, including security as one of the big ones. However, I think Apple's "strategy" of dropping the headphone jack is stupid, and it will probably play a role in my future decision to replace my iPhone 5 with when it fails; it has certainly kept me from getting too excited about buying a new iPhone as my iPhone 5 gets longer in the tooth. I enjoy using my $150 pair of v-Moda over the hear headphones for listening to music and engaging in both Internet and cellular communications, and I'm not at all thrilled at the prospect of having to either carry around a(nother) dongle OR keep a Bluetooth device charged up for the same purpose. I've gone through a couple of Bluetooth earpieces (single ear) for hands-free calling purposes, and I find the simple nature of the headphones to be preferable when I don't need the unobtrusiveness of the small single earpiece. I don't think I'm likely to switch to an Android phone, however, just to gain the headphone jack.
I think the clamor and unhappiness about Apple's decision is at least partially rooted in the fact that there are people who vastly prefer Apple's approach to industrial design, user interfaces, and features/capabilities; but are not at all happy that Apple has chosen to drop a very simple, effective, and economical interface for enhanced listening in favor of what they regard to be inferior options. Apple has, in the past, been a harbinger of change for personal electronic device standards, including USB, optical drives (both starting to include them, and eliminating them), higher speed standardized interfaces (SCSI, Firewire), and others, but more than the usual number of people appear to be shaking their heads in disbelief over the elimination of the headphone jack.
Semi-automatic rifles are rarely used in crime, although their has been a recent spate of well-publicized incidents involving semi-automatic rifles. I'll cite a Huffington Post article to avoid accusations of bias https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/assault-weapons-deaths_us_5763109de4b015db1bc8c123. It seems unlikely that California's laws restricting access to such firearms are responsible for the claimed ranking.