I had no role in deciding that 45% of my income should go to the government. It was that way when I entered the job market. If I kept all of my earnings, there would be no need for a second income to support a child.
If you pay 45% of your income in taxes, you make enough money so that this doesn't apply to you, and can easily support your child with no need for a second income; the highest federal tax rate is 39.6%, which applies only if you make more than $288,350. If state taxes push that to 45%, you can always move to a state without income tax.
If the politicians would READ the constitution, they would find that gov't ONLY has the power to tax imported / exported goods. The unconstitutional income tax (the amendment was never ratified) is the direct cause of the situation you're concerned with.
The Constitution DOES allow for taxation beyond imported/exported goods, and always has. Section 8 states:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the income tax levied during the Civil War was legal. Any reasonable person reading it can see that it allows the government to levy taxes. There is some uncertainty as to whether it can apply to directly taxing individuals, which is why the 16th amendment was created. The only people who claim that it wasn't ratified are people who are so incensed at having to turn over money that they construct elaborate fictions to justify not doing so. Point me to one reputable legal scholar who claims the 16th amendment wasn't ratified.
I guess we're moving offtopic though.
Furthermore, children are not "monitored" sufficiently by their parents because at some point in time, responsibility became a foreign concept in this society.
I hear this a lot, but haven't seen any proof. From time immemorial people have complained about decreasing moral standards, and if this were true by this point we'd be living in sewers. Was there suddenly spontaneous moral decay? What caused it?
If we had never tried to legislate away stupidity, outlaw recreation or mandate education, parents would necessarily be more involved in their children's lives.
These laws didn't just spring spontaneously into existence. They were created in response to specific problems. You really want to improve things? Force the television networks to cut their programming schedule down to a few educational and news shows a day. Cut the workday down to a sane amount. Offer more vacation time to parents. Stop treating education as a robot factory, and cut down class size to a fraction of what it is. Make it illegal to advertise any product to children. Create a society that isn't a constant assault on a child's psyche. I know that we can't legislate all this, but let's at least try, and if that means we have a few municipalities trying to cut down on the virtual gore little Johnny sees, well at least they're trying, and I'm not going to demonize them for doing it like everyone else on this forum.
As it is, the consequences of "failure" have been diminishing with time due to paternalistic laws and increases in welfare / bankruptcy / whatever.
So what do you propose? We resurrect the idea of debtor's prison?
The system has never correctly identified a single face in its database of suspects, let alone resulted in any arrests.
The system made many false positives, including such errors as confusing what were to a human easily identifiable male and female images.
The photographic database contains a broader selection of the population than just criminals wanted by the police, including such people as those who might have "valuable intelligence" for the police, or who have criminal records.
I wonder why they didn't mention that man who was a demo face for the system, and was subsequently misidentified then questioned as a felon. Guess it didn't make the logs.
Encouragement and laws are 2 different things. Nowadays you can get arrested for spanking your child. I should have been more clear, or less single-minded about this one, there are many more factors than political. But, when I'm in a resturaunt and there's someone there with a child the overwhelming majority of the time the child will be running around, making a nuicence of themselves, but the parent does absolutely nothing.
If you do it with some restraint, you're not likely to be arrested for spanking your child. I think the few cases where a parent has been arrested where when it was actually child abuse.
You're right about the restaurant situation, but I think the blame should fall squarely on the parents. And the restaurant manager for not asking them to leave.
But slave ownership at the time was socially accepted. I wouldn't go so far as to judge an 18th century man in that environment against 21st century standards.
Actually, slave ownership was not socially acceptable in all quarters of society. And I think in Jefferson's case you can criticize him to some extent, as he truly did believe slavery was evil, and worked to have it abolished, but kept slaves himself. I think hypocrisy was looked down upon in the 18th century as well (I do believe Jefferson was a great, but deeply flawed man)
1. We're a free society. we have certain freedoms, guaranteed by the constitution. This means we have freedom of expression. A video game is someone's expression.
This law didn't interfere with the creator's write to make a video game, it prevented minors (who are not, and shouldn't be, granted full Constitutional protections) from using that game. There is a difference. While I personally disagree with the ordinance, you have to recognize that this issue, like most, is not so cut-and-dried as most people here like to think.
2. Most of the violence today has nothing to do with video games. It's mostly because of the soft parenting that politicians have promoted in recent years. People don't dicipline their children anymore. They let their children get away with murder (figuratively speaking, but, then again...)
How is this politicians' faults? I mean, we blame them for everything under the sun, but what "soft parenting" laws have they created? I feel that people don't discipline their children as much anymore because they're not around to do so. We've created a society where in most families both the parents have to work simply to make ends meet. Children are not monitored suffiently not because of moral failure on someone's part (except maybe the corporations that have created this situation), but because of economic necessity.
Paradigm is a very useful term when you're discussing philosophy. It's a pity the marketdroids took it over, but hopefully it'll fall out of use in the marketing world eventually.
Here's an even worse example; movie and recording companies have been known to destroy some works when the copyright ran out rather than let the public have them.
It doesn't? Maybe it does work, but you just don't know about it.
The first step in shutting down a satellite via hacking is to submit a story on slashdot pointing out the security holes, thus planting the idea in a lot of peoples' heads. And no, the script kiddies aren't the only ones who do this sort of stuff. As much as people don't want to hear it, there are plenty of morally bankrupt but tech-savvy people who know what they're doing, and have the mentality of teenage vandals.
And a lot of dotcommers came up with boneheaded business strategies on their own. I don't think it really qualified as a scam, because the dot com crowd actually believed that they were going to succeed, and didn't really make that much money out of it on a personal level (though I guess they had their fun spending it).
The bubble burst not because people pulled money out, but because they just stopped putting it in. And without actual revenue the money just drained out without being restored.
Are they required to send out their privacy policy? Or was this done willingly? If the latter, I can easily see this preventing other companies from doing the same, figuring people are happier ignorant.
They both upgrade both, technically. The Professional version is simply the home version with a few extras, and I think it was mainly intended to encourage people to buy one for home and one for the office. If you already have 2k deployed in a corporate environment, I see little reason for changing, especially since there will be a 2k server upgrade this year. The kernel might be basically the same, but they're still different lines of software.
I know a lot of people here don't want to hear this, but XP is not a bad OS. As for your comparisons to 2k, I'm not sure exactly why you're making them; XP is meant to upgrade 98 users, not 2k ones. I'm not sure why you'd upgrade from 2k in the first place.
I also hear I'm not alone in that experience. So, glad it worked for you. For me, I stick to my Linux desktop - which is very simple for me to setup. And I'm not blinded by the ugliness that is XP.
I would have stuck with linux too; if it could actually play games.
Look at the pretension. Look at how many posts go "well I'm a REAL geek so I like putting everything together, and if you don't there's something wrong with you". You know something, I never go near car engines. Couldn't be bothered. It's not "fear", it's simply lack of interest.
Not at all; the dam only has political support. In China the principal opponents (other than people being displaced by the project) are the scientists and hydrological engineers. The only supporters of the dam outside of the government are foreign investment companies who think they can make money on this. The central figure in the anti-dam movement is Dai Qing, who is both a journalist and an engineer.
* reforestation - This is one of the most heavily populated areas in the world here, it is not an option to reforest much of it.
One of the causes of the flooding is deforestation; by preventing more loss of vegetation, and growing back what you can, you can increase how much water is absorbed before it enters the river. You have to keep in mind that while China is heavily populated, the actual population density isn't particularly high, and the Chinese government already has committed to reforestation projects, realizing their importance.
levees, spillways, floodways - This will only go so far. I do not think it is feasible to do given how many millions of acres flood each moonson season. How many levees, spillways and floodways can you make?
You don't just make new ones; you improve the ones that are already there. I think you're missing the point; the best way to prevent flooding is not in one huge grandiose project, but to improve flood control through a variety of methods. Again, these are also things that the Chinese government has already planned to do; however, I think they're putting too many eggs in the TGP basket.
* creating a series of smaller dams - A serious of smaller dams, while indeed an alternative solution, is not necessarily better. What matters is how well each solution, a big dam, or several smaller, is implemented, and not choosing say smaller dams over one large one. Each solution has its own advantages and problems, one is not clearly better than the other.
Moral relativism doesn't go far in engineering. Yes, a series of smaller dams would be more effective and less costly. It's a better solution. Especially considering you could more adequately control more of the river (the current location of the dam project is upstream from several tributaries, which will limit how effective it can be), they'd be easier and cheaper to make, and a catastrophic failure of one won't threaten as many people as if (or when) the TGD failed.
Again, I think you're missing the point; I'm not saying the TGP dam couldn't help, I'm just saying that the way it's been implemented pretty much dooms it to failure. They have already spent billions of dollars (much of it siphoned off by corrupt officials), and plan on spending tens of billions more. This, in a country that is in a perpetual cash shortage. There's a reason the World Bank refuses to offer any funding, and the US Export-Import bank won't guarantee loans to US companies investing in the project. The TGP is just a horrible idea, executed in one of the worst ways possible, that will most likely fail in its mission, and cost thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives.
Thats funny. Name them. Why mention there are far better ways and not name them?
Fine. Strengthening levees, spillways, floodways, reforestation, creating more reservoirs, creating a series of smaller dams, creating the same dam but changing it's design, creating the same dam but not making it so incredibly shoddy (the engineer in charge admits that it's not particularly well-made, but claims at this stage that's not important).
Slashdot Mirror
Well the problem the ACLU had with it wasn't technical, but rather how invasive it was, which that event proved...
If you pay 45% of your income in taxes, you make enough money so that this doesn't apply to you, and can easily support your child with no need for a second income; the highest federal tax rate is 39.6%, which applies only if you make more than $288,350. If state taxes push that to 45%, you can always move to a state without income tax.
If the politicians would READ the constitution, they would find that gov't ONLY has the power to tax imported / exported goods. The unconstitutional income tax (the amendment was never ratified) is the direct cause of the situation you're concerned with.
The Constitution DOES allow for taxation beyond imported/exported goods, and always has. Section 8 states: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the income tax levied during the Civil War was legal. Any reasonable person reading it can see that it allows the government to levy taxes. There is some uncertainty as to whether it can apply to directly taxing individuals, which is why the 16th amendment was created. The only people who claim that it wasn't ratified are people who are so incensed at having to turn over money that they construct elaborate fictions to justify not doing so. Point me to one reputable legal scholar who claims the 16th amendment wasn't ratified.
I guess we're moving offtopic though.
Furthermore, children are not "monitored" sufficiently by their parents because at some point in time, responsibility became a foreign concept in this society.
I hear this a lot, but haven't seen any proof. From time immemorial people have complained about decreasing moral standards, and if this were true by this point we'd be living in sewers. Was there suddenly spontaneous moral decay? What caused it?
If we had never tried to legislate away stupidity, outlaw recreation or mandate education, parents would necessarily be more involved in their children's lives.
These laws didn't just spring spontaneously into existence. They were created in response to specific problems. You really want to improve things? Force the television networks to cut their programming schedule down to a few educational and news shows a day. Cut the workday down to a sane amount. Offer more vacation time to parents. Stop treating education as a robot factory, and cut down class size to a fraction of what it is. Make it illegal to advertise any product to children. Create a society that isn't a constant assault on a child's psyche. I know that we can't legislate all this, but let's at least try, and if that means we have a few municipalities trying to cut down on the virtual gore little Johnny sees, well at least they're trying, and I'm not going to demonize them for doing it like everyone else on this forum.
As it is, the consequences of "failure" have been diminishing with time due to paternalistic laws and increases in welfare / bankruptcy / whatever.
So what do you propose? We resurrect the idea of debtor's prison?
Expanded Universe doesn't count.
- The system has never correctly identified a single face in its database of suspects, let alone resulted in any arrests.
- The system made many false positives, including such errors as confusing what were to a human easily identifiable male and female images.
- The photographic database contains a broader selection of the population than just criminals wanted by the police, including such people as those who might have "valuable intelligence" for the police, or who have criminal records.
I wonder why they didn't mention that man who was a demo face for the system, and was subsequently misidentified then questioned as a felon. Guess it didn't make the logs.Encouragement and laws are 2 different things. Nowadays you can get arrested for spanking your child. I should have been more clear, or less single-minded about this one, there are many more factors than political. But, when I'm in a resturaunt and there's someone there with a child the overwhelming majority of the time the child will be running around, making a nuicence of themselves, but the parent does absolutely nothing.
If you do it with some restraint, you're not likely to be arrested for spanking your child. I think the few cases where a parent has been arrested where when it was actually child abuse.
You're right about the restaurant situation, but I think the blame should fall squarely on the parents. And the restaurant manager for not asking them to leave.
But slave ownership at the time was socially accepted. I wouldn't go so far as to judge an 18th century man in that environment against 21st century standards.
Actually, slave ownership was not socially acceptable in all quarters of society. And I think in Jefferson's case you can criticize him to some extent, as he truly did believe slavery was evil, and worked to have it abolished, but kept slaves himself. I think hypocrisy was looked down upon in the 18th century as well (I do believe Jefferson was a great, but deeply flawed man)
1. We're a free society. we have certain freedoms, guaranteed by the constitution. This means we have freedom of expression. A video game is someone's expression.
...)
This law didn't interfere with the creator's write to make a video game, it prevented minors (who are not, and shouldn't be, granted full Constitutional protections) from using that game. There is a difference. While I personally disagree with the ordinance, you have to recognize that this issue, like most, is not so cut-and-dried as most people here like to think.
2. Most of the violence today has nothing to do with video games. It's mostly because of the soft parenting that politicians have promoted in recent years. People don't dicipline their children anymore. They let their children get away with murder (figuratively speaking, but, then again
How is this politicians' faults? I mean, we blame them for everything under the sun, but what "soft parenting" laws have they created? I feel that people don't discipline their children as much anymore because they're not around to do so. We've created a society where in most families both the parents have to work simply to make ends meet. Children are not monitored suffiently not because of moral failure on someone's part (except maybe the corporations that have created this situation), but because of economic necessity.
wrong. The "average" life span is increasing do to the lowering of the infant mortality rate.
Which is a result of medical advances. So he/she was right.
I want to say Robotech Defense Force, but that's probably not right...
Paradigm is a very useful term when you're discussing philosophy. It's a pity the marketdroids took it over, but hopefully it'll fall out of use in the marketing world eventually.
Here's an even worse example; movie and recording companies have been known to destroy some works when the copyright ran out rather than let the public have them.
I was referring to the people who would hack into the satellites just to be destructive, not the guy who pointed out the security flaws.
Obscurity doesn't work.
It doesn't? Maybe it does work, but you just don't know about it.
The first step in shutting down a satellite via hacking is to submit a story on slashdot pointing out the security holes, thus planting the idea in a lot of peoples' heads. And no, the script kiddies aren't the only ones who do this sort of stuff. As much as people don't want to hear it, there are plenty of morally bankrupt but tech-savvy people who know what they're doing, and have the mentality of teenage vandals.
And a lot of dotcommers came up with boneheaded business strategies on their own. I don't think it really qualified as a scam, because the dot com crowd actually believed that they were going to succeed, and didn't really make that much money out of it on a personal level (though I guess they had their fun spending it).
The bubble burst not because people pulled money out, but because they just stopped putting it in. And without actual revenue the money just drained out without being restored.
Come on, this is slashdot, what the hell are we supposed to do with facts?
Are they required to send out their privacy policy? Or was this done willingly? If the latter, I can easily see this preventing other companies from doing the same, figuring people are happier ignorant.
They both upgrade both, technically. The Professional version is simply the home version with a few extras, and I think it was mainly intended to encourage people to buy one for home and one for the office. If you already have 2k deployed in a corporate environment, I see little reason for changing, especially since there will be a 2k server upgrade this year. The kernel might be basically the same, but they're still different lines of software.
Windows 98. You would not believe how many corporate networks still use it. Hell, a lot of places still use 3.11.
I know a lot of people here don't want to hear this, but XP is not a bad OS. As for your comparisons to 2k, I'm not sure exactly why you're making them; XP is meant to upgrade 98 users, not 2k ones. I'm not sure why you'd upgrade from 2k in the first place.
I also hear I'm not alone in that experience. So, glad it worked for you. For me, I stick to my Linux desktop - which is very simple for me to setup. And I'm not blinded by the ugliness that is XP.
I would have stuck with linux too; if it could actually play games.
Look at the pretension. Look at how many posts go "well I'm a REAL geek so I like putting everything together, and if you don't there's something wrong with you". You know something, I never go near car engines. Couldn't be bothered. It's not "fear", it's simply lack of interest.
pygmy chimpanzees?
Not at all; the dam only has political support. In China the principal opponents (other than people being displaced by the project) are the scientists and hydrological engineers. The only supporters of the dam outside of the government are foreign investment companies who think they can make money on this. The central figure in the anti-dam movement is Dai Qing, who is both a journalist and an engineer.
* reforestation - This is one of the most heavily populated areas in the world here, it is not an option to reforest much of it.
One of the causes of the flooding is deforestation; by preventing more loss of vegetation, and growing back what you can, you can increase how much water is absorbed before it enters the river. You have to keep in mind that while China is heavily populated, the actual population density isn't particularly high, and the Chinese government already has committed to reforestation projects, realizing their importance.
levees, spillways, floodways - This will only go so far. I do not think it is feasible to do given how many millions of acres flood each moonson season. How many levees, spillways and floodways can you make?
You don't just make new ones; you improve the ones that are already there. I think you're missing the point; the best way to prevent flooding is not in one huge grandiose project, but to improve flood control through a variety of methods. Again, these are also things that the Chinese government has already planned to do; however, I think they're putting too many eggs in the TGP basket.
* creating a series of smaller dams - A serious of smaller dams, while indeed an alternative solution, is not necessarily better. What matters is how well each solution, a big dam, or several smaller, is implemented, and not choosing say smaller dams over one large one. Each solution has its own advantages and problems, one is not clearly better than the other.
Moral relativism doesn't go far in engineering. Yes, a series of smaller dams would be more effective and less costly. It's a better solution. Especially considering you could more adequately control more of the river (the current location of the dam project is upstream from several tributaries, which will limit how effective it can be), they'd be easier and cheaper to make, and a catastrophic failure of one won't threaten as many people as if (or when) the TGD failed.
Again, I think you're missing the point; I'm not saying the TGP dam couldn't help, I'm just saying that the way it's been implemented pretty much dooms it to failure. They have already spent billions of dollars (much of it siphoned off by corrupt officials), and plan on spending tens of billions more. This, in a country that is in a perpetual cash shortage. There's a reason the World Bank refuses to offer any funding, and the US Export-Import bank won't guarantee loans to US companies investing in the project. The TGP is just a horrible idea, executed in one of the worst ways possible, that will most likely fail in its mission, and cost thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives.
Thats funny. Name them. Why mention there are far better ways and not name them?
Fine. Strengthening levees, spillways, floodways, reforestation, creating more reservoirs, creating a series of smaller dams, creating the same dam but changing it's design, creating the same dam but not making it so incredibly shoddy (the engineer in charge admits that it's not particularly well-made, but claims at this stage that's not important).