No, but Congress does have subpeona power, which WOULD be compulsory and be a bad way to start the meeting. So usually folks go along with requests from Congress and use relationships with friendly congressmen to try and limit topics covered or questions away from the more embarrassing stuff.
I find it hard to believe the geek cred of this reviewer when he repeatedly refers to "Spider-Man" as "Spiderman". Lonely virgins everywhere know that it is hyphenated!
Please tell me how mutilating another human being (or yourself) or performing gross acts on one another is normal in any way?
Well, most boys in the US in the past few hundred years have had several inches of skin cut off their penis shortly after birth. Most girls have gone to completely normal stores where they pay to have needles shoved through their ears to create a permanent hole from which to hang ornamentation. In recent years, it's become pretty common to have even more holes created in other parts of the body, the belly button being a common site, and also frequently multiple holes around the ear. It's also quite common to pay people to jam a needle under your skin to leave little drops of colored ink suspended there for decades after.
Pretty much every human society has mutilation and scarification of some form as completely normal and accepted practices.
Of course, the personal ad we're talking about said nothing about any mutilation or scarification, so I'm not sure why you wanted such examples of how normal and accepted it is.
I really don't know how much more simply anyone can say the words "if you serve text, then it will be accessible." It might not be optimal, but it is not your responsibility to personally fix bugs in screen readers if they can't handle simple text that validates according to accepted standards.
You just like to make it sound incredibly complex and onerous because then you can feel justified in doing nothing or blaming the guv'mint for imposing such terrible burdens on you. Serve plain text. Have links built with anchor tags instead of some crazy flash/javascript monster. You are done. Stop bitching about Jaws, it is not magic. Use any of the other 800 free methods of validation and if they check out, you are done. Really, no trick! There is no secret accessibility code that is only revealed to people buying expensive programs!
You also haven't addressed my original point, which is that the probability of a visually-impaired person wanting to buy visual art is about zero, making all of this an exercise in futility.
Because it's easier to make a law that applies to everyone equally than to allow people to unilaterally declare that they should be exempt based on nothing other than their intuition that a disabled person has no interest in the goods they sell. Someone else kept insisting hiking stores have no need to admit people with wheelchairs, and of course many amputees use wheelchairs and artifical limbs at different times, including shopping in a wheelchair but mountain climbing with $50,000 carbon fiber legs.
but the guy who reveals them should never be hired again, because.... ???? because his moral views are ignorant? Does that have anything to do with job performance?
Because he's shown a willingness to post online highly embarassing information given to him in confidence, so long as he finds it personally entertaining to do so, and no matter the cost to the other party. That's not the kind of discretion most companies are looking for in network and system administrators who often have complete access to confidential and private data. That usually includes access to personal email and data on the systems belonging to higher-ups, who get to make their own rules about what is allowed on company systems. He just announed to the internet that he isn't trustworthy.
Oh please. SM consists of purposely inflicting pain on other people.
Consensually. They weren't sending messages to random email addresses, they were responding to a message that specifically requested dominant and sadistic men because that's what the "girl" liked.
The people responding (the sadists) are apparently quite willing to inflict pain on other weaker people. Apparently they don't find it so fun when the tables are turned.
Why do you assume a submissive or masochist is weaker? Just because you enjoy being spanked doesn't mean you're weak, it just means you enjoy being spanked. Plenty of big strong men with successful careers let women half their size to tie them up and spank them and call them names. That's what they both like.
How were the tables turned? These men didn't consent to being treated this way. They weren't humiliating anyone else in public or sharing the personal information of other people in public.
People who get pleasure from hurting others ARE a "freak" or a "sick weirdo". It's not something that should be tolerated and it's rather sick that respondants are so willing to accept it as a normal fetish. It's not.
I have a feeling you'd be very frightened to find out just how common those freakish and weird things are, my sheltered anonymous coward. Most married couples have played with some form of bondage (neckties to the bedpost, etc), sadism/masochism (spanking, biting, pinching), domination and submission (student/teacher roleplaying), or humiliation ("call me dirty names, tell me what a bad boy I am"). The Kinsey Report and subsequent studies have shown middle america is far more adventurous in the bedroom than we show publicly. As long as both people enjoy it and are adults, what does it matter?
I mean, I don't get off on sucking toes or having girls piss on me and call me names, but if that's what keeps a couple happily in love for 50 years who the hell are you or I to say they're wrong?
As for the copyright violations - that is a tough one. The copyright to an email and a jpeg rests with the author. However this was published and in such a fashion that it might actually be public domain. In the USA one must register the copyright prior to publishing and if this is not done the copyright becomes imperfect and as such enters limbo. (IANAL but I have researched this).
The US hasn't required registration for Copyright since 1976 (though it has advantages in damages awarded). And there is no such thing as "releasing it in such a fashion that it might be public domain" -- authors have to make any transfer of rights and ownership explicitly, there is no such thing as implicit transfer of copyright under current US or international law (most major countries are signatories of the Berne Convention).
Actually, it's called ignorance. We here on slashdot may all be internet-savvy enough to know the full implications of putting anything in electronic format, but the majority of people out there using computers really do take for granted that email is somewhat private. It just wouldn't occur to most people that some sociopath on the other end who they've never harmed is deliberately baiting them solely to fuck up their lives for no other reason than it amuses him momentarily.
I'm sure a lot of people will be more careful now that they've heard this story, but these guys will wind up paying a pretty high price for their lack of imagination in how widely and quickly things like this can be spread all over.
I had a measure of sympathy for him before I delved into his blog because I figured it was the sort of thing that any number of people could do and not fully realise the legal implications of their actions.
Yeah, when I first heard about this a couple days ago, I thought it was a case of some guy pulling a prank and just not thinking it through, basically being just as ignorant and foolish and impetuous as the ones who responded.
But damn, I read his followup comments and realized the guy knew exactly what he was doing the whole time, he just doesn't give a shit about ruining other people's lives for a moment of amusement. Legal consequences or not, I hate to say at this point he pretty much deserves whatever vengeance he brought upon himself. He could have easily defused it all much sooner than this but he's so intent on being the class clown and impressing his LiveJournal friends that I wonder if he can really comprehend not everybody is content to strike back with snarky comments on LJ.
Personally, I wonder why the're doing things that they're emberrased by to begin with. Seems like it might be useful to seek phsychiatric help such that they can either accept themselves for what they are, or change to reflect what they want to be. It can't be fun living a life where you're perpetually ashamed of yourself.
Then again, perhaps they are perfectly comfortable and confident of themselves, but recognize that most of society disagrees with their ideas of what is proper sexual behavior for consenting adults.
It's one thing to be completely open about unusual sexual practices with friends and family, quite another to have them available on Google for future employers to misinterpret when they don't know what you are really like, and they have a mistaken stereotype of what someone with your interests will be like personally and professionally.
In the US, we consider anything other than man on top, woman on bottom, face to face, under the covers, in bed, after marriage, with the lights out sex to be quite dirty.
Certainly having google-able records of anything slightly non-mainstream could affect these guys' careers quite a bit, even though most of them are apparently single and responding to a consenting adult, you don't want to hire a "freak" or some "sick weirdo" after all.
WTF? This guy spent six months taking a class on MySpace and put it in his resume? That's like saying you took off a year after high school to learn your multiplication tables.
You really need to read the article before you go off on such a rant. Nowehere in the courts, in the ADA, or in my earlier posting has anyone suggested that the entire visual universe should be somehow translated into sound, or that the entire aural universe should be translated into sight.
I never suggested images were not the focus on some sites, only that the web itself is not an inherently visual medium as the earlier poster claimed. That image (and video and audio) support was added later does not make the web an inherently visual medium, though a particular web site may certainly sell inherently visual products. I'm a professional artist myself, so I certainly understand that product, and building sites solely around presenting images.
I have to disagree. A good friend of my wife's is disabled, and knows what real discrimination is like.
So it isn't REAL racism unless someone is getting sprayed with a fire hose or being sent to the back of the bus? I agree your friend's problem is more serious, but that doesn't make inaccessible stores any less discriminatory. It is possible to address more than one act of discrimination at a time in a country our size.
What if the site is inaccessible from Mac browsers? Can I sue on the grounds that being a Mac user is a disability?
Where has anyone suggested that? All the complainants are saying is that information about the physical Target stores should be available to people with disabilities. I'm pretty sure any Mac browser can render a page with three lines of unstyled text giving the address and phone number of the store.
The problem is that now, because of this ruling, my wife will be faced with two options:
1) Keep running the business in potential violation of the ADA and hope she doesn't get sued. 2) Close the business because she can't afford to pay for an accessibility audit of the website.
Testing the site ourselves isn't possible.
Ignoring the fact that this case has essentially nothing to do with your wife's web site unless she runs a physical store as well, why isn't it possible to test yourself? You made a web site and it works, making it accessible is no more difficult. Go to the W3C and follow their guidelines. Cost is $0, they have dozens of free tools in multiple languages for evaluating accessibility and lists of issues to look out. If the essential information is available in Lynx, you're peachy, though going beyond the minimum will result in a more compatible site overall that is easier to update.
Do you still think this ruling was a good idea, NMerriam? Should all mom-and-pop online businesses be closed down because of the ADA?
Considering this only deals with information about physical stores on the website, yeah, I think it's a great idea. Adding three lines of text to your website is far less onerous than building wheelchair ramps and wider doorways, and stores deal with those requirements.
Just think of the killing some unscrupulous lawyers could make off this. Just build a webcrawler that finds "unaccessible" websites, then sue the owners. Free money!
If a company has money to fix an inaccessible site and refuses to when someone disabled complains, then yes, someone could sue, just as they could sue a bus company for refusing to admit a guide dog after ignoring complaints. I'm sure the bus company thinks its a stupid rule, and a waste of money, and it will annoy the other passengers to have a dog on the bus. I'm sure they think any lawyer who sues them over it is unscrupulous and just looking for free money.
this is a fiction that has been created by the people who support these kind of laws to justify destroying small business
Considering the laws themselves say businesses under a certain size are exempt, I don't know how it can be a fiction. What motivation would people have for wanting to "destroy small business, anyways?
a company that had only 10 employees, that had to make hundreds of thousands of dollars of building changes to make the business handicap compliant, and it wasn't even a place of "public accommodation" like a store or hotel or such. It was a tiny office and warehouse. No exemptions for small business, no way, no how... total fantasy.
If the building was from before 1993, they only had to make changes that were affordable and practical for their financial resources, and they were eligible for tax credits for the cost of what they did (not just deductions -- CREDITS, as in 100% of the money you paid you just subtract from your taxes owed). And they only had to do that if they were a public accomodation.
If they built a building after 1993 and didn't comply with the law when they built it, well, then they or their architects or their constructions guys deserved the financial hit just the same as if they built something without following the fire codes or local zoning regulations.
The Small Business Administration has a helpful guide up here. If your old company couldn't afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in improvements, then someone suckered them, because nothing in the law requires that.
Most of these laws are pushed by trail lawyers, who especially love to sue small businesses, because they are the ones who have the least legal resources to fight a lawsuit... or to seek exemptions in the first place.
If your business is so poor it can't afford to put in wheelchair ramps, then it's too poor to be a target for a lawyer. Lawyers don't sue for fun, they sue for profit.
That's insane. It seems like the analysts are really just complaining Apple sold too many iPods for Chrsitmas 2005, that spike is so huge of course the next quarter will look smaller, even though it's bigger than every other quarter in history but the massive holiday one.
I know about 12 people with bad credit. Not a one of them is that way for "good reasons" like medical. They're that way because they went out and bought new computers and other toys, got crappy jobs when they could have done better, and just let the payments slide because they were too busy bitching about the man keeping them down.
No offense, but it sounds like you hang out with a lot of real losers.
About half of all personal bankruptcies in the US are caused by unexpected medical expenses, and another quarter are caused by sudden but prolonged unemployment (ie, longer than the few months most people should have saved to cover themselves).
The things checking a credit history will show is whether somebody was hit by a car or laid off when their job in a small field was outsourced. Neither one is a particularly good reason to deny them a job.
No, I definately don't want to be paying everyone's healthcare costs with my taxes.
You already are. Who do you think pays for all those uninsured emergency room visits? The health care fairy?
Nothing stopping everyone from paying for health insurance
Sure there is -- there's no reason for insurance companies to cover the poor or people with chronic conditions. They aren't profitable. If you think a family living off minimum wage can afford $1200/month in insurance, you need to put down the libertarian kool-aid and join the real world.
Then don't spend money that you can't pay back. Why do people without a job have credit when there isn't a way for them to pay it back?
Half of consumer bankrupties are caused by medical debt. Being hit by a car and taken unconscious in an ambulance to a hospital and waking up to find yourself $250,000 in debt is hardly a choice, or indicative of financial management problems or bad priorities.
Your points are all perfectly valid and perfectly senseless and extreme. Nobody is suggesting everyone should be able to do everything and we should create a Harrison Bergeron style system of weights for the strong.
But you should certainly not lock up important text data in or behind a video stream or a graphic file without providing a way for the blind to get at the information they CAN use. This is basic common sense, not some ridiculous idea that we should translate all sounds in the universe for the deaf or all sights in the world for the blind. Hiking stores are required to have wheelchair ramps like everywhere else -- many amputees use wheelchairs at times and artifical limbs at others, for example while summiting Mount Everest.
As for your exteme survival-of-the-fittest ideas, I think you may have missed the last few hundred years of human history. We're not a hunter/gatherer society anymore, and someone with disabilities is no more inherently a burden on society than a healthy person. Being almost entirely immobile hasn't stopped Stephen Hawking from making more money and contributions to society than most of us will.
Yes, a store owner having to build a wheelchair ramp may feel like he is personally bearing the weight of other peoples' disabilities, but that's probably because he never stopped to think whether or not his store would exist without that weak, useless cripple FDR leading his country for four terms out of the Great Depression and the largest war the world has ever seen. And of course all the veterans who came back from that war missing limbs or sight should all be getting on their knees to thank the generous people who so kindly allow them to continue to live. After all, a couple hundred years ago they would have died on the battlefield due to infections, so they should be grateful at the charity we've given them and stop talking sass to the store owners whose greatest contribution to the country's security is stocking flags on Memorial Day.
Whenever money gets involved, there are a lot of very silly people who somehow imagine they are an island unto themselves, ignoring the fact that they'd be living in a cave and eating berries if not for the contributions of all the other who came before.
*shrug*, you're entitled to your extreme libertarian opinion. Most of modern civilization disagrees with you, they believe businesses benefit from some government policies that protect their private interests, and in exchange they're expected to live up to other policies that serve the public interest.
Or, to put it in your own words, No one has a right to start a store. Period. If you don't like the fact that we chose to make you follow requirements, then vote with your feet/money and start a store elsewhere. If we cut out enough business, we will either change the laws or go bankrupt and be conquered. This applies to ANY limit place on who may open a store. If we are stupid enough to limit who can start a store, then we have to live with it. But stores have NO business coming in and telling us to change it. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but Congress does have subpeona power, which WOULD be compulsory and be a bad way to start the meeting. So usually folks go along with requests from Congress and use relationships with friendly congressmen to try and limit topics covered or questions away from the more embarrassing stuff.
Nothing protects you against lawuits. Someone can sue you because the sky is green and they think you are sending radio waves through their cat.
I find it hard to believe the geek cred of this reviewer when he repeatedly refers to "Spider-Man" as "Spiderman". Lonely virgins everywhere know that it is hyphenated!
[/comic book guy]
Please tell me how mutilating another human being (or yourself) or performing gross acts on one another is normal in any way?
Well, most boys in the US in the past few hundred years have had several inches of skin cut off their penis shortly after birth. Most girls have gone to completely normal stores where they pay to have needles shoved through their ears to create a permanent hole from which to hang ornamentation. In recent years, it's become pretty common to have even more holes created in other parts of the body, the belly button being a common site, and also frequently multiple holes around the ear. It's also quite common to pay people to jam a needle under your skin to leave little drops of colored ink suspended there for decades after.
Pretty much every human society has mutilation and scarification of some form as completely normal and accepted practices.
Of course, the personal ad we're talking about said nothing about any mutilation or scarification, so I'm not sure why you wanted such examples of how normal and accepted it is.
I really don't know how much more simply anyone can say the words "if you serve text, then it will be accessible." It might not be optimal, but it is not your responsibility to personally fix bugs in screen readers if they can't handle simple text that validates according to accepted standards.
You just like to make it sound incredibly complex and onerous because then you can feel justified in doing nothing or blaming the guv'mint for imposing such terrible burdens on you. Serve plain text. Have links built with anchor tags instead of some crazy flash/javascript monster. You are done. Stop bitching about Jaws, it is not magic. Use any of the other 800 free methods of validation and if they check out, you are done. Really, no trick! There is no secret accessibility code that is only revealed to people buying expensive programs!
You also haven't addressed my original point, which is that the probability of a visually-impaired person wanting to buy visual art is about zero, making all of this an exercise in futility.
Because it's easier to make a law that applies to everyone equally than to allow people to unilaterally declare that they should be exempt based on nothing other than their intuition that a disabled person has no interest in the goods they sell. Someone else kept insisting hiking stores have no need to admit people with wheelchairs, and of course many amputees use wheelchairs and artifical limbs at different times, including shopping in a wheelchair but mountain climbing with $50,000 carbon fiber legs.
but the guy who reveals them should never be hired again, because.... ???? because his moral views are ignorant? Does that have anything to do with job performance?
Because he's shown a willingness to post online highly embarassing information given to him in confidence, so long as he finds it personally entertaining to do so, and no matter the cost to the other party. That's not the kind of discretion most companies are looking for in network and system administrators who often have complete access to confidential and private data. That usually includes access to personal email and data on the systems belonging to higher-ups, who get to make their own rules about what is allowed on company systems. He just announed to the internet that he isn't trustworthy.
I'm torn, is this informative or funny?
Oh please. SM consists of purposely inflicting pain on other people.
Consensually. They weren't sending messages to random email addresses, they were responding to a message that specifically requested dominant and sadistic men because that's what the "girl" liked.
The people responding (the sadists) are apparently quite willing to inflict pain on other weaker people. Apparently they don't find it so fun when the tables are turned.
Why do you assume a submissive or masochist is weaker? Just because you enjoy being spanked doesn't mean you're weak, it just means you enjoy being spanked. Plenty of big strong men with successful careers let women half their size to tie them up and spank them and call them names. That's what they both like.
How were the tables turned? These men didn't consent to being treated this way. They weren't humiliating anyone else in public or sharing the personal information of other people in public.
People who get pleasure from hurting others ARE a "freak" or a "sick weirdo". It's not something that should be tolerated and it's rather sick that respondants are so willing to accept it as a normal fetish. It's not.
I have a feeling you'd be very frightened to find out just how common those freakish and weird things are, my sheltered anonymous coward. Most married couples have played with some form of bondage (neckties to the bedpost, etc), sadism/masochism (spanking, biting, pinching), domination and submission (student/teacher roleplaying), or humiliation ("call me dirty names, tell me what a bad boy I am"). The Kinsey Report and subsequent studies have shown middle america is far more adventurous in the bedroom than we show publicly. As long as both people enjoy it and are adults, what does it matter?
I mean, I don't get off on sucking toes or having girls piss on me and call me names, but if that's what keeps a couple happily in love for 50 years who the hell are you or I to say they're wrong?
As for the copyright violations - that is a tough one. The copyright to an email and a jpeg rests with the author. However this was published and in such a fashion that it might actually be public domain. In the USA one must register the copyright prior to publishing and if this is not done the copyright becomes imperfect and as such enters limbo. (IANAL but I have researched this).
The US hasn't required registration for Copyright since 1976 (though it has advantages in damages awarded). And there is no such thing as "releasing it in such a fashion that it might be public domain" -- authors have to make any transfer of rights and ownership explicitly, there is no such thing as implicit transfer of copyright under current US or international law (most major countries are signatories of the Berne Convention).
Actually, it's called ignorance. We here on slashdot may all be internet-savvy enough to know the full implications of putting anything in electronic format, but the majority of people out there using computers really do take for granted that email is somewhat private. It just wouldn't occur to most people that some sociopath on the other end who they've never harmed is deliberately baiting them solely to fuck up their lives for no other reason than it amuses him momentarily.
I'm sure a lot of people will be more careful now that they've heard this story, but these guys will wind up paying a pretty high price for their lack of imagination in how widely and quickly things like this can be spread all over.
It's kind of obvious that his whole resume etc. is a joke.
:)
Thanks for the heads up, you can tell I really didn't care enough about this jackhole to read past the first line.
I had a measure of sympathy for him before I delved into his blog because I figured it was the sort of thing that any number of people could do and not fully realise the legal implications of their actions.
Yeah, when I first heard about this a couple days ago, I thought it was a case of some guy pulling a prank and just not thinking it through, basically being just as ignorant and foolish and impetuous as the ones who responded.
But damn, I read his followup comments and realized the guy knew exactly what he was doing the whole time, he just doesn't give a shit about ruining other people's lives for a moment of amusement. Legal consequences or not, I hate to say at this point he pretty much deserves whatever vengeance he brought upon himself. He could have easily defused it all much sooner than this but he's so intent on being the class clown and impressing his LiveJournal friends that I wonder if he can really comprehend not everybody is content to strike back with snarky comments on LJ.
LOL, BAG. You had me at hello.
Personally, I wonder why the're doing things that they're emberrased by to begin with. Seems like it might be useful to seek phsychiatric help such that they can either accept themselves for what they are, or change to reflect what they want to be. It can't be fun living a life where you're perpetually ashamed of yourself.
Then again, perhaps they are perfectly comfortable and confident of themselves, but recognize that most of society disagrees with their ideas of what is proper sexual behavior for consenting adults.
It's one thing to be completely open about unusual sexual practices with friends and family, quite another to have them available on Google for future employers to misinterpret when they don't know what you are really like, and they have a mistaken stereotype of what someone with your interests will be like personally and professionally.
In the US, we consider anything other than man on top, woman on bottom, face to face, under the covers, in bed, after marriage, with the lights out sex to be quite dirty.
Certainly having google-able records of anything slightly non-mainstream could affect these guys' careers quite a bit, even though most of them are apparently single and responding to a consenting adult, you don't want to hire a "freak" or some "sick weirdo" after all.
WTF? This guy spent six months taking a class on MySpace and put it in his resume? That's like saying you took off a year after high school to learn your multiplication tables.
I never suggested images were not the focus on some sites, only that the web itself is not an inherently visual medium as the earlier poster claimed. That image (and video and audio) support was added later does not make the web an inherently visual medium, though a particular web site may certainly sell inherently visual products. I'm a professional artist myself, so I certainly understand that product, and building sites solely around presenting images.
So it isn't REAL racism unless someone is getting sprayed with a fire hose or being sent to the back of the bus? I agree your friend's problem is more serious, but that doesn't make inaccessible stores any less discriminatory. It is possible to address more than one act of discrimination at a time in a country our size.
Where has anyone suggested that? All the complainants are saying is that information about the physical Target stores should be available to people with disabilities. I'm pretty sure any Mac browser can render a page with three lines of unstyled text giving the address and phone number of the store.
Ignoring the fact that this case has essentially nothing to do with your wife's web site unless she runs a physical store as well, why isn't it possible to test yourself? You made a web site and it works, making it accessible is no more difficult. Go to the W3C and follow their guidelines. Cost is $0, they have dozens of free tools in multiple languages for evaluating accessibility and lists of issues to look out. If the essential information is available in Lynx, you're peachy, though going beyond the minimum will result in a more compatible site overall that is easier to update.
Considering this only deals with information about physical stores on the website, yeah, I think it's a great idea. Adding three lines of text to your website is far less onerous than building wheelchair ramps and wider doorways, and stores deal with those requirements.
If a company has money to fix an inaccessible site and refuses to when someone disabled complains, then yes, someone could sue, just as they could sue a bus company for refusing to admit a guide dog after ignoring complaints. I'm sure the bus company thinks its a stupid rule, and a waste of money, and it will annoy the other passengers to have a dog on the bus. I'm sure they think any lawyer who sues them over it is unscrupulous and just looking for free money.
this is a fiction that has been created by the people who support these kind of laws to justify destroying small business
Considering the laws themselves say businesses under a certain size are exempt, I don't know how it can be a fiction. What motivation would people have for wanting to "destroy small business, anyways?
a company that had only 10 employees, that had to make hundreds of thousands of dollars of building changes to make the business handicap compliant, and it wasn't even a place of "public accommodation" like a store or hotel or such. It was a tiny office and warehouse. No exemptions for small business, no way, no how... total fantasy.
If the building was from before 1993, they only had to make changes that were affordable and practical for their financial resources, and they were eligible for tax credits for the cost of what they did (not just deductions -- CREDITS, as in 100% of the money you paid you just subtract from your taxes owed). And they only had to do that if they were a public accomodation.
If they built a building after 1993 and didn't comply with the law when they built it, well, then they or their architects or their constructions guys deserved the financial hit just the same as if they built something without following the fire codes or local zoning regulations.
The Small Business Administration has a helpful guide up here. If your old company couldn't afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in improvements, then someone suckered them, because nothing in the law requires that.
Most of these laws are pushed by trail lawyers, who especially love to sue small businesses, because they are the ones who have the least legal resources to fight a lawsuit... or to seek exemptions in the first place.
If your business is so poor it can't afford to put in wheelchair ramps, then it's too poor to be a target for a lawyer. Lawyers don't sue for fun, they sue for profit.
That's insane. It seems like the analysts are really just complaining Apple sold too many iPods for Chrsitmas 2005, that spike is so huge of course the next quarter will look smaller, even though it's bigger than every other quarter in history but the massive holiday one.
I know about 12 people with bad credit. Not a one of them is that way for "good reasons" like medical. They're that way because they went out and bought new computers and other toys, got crappy jobs when they could have done better, and just let the payments slide because they were too busy bitching about the man keeping them down.
No offense, but it sounds like you hang out with a lot of real losers.
About half of all personal bankruptcies in the US are caused by unexpected medical expenses, and another quarter are caused by sudden but prolonged unemployment (ie, longer than the few months most people should have saved to cover themselves).
The things checking a credit history will show is whether somebody was hit by a car or laid off when their job in a small field was outsourced. Neither one is a particularly good reason to deny them a job.
No, I definately don't want to be paying everyone's healthcare costs with my taxes.
You already are. Who do you think pays for all those uninsured emergency room visits? The health care fairy?
Nothing stopping everyone from paying for health insurance
Sure there is -- there's no reason for insurance companies to cover the poor or people with chronic conditions. They aren't profitable. If you think a family living off minimum wage can afford $1200/month in insurance, you need to put down the libertarian kool-aid and join the real world.
Then don't spend money that you can't pay back. Why do people without a job have credit when there isn't a way for them to pay it back?
Half of consumer bankrupties are caused by medical debt. Being hit by a car and taken unconscious in an ambulance to a hospital and waking up to find yourself $250,000 in debt is hardly a choice, or indicative of financial management problems or bad priorities.
Your points are all perfectly valid and perfectly senseless and extreme. Nobody is suggesting everyone should be able to do everything and we should create a Harrison Bergeron style system of weights for the strong.
But you should certainly not lock up important text data in or behind a video stream or a graphic file without providing a way for the blind to get at the information they CAN use. This is basic common sense, not some ridiculous idea that we should translate all sounds in the universe for the deaf or all sights in the world for the blind. Hiking stores are required to have wheelchair ramps like everywhere else -- many amputees use wheelchairs at times and artifical limbs at others, for example while summiting Mount Everest.
As for your exteme survival-of-the-fittest ideas, I think you may have missed the last few hundred years of human history. We're not a hunter/gatherer society anymore, and someone with disabilities is no more inherently a burden on society than a healthy person. Being almost entirely immobile hasn't stopped Stephen Hawking from making more money and contributions to society than most of us will.
Yes, a store owner having to build a wheelchair ramp may feel like he is personally bearing the weight of other peoples' disabilities, but that's probably because he never stopped to think whether or not his store would exist without that weak, useless cripple FDR leading his country for four terms out of the Great Depression and the largest war the world has ever seen. And of course all the veterans who came back from that war missing limbs or sight should all be getting on their knees to thank the generous people who so kindly allow them to continue to live. After all, a couple hundred years ago they would have died on the battlefield due to infections, so they should be grateful at the charity we've given them and stop talking sass to the store owners whose greatest contribution to the country's security is stocking flags on Memorial Day.
Whenever money gets involved, there are a lot of very silly people who somehow imagine they are an island unto themselves, ignoring the fact that they'd be living in a cave and eating berries if not for the contributions of all the other who came before.
*shrug*, you're entitled to your extreme libertarian opinion. Most of modern civilization disagrees with you, they believe businesses benefit from some government policies that protect their private interests, and in exchange they're expected to live up to other policies that serve the public interest.
Or, to put it in your own words, No one has a right to start a store. Period. If you don't like the fact that we chose to make you follow requirements, then vote with your feet/money and start a store elsewhere. If we cut out enough business, we will either change the laws or go bankrupt and be conquered. This applies to ANY limit place on who may open a store. If we are stupid enough to limit who can start a store, then we have to live with it. But stores have NO business coming in and telling us to change it. Period.
And that text is displayed on pages. Pages are meant to be viewed.
Pages can be read aloud by screen readers and braille systems, and those solutions work just fine if you build a web page properly.