The average middle class household pays 50% of their gross income and benefit burden to governments in various forms of taxation. 50%. Half your year you work for others. This is not a "free society" any more.
Only if you're a short-sighted libertarian with delusions of being the one man who is, in fact, an island unto himself.
The rest of us out here do pay a great deal in taxes, but that money isn't loaded into a rocket and fired into the sun. It's spent on police officers, environmental cleanup, road construction, hospital expenses, etc, etc, etc. If you don't benefit in any way from anything the government does, well, congratulations, but for the other 99.9999999999% of the American public, we actually are provided with goods and services based on those tax payments.
It may not be our exact personal prefererred balance of a particular good or service, but that's what happens when 300 million people have to compromise on the best way to pool resources for economies of scale. It's still a lot cheaper for $100 of my taxes to be wasted on some pork-barrel project than it would be for me to pave my own road so I could get to the store.
You offer a wonderful vision of the future that has no basis in human behavior or reality. Yes, with the federal and state governments exercising strong oversight, it is completely reasonable to have municipalities in the US essentially run by companies (of course they are not even a shadow of true comapny towns, where your pay was in scrip that was only redeemable by comapny stores, etc -- they are just private municipalities, no different than any other private municipality, of which there are tens of thousands throughout the USA).
Take a trip outside the USA sometime and see how well company towns treat their citizens when there is no strong government oversight. Even american companies -- those most vulnerable to bad press -- still treat unskilled employees as virtual slave labor once they leave the regulatory boundaries of the US Government.
The idea that the internet and communication have changed the desire to generate profit or have a captive customer base is ridiculous. As long as every company does it, there's no alternative provider, and thus bad PR will accomplish nothing. In Libertarian fantasy-land, of course anyone can start a new megacoporation to compete if they like, but here in the real world there are very few of us who have millions of dollars and decades of our lives to dedicate to eradicating a single injustice. It's a lot easier to simply consolidate our efforts, pool our money and hire some people to require standards we all find acceptable (we could even call it a "congress" of sorts!). Trusting the hand of Adam Smith to reach in and correct a problem decades after the victims have already been buried is not a solution.
The free market is wonderful in the long run, but in the short run it has a bad habit of chewing up the bones of human beings in a rather vicious fashion. Anyone who believes otherwise has never seen what unregulated industry is capable of (or alternately, a refugee having a reactionary response to TOTAL government control, which is why Ayn Rand can be forgiven her paranoia).
You have been raised in a late 20th century world in which you simply take for granted that corporations have certain limitations, but the merest browsing of a history book will show that every one of the things you claim corporations don't have are, in fact, things that corporations did have prior to public outcry and government crackdowns.
Start with a google search for "company town" and then feel free to read backwards through European history and the international corporations that weilded far more military and police power than any nation-state of the time.
Yeah, because everyone knows there is no legitimate interest about computer security in academia. You should probably send a message to the Regents of the University of California at Bekley -- I hear some of their people have been wasting time on computer stuff over there, too! A blatant waste...
Trust me, at the time of the comparisons, that was a very apt example of the boneheadedness of OS9. The more common example would be when everything on the mac would STOP completely becuase you were holding down the mouse button. Before OSX, the Mac OS had really grown long in the tooth (remember it was supposed to have been replaced years earlier) and I hated working on it because of the pathetic task-switching behavior (I work in graphics, publishing and prepress so switched daily depending on whether I was working with a corporate or creative customer).
Of course, now I use a Dual G5 as my main desktop and will be first in line to buy an intel iBook -- OSX is a better multitasker and more technically capable than Windows by far. Apple always had elegance, but when OS9 couldn't handle a simple task like formatting a floppy without making you take a coffee break, it was definitely not first choice for heavy production use.
There's even a little bit of stupidity still left around, though it could just be the ass-tastic Finder more than anything else. Try moving big files out of a directory, then deleting another file from that directory. As long as the move operation is still in progress, no files in that directory can be moved/deleted, they're marked as "in use". Whaa? Talk about a pain in the ass when I finally get off my duff and try to organize my work folders...
I never said $40K a year was the threshold for poor.
You implied that after taxes it was at least close: If you're making 40K/yr, you're hardly poor.Until the taxes are paid. $40K gross = $22K net after all taxes. Then rent and food takes the rest.
I think people making less than $40K a year should pay NO taxes.
So how do you reconcile that with supporting a VAT? People making under 40k obviously have to buy things, do we have them save receipts and get an annual refund? And by "making under $40k", we still have to have all the current rules and regulations about what is and isn't income. Somebody who gets all their money from interest income certainly doesn't need a tax break we intend to help out those who are barely scraping by.
Sales taxes are regressive, there really is no evidence otherwise -- now you can certainly argue against progressive taxes, but sales taxes and income taxes are not theoretical. We really do know how hard they hit people of different incomes/net worths. I agree that we should be encouraging people to save (the negative saving rate right now has me very concerned about the long-term health and economic/politcal influence of our country), but implementing regressive tax systems as a way to help poor people have more money to save is just more trickle-down/voodoo economics.
By taxing the interest earned from savings, the government is discouraging people from saving money.
The fundamental point you are missing is that these people don't have money to save -- it isn't about incentives or disincentives. That you consider 40k a year to be remotely near the threshold for "poor" clearly shows you have no concept of how poor people in this country really live. I was an "overtaxed" 25 year old single male making 40k/year and living in expensive cities, I lived the life of Riley while also putting money into my retirement fund and travelling the world. I can't comprehend how anyone would claim I was poor or overtaxed. I now make literally half what I used to, and still manage to pay the bills, though not always on time, and I don't get many creature comforts. I'm still not poor, but that's because I don't have kids or ayone else to support.
Someone making minimum wage (ie, less than 15k a year BEFORE taxes) is not sitting around comparing the annualized rate of return on savings account vs an IRA, 401k, or real estate. They don't have any money to do those things anyways -- you could offer free blowjobs and strippers with every savings account and the working poor in this country (ie, the very common blue collar couple making 35k combined while raising 2 kids) still wouldn't be able to scrape together more than a few dollars. The notion that they're holding back because they're worried about losing 10% of the 5% in interest they'd make over the year in a savings account is ludicrous. The only ones worried about losing tax on interest are guys who can actually see significant interest gains on things other than retirement accounts.
It's hard to say how (if at all) iTunes is different from/similar to amaroK -- like most Apple software and hardware, the screenshots look pretty but the Apple appeal really isn't about cosmetics, it's about making things work elegantly. You can drag things from one place to another and they do what you'd expect. What was key to iTunes is that it was the first major audio player to treat music as a database, but ALSO make that database totally usable by the average person who has no clue what a database is. Tell it to play all the blues songs from the 60s that you like better than average, and it will do it. When you add music in the future, it automatically updates your ipod and your playlists. It just works (though it does require good ID3 tags on music to do all the magic, which was quite a pain for those of us raised on WinAmp.m3u style playlists and manual file organization, but worth the editing).
I suspect most other audio players have adopted this mechanic nowadays, but when iTunes started getting popular, it really was the only one that did it and wasn't totally geeky in operation (like Musicmatch, etc). I remember when I gave up my Rio for an iPod and was annoyed at not being able to just drag music onto it. Now I consider dragging music files around positively cro-magnon -- iTunes has all my music, I've told it what I like and how I want it. I just turn it on and it takes care of all the mechanics, whether I'm listening through my home stereo over the network or refreshing my iPod.
Juries in criminal trials in the US find the defendant guilty or not guilty. They can base that on fact, law, or the flip of a coin if they like. The Judge is there to instruct them in matters of law, and in many cases (such as deciding which evidence is shown to the jury) his findings of law can't be gotten around, but the idea that juries merely decide matters of fact is not true at all. They decide whatever they want, however they want, though the judge has the ability to throw out any jury findings of guilt that aren't supported as a matter of law.
what if I like making compilation CDs and a song ends up on several of them? That's something I happen to like to do and I know that there a few songs that have ended up on more than a few compilations.
You don't seem to understand how iTunes DRM works. You can burn a particular song onto an infinite number of CDs, there's no limit there. The only thing limited is how many times a particular playlist can be burned. but you can have a track in all the different playlists you desire.
We're not talking about unlimited phone data plans, we're talking about dedicated PCMCIA cellular modems. Unlimited for them is obviously about plugging into a computer and running normal web/data over the connection, not viewing things on a 320x240 screen.
Verizon Wireless, for example, sells a product targetted to consumers call BroadbandAccess, that is $79.95/month for unlimited 700-800kbps data. It is actually intended as an alternative to Cable and DSL for normal computer usage -- the wireless Router products that Pogue is reviewing are based around these PC Cards and sharing their access over a WLAN, not some sort of frankenstein's monster of hooking your cell phone up to a box and using it as a modem.
Most of the providers here in the US have unlimited data plans available, for $50-100. But yeah, the per-byte plans are outrageous and can wind up being $50 for a few megabytes -- clearly they'd like everyone to buy an unlimited plan right up front.
If people start making open hotspots, I suspect they'll find the cell providers cutting them off or otherwise changing the deal (which of course no cell CUSTOMER could ever do without paying an outrageous cancellation fee, isn't "capitalism" great when only one side is allowed to negotiate?).
And someone who has physical access to the old paper systems can't make votes disappear almost as easily?
I dunno, how exactly would you make 65,000 pieces of paper disappear without anyone noticing? I think you could probably hide a few in your pockets, but what about the next few thousand pounds of votes? You certainly couldn't do it in a few seconds or without a lot of accomplices.
I appreciate you trying to put things in perspective -- but the entire point of electronic voting is that it was supposed to be MORE secure and MORE fraud-resistant than paper. What we have right now is, if anything, the worst of both worlds -- just as tamper-able as old voting machines, with the added bonus of being able to magically change thousands or millions of votes with no more skill than it takes to do a basic card trick.
When an entire city's electorate is represented on a chip the size of a postage stamp, the requirements for physical secrity are much greater than they ever were for what was literally truckloads of paper. And the requirements for auditing and athenticity verification are that much higher.
Device support? in 2006? Maybe in 1996 that would have made sense, but now everything the average consumer buys for a computer is a USB device that just plugs in and works. Back when you had to buy SCSI or ADB devices it could be quite a challenge, and when Windows hardware still hung on to the parallel/serial ports, but I can't think of a single consumer device available today that won't work with a Mac (that isn't software dependant -- like WMP music players, and even then they'll show up as generic storage and still play your MP3 files most of the time).
This pharase "Seperation of church and state" is a bogus idea. It came from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend while he was in France. Jefferson never had anything to do with the US constitution.
Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which is not only the direct model for the religious clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution, it is the prototype of all modern religious liberty guarantees -- the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the constitutions of countless other nations, etc. Jefferson is the single most important thinker and writer in the past 500 years on the topic of religion and government. The phrase "separation of church and state" is the phrase he used to describe the essence of his policy, and it is the phrase we continue to use to describe that same policy.
It only prohibits the Federal Government from abridging the freedom of speech. Local state authorites are not Congress. It only prohibits Congress
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868. You really need to pick up a few books on the Constitution and US history, your understanding of both is lacking, and it affects your understanding of your right as a citizen and human being.
Thanks, the consequence of you posting this is that I'm copying it to paste in the future when others bring up this same old canard. I got sick of constantly typing out why it is a non-sequiter to the question of free speech.
Yeah, and remember when they criminalized drugs, and everybody stopped using them and there was no more money to be made in the field?
Heck, now that I think about it, Slashdot should be leading the charge for criminalization of this stuff, it would guarantee us all a healthy income for decades!
I'm saying the only reason FOR THE GOVERNMENT to get involved in marriage is to promote healthy raising of children.
Why would the government support an institution for the purpose of achieving something governments weren't involved in until fairly recently? It's not like governments provided education or health care for children before the last 150 years. As long as they got taxes and soldiers, governments didn't give a damn if you had 20 illegitimate kids or a handful of lovingly raised angels. Governments were completely uninvolved in the lives of children for over a thousand years in which they recognized religious unions for civil purposes.
What were those civil purposes? Property rights, by and large. Marriage for romantic love wasn't common until very recently (from a historical perspective). Marriages were arranged for commercial, legal, religious and political reasons.
You talk about next of kin laws but seemingly don't understand what marriage has to do with them. We don't get to choose our family when we're born. The only family member we get to select, in our entire life, is the one person to whom we can be married, whether in the eyes of God, the state, or both. That's not a trivial thing from a legal standpoint. All that homosexuals want is the ability to choose that one legal family member and have that person recognized as their next of kin for legal purposes. The next of kin, from a legal standpoint, has the ability to successfully challenge virtually any legal document that gives preference to another.
There is no shortage of legal cases in which wills and other documents have been overturned because they were "unfair" to the next of kin. Now you no doubt agree with me that it's unfair a person's wishes are being ignored in such cases, but the conundrum remains that an adult homosexual has no reliable legal recourse to seeing that his property and other legal rights be distributed as he chooses.
Heterosexuals simply get married, and the problem is solved -- the spouse is the default decision maker and inheritor of everything. Homosexuals have no way to accomplish the same legal choice -- with disastrous results for both property rights (see the man who was recently evicted from his home and is being sued for 30 years' back rent by his deceased partners' biological family who didn't approve of their lifelong monogamous homosexual relationship) and the supposedly important child raising (so what if a child has been raised for over ten years by two loving parents -- if the biological or adoptive parent dies, the child will be shipped off to some stranger because the surviving parent has no legal standing in most states).
Now we see why it's such a bad idea to try and get the government to recognize religious things. It isn't just about protecting people from other religions, it's also about protecting religions from changes in government. There's no legal reason to keep civil marriages same-sex only, though there are certainly many religious ones for keeping church marriages as such. Unfortunately we use the same word to describe both a civil and a religious act, so the religious will just have to live with the inevitable legal change.
I don't remember Bush ever saying that the war would be a few months long,
Bush didn't -- Cheney and Rumsfeld both did. It was quite beautiful, really -- Bush could state for the record that it will be a difficult war and that we shouldn't underestimate the enemy, while his administration officials could go on TV and before Congress and say *wink wink nudge nudge* "It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.", "I think it will go relatively quickly,...weeks rather than months."
or that we would pay for it with Iraqi oil exports
The reconstruction of Iraq was going to pay for itself. The American taxpayer was not going to have to foot the bill, that's what Congress was told when asked for the paltry few billions to start the war.
Major combat operations did end after a few weeks, maybe that's what you mean, but everybody knew the rebuilding process would be long and hard.
"Major combat operations" may have ended, but soldiers are dying more frequently now than they were before, so such semantic sleight-of-hand may be good for public relations, but from a practical military perspective it doesn't mean a hell of a lot. We knew the rebuilding process would take time, but the American Taxpayer wasn't supposed to be footing the bill.
He never intended to take oil from Iraq, that's silly, maybe you should check your facts.
Maybe you should check your reading comprehension. I never said we'd take oil from Iraq. Iraq's oil exports were to be paying for the costs of reconstruction, and of course with the sudden end of all foreign oil contracts, American oil companies would have a prime spot at the negotiating table when the new ones were written. Unfortunately, it took us over a year to even get much oil coming out of the country due to sabotage, and last time I checked the exports were still lower than before the first Gulf War (ie, not up to our prewar expectations). The plan/intention had been for oil to be coming out quite literally weeks after the end of "major combat operations", unfortunately the minor combat operations turned out to be more distracting than intended.
Furthermore, you're completely short sighted, to you this war is already over and we've lost. That's ridiculous.
Congratulations on your mind reading ability, and your keen straw-man demolishing. I neither think the war is over nor that we've lost, but if it makes you feel more comfortable to stay ill-informed by writing off anyone who disagrees as a hippie peacenik commie defeatist, feel free.
Take a step back and think out your own arguments. You really WANT to believe that our leadership is as intelligent as a bunch of primates with big sticks, going and taking whatever they want. You've been compromised, buddy. You're the fool.
I've been "compromised" because...why again? You threw out a bunch of mind-reading exercises and disagreed with them? I believe our current leadership is quite intelligent, they got done what they wanted to, didn't they?
"You know why we went into Iraq right? OIL!" and so I politely responded "See, I just don't see what we have to gain by overtaking Iraq, in terms of oil." to which he responded "That's right, we don't! It's not worth it!". He made my point quite cleary
You've conflated two completely separate concepts and somehow imagine you've had a "point" made.
The motivation for an act says nothing about the actual (or even just perceived) results. We can invade Iraq for oil, and wind up even worse off than before. That the result of our actions didn't match our desires doesn't retroactively change our motivation. That your professor doesn't believe it was "worth it" has no bearing on the motivation either, it's a statement of his opinion on the cost/benefit analysis.
I don't know where you were in 2002, but the war WE were all sold was to be a few months long, we were to be greeted as liberators, and within a year Iraq's oil sales would pay us back every penny for the cost. Either they were lying or they were just as absolutely wrong as any human can be about something. Neither speaks highly of their capabilities for leadership, but their complete failure/deception is the reason we've seen little benefit. Had they accomplished what they intended/sold, we would have seen many clear benefits, both in increased oil production/market availability and greater political influence at zero direct financial cost, as it would all be subsidized by another country's oil sales. We also would have seen American oil companies take production share from European competitors, potentially leading to economic benefits for America in general, but definitely leading to benefits for the major campaign contributors and dinner party guests of our current administration.
I hope for your sake that if you intend to remain a neo-con, you find much better mentors than any of the current influential neo-cons. They seem to be so lost in the theory of what they're doing, they never bother to open the door and see what the real world is like. Tragic that they've fallen victim to the same major failure they once condemned liberal "ivory tower intellectuals" for.
There's no real shortage there, either. It's artificial
The shortage of parents is artificial? In what way? I don't see any government stopping lots of loving heterosexual couples from adopting.
True, you can wait for years and years to adopt, but that's only if you want a cute white baby. if you're willing to take a black other minority, especially one that is older than an infant, you can take your pick -- hundreds of millions of THOSE are available around the world.
I should have warned you that I'm an anarcho-capitalist libertarian that can argue every single problem in the world was either caused by government or made much worse by it.
I should have warned you that I'm a rational human being that can look at every single problem and examine it before deciding what causes it or makes it worse.
Depends totally on your definition of "normal". It's completely natural and happens in many many species. It's not as common as the alternative, but then again neither is being Greek (after all, 98%+ of the world's parents aren't Greek, but they seem to raise children okay despite being in a tiny minority).
When same-sex "couples" figure out how to make children, I'll leave them and their misfit children alone
There's no shortage of children on Earth -- the only shortage is of loving parents willing to care for them and raise them. Granted, we could provide free abortions to everyone in order to solve that problem, but I suspect many people would have a problem with that alternative. Orphanages haven't figured out how to give birth either, but you don't seem to mind letting them raise a lot of kids.
Before you get too excited about low ages of consent -- you can STILL be charged with "corruption of a minor," "exposure to a minor" and similar crimes for having relations with someone under 18. If the parents, cops, DA or whoever wants to get you, they CAN get you and put you on a sex offender list for the rest of your life.
And those ethicists can (and do) engage in discussions of how to deal with the implications of such research and the ensuing technologies and changes. Theology prevents all discussion, since it simply says "Nope, goes against God, end of story." I would be thrilled to have a president engaged in the ethical debates surrounding these issues and providing leadership on how we can solve the dilemmas presented.
So no, I don't think only "out there loonies" oppose this research, however I do think only simpleminded people who don't examine the issues think it is as easily solvable as the president's policies would indicate. He cares not one whit about the ethical implications of all the other genetic playing that is going on under the auspices of giant food companies -- sure, it isn't about human embryos, but the possibility of dire consequences for humanity are just as great.
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The average middle class household pays 50% of their gross income and benefit burden to governments in various forms of taxation. 50%. Half your year you work for others. This is not a "free society" any more.
Only if you're a short-sighted libertarian with delusions of being the one man who is, in fact, an island unto himself.
The rest of us out here do pay a great deal in taxes, but that money isn't loaded into a rocket and fired into the sun. It's spent on police officers, environmental cleanup, road construction, hospital expenses, etc, etc, etc. If you don't benefit in any way from anything the government does, well, congratulations, but for the other 99.9999999999% of the American public, we actually are provided with goods and services based on those tax payments.
It may not be our exact personal prefererred balance of a particular good or service, but that's what happens when 300 million people have to compromise on the best way to pool resources for economies of scale. It's still a lot cheaper for $100 of my taxes to be wasted on some pork-barrel project than it would be for me to pave my own road so I could get to the store.
You offer a wonderful vision of the future that has no basis in human behavior or reality. Yes, with the federal and state governments exercising strong oversight, it is completely reasonable to have municipalities in the US essentially run by companies (of course they are not even a shadow of true comapny towns, where your pay was in scrip that was only redeemable by comapny stores, etc -- they are just private municipalities, no different than any other private municipality, of which there are tens of thousands throughout the USA).
Take a trip outside the USA sometime and see how well company towns treat their citizens when there is no strong government oversight. Even american companies -- those most vulnerable to bad press -- still treat unskilled employees as virtual slave labor once they leave the regulatory boundaries of the US Government.
The idea that the internet and communication have changed the desire to generate profit or have a captive customer base is ridiculous. As long as every company does it, there's no alternative provider, and thus bad PR will accomplish nothing. In Libertarian fantasy-land, of course anyone can start a new megacoporation to compete if they like, but here in the real world there are very few of us who have millions of dollars and decades of our lives to dedicate to eradicating a single injustice. It's a lot easier to simply consolidate our efforts, pool our money and hire some people to require standards we all find acceptable (we could even call it a "congress" of sorts!). Trusting the hand of Adam Smith to reach in and correct a problem decades after the victims have already been buried is not a solution.
The free market is wonderful in the long run, but in the short run it has a bad habit of chewing up the bones of human beings in a rather vicious fashion. Anyone who believes otherwise has never seen what unregulated industry is capable of (or alternately, a refugee having a reactionary response to TOTAL government control, which is why Ayn Rand can be forgiven her paranoia).
You have been raised in a late 20th century world in which you simply take for granted that corporations have certain limitations, but the merest browsing of a history book will show that every one of the things you claim corporations don't have are, in fact, things that corporations did have prior to public outcry and government crackdowns.
Start with a google search for "company town" and then feel free to read backwards through European history and the international corporations that weilded far more military and police power than any nation-state of the time.
they were often plagued by people using them for pr0n or other illigitmate content.
I'll have you know my pr0n is VERY legitimate, thank you very much!
Yeah, because everyone knows there is no legitimate interest about computer security in academia. You should probably send a message to the Regents of the University of California at Bekley -- I hear some of their people have been wasting time on computer stuff over there, too! A blatant waste...
Trust me, at the time of the comparisons, that was a very apt example of the boneheadedness of OS9. The more common example would be when everything on the mac would STOP completely becuase you were holding down the mouse button. Before OSX, the Mac OS had really grown long in the tooth (remember it was supposed to have been replaced years earlier) and I hated working on it because of the pathetic task-switching behavior (I work in graphics, publishing and prepress so switched daily depending on whether I was working with a corporate or creative customer).
Of course, now I use a Dual G5 as my main desktop and will be first in line to buy an intel iBook -- OSX is a better multitasker and more technically capable than Windows by far. Apple always had elegance, but when OS9 couldn't handle a simple task like formatting a floppy without making you take a coffee break, it was definitely not first choice for heavy production use.
There's even a little bit of stupidity still left around, though it could just be the ass-tastic Finder more than anything else. Try moving big files out of a directory, then deleting another file from that directory. As long as the move operation is still in progress, no files in that directory can be moved/deleted, they're marked as "in use". Whaa? Talk about a pain in the ass when I finally get off my duff and try to organize my work folders...
I never said $40K a year was the threshold for poor.
You implied that after taxes it was at least close: If you're making 40K/yr, you're hardly poor. Until the taxes are paid. $40K gross = $22K net after all taxes. Then rent and food takes the rest.
I think people making less than $40K a year should pay NO taxes.
So how do you reconcile that with supporting a VAT? People making under 40k obviously have to buy things, do we have them save receipts and get an annual refund? And by "making under $40k", we still have to have all the current rules and regulations about what is and isn't income. Somebody who gets all their money from interest income certainly doesn't need a tax break we intend to help out those who are barely scraping by.
Sales taxes are regressive, there really is no evidence otherwise -- now you can certainly argue against progressive taxes, but sales taxes and income taxes are not theoretical. We really do know how hard they hit people of different incomes/net worths. I agree that we should be encouraging people to save (the negative saving rate right now has me very concerned about the long-term health and economic/politcal influence of our country), but implementing regressive tax systems as a way to help poor people have more money to save is just more trickle-down/voodoo economics.
By taxing the interest earned from savings, the government is discouraging people from saving money.
The fundamental point you are missing is that these people don't have money to save -- it isn't about incentives or disincentives. That you consider 40k a year to be remotely near the threshold for "poor" clearly shows you have no concept of how poor people in this country really live. I was an "overtaxed" 25 year old single male making 40k/year and living in expensive cities, I lived the life of Riley while also putting money into my retirement fund and travelling the world. I can't comprehend how anyone would claim I was poor or overtaxed. I now make literally half what I used to, and still manage to pay the bills, though not always on time, and I don't get many creature comforts. I'm still not poor, but that's because I don't have kids or ayone else to support.
Someone making minimum wage (ie, less than 15k a year BEFORE taxes) is not sitting around comparing the annualized rate of return on savings account vs an IRA, 401k, or real estate. They don't have any money to do those things anyways -- you could offer free blowjobs and strippers with every savings account and the working poor in this country (ie, the very common blue collar couple making 35k combined while raising 2 kids) still wouldn't be able to scrape together more than a few dollars. The notion that they're holding back because they're worried about losing 10% of the 5% in interest they'd make over the year in a savings account is ludicrous. The only ones worried about losing tax on interest are guys who can actually see significant interest gains on things other than retirement accounts.
It's hard to say how (if at all) iTunes is different from/similar to amaroK -- like most Apple software and hardware, the screenshots look pretty but the Apple appeal really isn't about cosmetics, it's about making things work elegantly. You can drag things from one place to another and they do what you'd expect. What was key to iTunes is that it was the first major audio player to treat music as a database, but ALSO make that database totally usable by the average person who has no clue what a database is. Tell it to play all the blues songs from the 60s that you like better than average, and it will do it. When you add music in the future, it automatically updates your ipod and your playlists. It just works (though it does require good ID3 tags on music to do all the magic, which was quite a pain for those of us raised on WinAmp .m3u style playlists and manual file organization, but worth the editing).
I suspect most other audio players have adopted this mechanic nowadays, but when iTunes started getting popular, it really was the only one that did it and wasn't totally geeky in operation (like Musicmatch, etc). I remember when I gave up my Rio for an iPod and was annoyed at not being able to just drag music onto it. Now I consider dragging music files around positively cro-magnon -- iTunes has all my music, I've told it what I like and how I want it. I just turn it on and it takes care of all the mechanics, whether I'm listening through my home stereo over the network or refreshing my iPod.
Juries in criminal trials in the US find the defendant guilty or not guilty. They can base that on fact, law, or the flip of a coin if they like. The Judge is there to instruct them in matters of law, and in many cases (such as deciding which evidence is shown to the jury) his findings of law can't be gotten around, but the idea that juries merely decide matters of fact is not true at all. They decide whatever they want, however they want, though the judge has the ability to throw out any jury findings of guilt that aren't supported as a matter of law.
what if I like making compilation CDs and a song ends up on several of them? That's something I happen to like to do and I know that there a few songs that have ended up on more than a few compilations.
You don't seem to understand how iTunes DRM works. You can burn a particular song onto an infinite number of CDs, there's no limit there. The only thing limited is how many times a particular playlist can be burned. but you can have a track in all the different playlists you desire.
We're not talking about unlimited phone data plans, we're talking about dedicated PCMCIA cellular modems. Unlimited for them is obviously about plugging into a computer and running normal web/data over the connection, not viewing things on a 320x240 screen.
Verizon Wireless, for example, sells a product targetted to consumers call BroadbandAccess, that is $79.95/month for unlimited 700-800kbps data. It is actually intended as an alternative to Cable and DSL for normal computer usage -- the wireless Router products that Pogue is reviewing are based around these PC Cards and sharing their access over a WLAN, not some sort of frankenstein's monster of hooking your cell phone up to a box and using it as a modem.
Most of the providers here in the US have unlimited data plans available, for $50-100. But yeah, the per-byte plans are outrageous and can wind up being $50 for a few megabytes -- clearly they'd like everyone to buy an unlimited plan right up front.
If people start making open hotspots, I suspect they'll find the cell providers cutting them off or otherwise changing the deal (which of course no cell CUSTOMER could ever do without paying an outrageous cancellation fee, isn't "capitalism" great when only one side is allowed to negotiate?).
And someone who has physical access to the old paper systems can't make votes disappear almost as easily?
I dunno, how exactly would you make 65,000 pieces of paper disappear without anyone noticing? I think you could probably hide a few in your pockets, but what about the next few thousand pounds of votes? You certainly couldn't do it in a few seconds or without a lot of accomplices.
I appreciate you trying to put things in perspective -- but the entire point of electronic voting is that it was supposed to be MORE secure and MORE fraud-resistant than paper. What we have right now is, if anything, the worst of both worlds -- just as tamper-able as old voting machines, with the added bonus of being able to magically change thousands or millions of votes with no more skill than it takes to do a basic card trick.
When an entire city's electorate is represented on a chip the size of a postage stamp, the requirements for physical secrity are much greater than they ever were for what was literally truckloads of paper. And the requirements for auditing and athenticity verification are that much higher.
The switch will be for device support.
Device support? in 2006? Maybe in 1996 that would have made sense, but now everything the average consumer buys for a computer is a USB device that just plugs in and works. Back when you had to buy SCSI or ADB devices it could be quite a challenge, and when Windows hardware still hung on to the parallel/serial ports, but I can't think of a single consumer device available today that won't work with a Mac (that isn't software dependant -- like WMP music players, and even then they'll show up as generic storage and still play your MP3 files most of the time).
This pharase "Seperation of church and state" is a bogus idea. It came from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend while he was in France. Jefferson never had anything to do with the US constitution.
Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which is not only the direct model for the religious clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution, it is the prototype of all modern religious liberty guarantees -- the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the constitutions of countless other nations, etc. Jefferson is the single most important thinker and writer in the past 500 years on the topic of religion and government. The phrase "separation of church and state" is the phrase he used to describe the essence of his policy, and it is the phrase we continue to use to describe that same policy.
It only prohibits the Federal Government from abridging the freedom of speech. Local state authorites are not Congress. It only prohibits Congress
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868. You really need to pick up a few books on the Constitution and US history, your understanding of both is lacking, and it affects your understanding of your right as a citizen and human being.
Thanks, the consequence of you posting this is that I'm copying it to paste in the future when others bring up this same old canard. I got sick of constantly typing out why it is a non-sequiter to the question of free speech.
Yeah, and remember when they criminalized drugs, and everybody stopped using them and there was no more money to be made in the field?
Heck, now that I think about it, Slashdot should be leading the charge for criminalization of this stuff, it would guarantee us all a healthy income for decades!
I'm saying the only reason FOR THE GOVERNMENT to get involved in marriage is to promote healthy raising of children.
Why would the government support an institution for the purpose of achieving something governments weren't involved in until fairly recently? It's not like governments provided education or health care for children before the last 150 years. As long as they got taxes and soldiers, governments didn't give a damn if you had 20 illegitimate kids or a handful of lovingly raised angels. Governments were completely uninvolved in the lives of children for over a thousand years in which they recognized religious unions for civil purposes.
What were those civil purposes? Property rights, by and large. Marriage for romantic love wasn't common until very recently (from a historical perspective). Marriages were arranged for commercial, legal, religious and political reasons.
You talk about next of kin laws but seemingly don't understand what marriage has to do with them. We don't get to choose our family when we're born. The only family member we get to select, in our entire life, is the one person to whom we can be married, whether in the eyes of God, the state, or both. That's not a trivial thing from a legal standpoint. All that homosexuals want is the ability to choose that one legal family member and have that person recognized as their next of kin for legal purposes. The next of kin, from a legal standpoint, has the ability to successfully challenge virtually any legal document that gives preference to another.
There is no shortage of legal cases in which wills and other documents have been overturned because they were "unfair" to the next of kin. Now you no doubt agree with me that it's unfair a person's wishes are being ignored in such cases, but the conundrum remains that an adult homosexual has no reliable legal recourse to seeing that his property and other legal rights be distributed as he chooses.
Heterosexuals simply get married, and the problem is solved -- the spouse is the default decision maker and inheritor of everything. Homosexuals have no way to accomplish the same legal choice -- with disastrous results for both property rights (see the man who was recently evicted from his home and is being sued for 30 years' back rent by his deceased partners' biological family who didn't approve of their lifelong monogamous homosexual relationship) and the supposedly important child raising (so what if a child has been raised for over ten years by two loving parents -- if the biological or adoptive parent dies, the child will be shipped off to some stranger because the surviving parent has no legal standing in most states).
Now we see why it's such a bad idea to try and get the government to recognize religious things. It isn't just about protecting people from other religions, it's also about protecting religions from changes in government. There's no legal reason to keep civil marriages same-sex only, though there are certainly many religious ones for keeping church marriages as such. Unfortunately we use the same word to describe both a civil and a religious act, so the religious will just have to live with the inevitable legal change.
I don't remember Bush ever saying that the war would be a few months long,
Bush didn't -- Cheney and Rumsfeld both did. It was quite beautiful, really -- Bush could state for the record that it will be a difficult war and that we shouldn't underestimate the enemy, while his administration officials could go on TV and before Congress and say *wink wink nudge nudge* "It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.", "I think it will go relatively quickly,...weeks rather than months."
or that we would pay for it with Iraqi oil exports
The reconstruction of Iraq was going to pay for itself. The American taxpayer was not going to have to foot the bill, that's what Congress was told when asked for the paltry few billions to start the war.
Major combat operations did end after a few weeks, maybe that's what you mean, but everybody knew the rebuilding process would be long and hard.
"Major combat operations" may have ended, but soldiers are dying more frequently now than they were before, so such semantic sleight-of-hand may be good for public relations, but from a practical military perspective it doesn't mean a hell of a lot. We knew the rebuilding process would take time, but the American Taxpayer wasn't supposed to be footing the bill.
He never intended to take oil from Iraq, that's silly, maybe you should check your facts.
Maybe you should check your reading comprehension. I never said we'd take oil from Iraq. Iraq's oil exports were to be paying for the costs of reconstruction, and of course with the sudden end of all foreign oil contracts, American oil companies would have a prime spot at the negotiating table when the new ones were written. Unfortunately, it took us over a year to even get much oil coming out of the country due to sabotage, and last time I checked the exports were still lower than before the first Gulf War (ie, not up to our prewar expectations). The plan/intention had been for oil to be coming out quite literally weeks after the end of "major combat operations", unfortunately the minor combat operations turned out to be more distracting than intended.
Furthermore, you're completely short sighted, to you this war is already over and we've lost. That's ridiculous.
Congratulations on your mind reading ability, and your keen straw-man demolishing. I neither think the war is over nor that we've lost, but if it makes you feel more comfortable to stay ill-informed by writing off anyone who disagrees as a hippie peacenik commie defeatist, feel free.
Take a step back and think out your own arguments. You really WANT to believe that our leadership is as intelligent as a bunch of primates with big sticks, going and taking whatever they want. You've been compromised, buddy. You're the fool.
I've been "compromised" because...why again? You threw out a bunch of mind-reading exercises and disagreed with them? I believe our current leadership is quite intelligent, they got done what they wanted to, didn't they?
"You know why we went into Iraq right? OIL!" and so I politely responded "See, I just don't see what we have to gain by overtaking Iraq, in terms of oil." to which he responded "That's right, we don't! It's not worth it!". He made my point quite cleary
You've conflated two completely separate concepts and somehow imagine you've had a "point" made.
The motivation for an act says nothing about the actual (or even just perceived) results. We can invade Iraq for oil, and wind up even worse off than before. That the result of our actions didn't match our desires doesn't retroactively change our motivation. That your professor doesn't believe it was "worth it" has no bearing on the motivation either, it's a statement of his opinion on the cost/benefit analysis.
I don't know where you were in 2002, but the war WE were all sold was to be a few months long, we were to be greeted as liberators, and within a year Iraq's oil sales would pay us back every penny for the cost. Either they were lying or they were just as absolutely wrong as any human can be about something. Neither speaks highly of their capabilities for leadership, but their complete failure/deception is the reason we've seen little benefit. Had they accomplished what they intended/sold, we would have seen many clear benefits, both in increased oil production/market availability and greater political influence at zero direct financial cost, as it would all be subsidized by another country's oil sales. We also would have seen American oil companies take production share from European competitors, potentially leading to economic benefits for America in general, but definitely leading to benefits for the major campaign contributors and dinner party guests of our current administration.
I hope for your sake that if you intend to remain a neo-con, you find much better mentors than any of the current influential neo-cons. They seem to be so lost in the theory of what they're doing, they never bother to open the door and see what the real world is like. Tragic that they've fallen victim to the same major failure they once condemned liberal "ivory tower intellectuals" for.
There's no real shortage there, either. It's artificial
The shortage of parents is artificial? In what way? I don't see any government stopping lots of loving heterosexual couples from adopting.
True, you can wait for years and years to adopt, but that's only if you want a cute white baby. if you're willing to take a black other minority, especially one that is older than an infant, you can take your pick -- hundreds of millions of THOSE are available around the world.
I should have warned you that I'm an anarcho-capitalist libertarian that can argue every single problem in the world was either caused by government or made much worse by it.
I should have warned you that I'm a rational human being that can look at every single problem and examine it before deciding what causes it or makes it worse.
but homosexuality is not normal
Depends totally on your definition of "normal". It's completely natural and happens in many many species. It's not as common as the alternative, but then again neither is being Greek (after all, 98%+ of the world's parents aren't Greek, but they seem to raise children okay despite being in a tiny minority).
When same-sex "couples" figure out how to make children, I'll leave them and their misfit children alone
There's no shortage of children on Earth -- the only shortage is of loving parents willing to care for them and raise them. Granted, we could provide free abortions to everyone in order to solve that problem, but I suspect many people would have a problem with that alternative. Orphanages haven't figured out how to give birth either, but you don't seem to mind letting them raise a lot of kids.
Before you get too excited about low ages of consent -- you can STILL be charged with "corruption of a minor," "exposure to a minor" and similar crimes for having relations with someone under 18. If the parents, cops, DA or whoever wants to get you, they CAN get you and put you on a sex offender list for the rest of your life.
And those ethicists can (and do) engage in discussions of how to deal with the implications of such research and the ensuing technologies and changes. Theology prevents all discussion, since it simply says "Nope, goes against God, end of story." I would be thrilled to have a president engaged in the ethical debates surrounding these issues and providing leadership on how we can solve the dilemmas presented.
So no, I don't think only "out there loonies" oppose this research, however I do think only simpleminded people who don't examine the issues think it is as easily solvable as the president's policies would indicate. He cares not one whit about the ethical implications of all the other genetic playing that is going on under the auspices of giant food companies -- sure, it isn't about human embryos, but the possibility of dire consequences for humanity are just as great.