Plenty of clubs magically become less full if attractive ladies want to get in, it would be far more reasonable if they were allowed to tell you the reason you're not getting in.
Ignoring the current anti-discrimination laws, "No Catholics" would be a fairly silly rule, since the only way to tell if a person is Catholic is to either ask them, recognise some identifying item of clothing (which round here would pretty much only be a World Youth Day shirt, since all the other Catholic organisations with shirts or whatnot are too small for a non-Catholic to be likely to know, and a lot of non-Catholics attend Catholic schools because most private schools are Catholic), or by knowing them personally. "No Kykes" would be even more pointless because there are almost no obvious Jews (ultra-orthodox, or visibly ethnic Jews) round here.
"No Blacks" (or at least "No Abos") would be a sensible business decision in some places, since there is a perception that they are more likely to be disorderly or objectionable than white or asian people, so a bar or nightclub might be more profitable if they refuse entry to all Aboriginal people. I have heard of that being done on the sly in Alice and the more racist parts of Queensland. Of course, if such behaviour was legal, then in publicly-traded companies it would still have to be in the best interests of the shareholders.
Of course, all that ignores the fact that "No shirt, no shoes, no service" is currently legal, whereas the examples you gave are currently not.
I think he was trying to make it clear that he meant n-somes too, without having to re-write his entire sentence or become really convoluted. It's just like "yous" to mean plural you, it's ugly and if I were his teacher I'd take marks off for it, but as a quick kludge it worked well enough.
I think the problem with online gambling is that if you aren't using a reputable site, you have no real way of telling what the odds are. In, for example, blackjack, it is fairly easy to find out the odds of the game. However, if the cards are generated electronicly, the house can be slightly luckier, without anyone noticing, and they can pull stunts like making the odds less favourable if you bet more (so the punter feels that they are on a winning streak and so up the stakes or simply commit more money to their account (slots machines were allowed to do crap like that until recently where I am, they only had to publish the average odds over something like 1000 games).
Of course you're an idiot if you think that you're going to win on some dodgy foreign site, but you're just as much of a fool if you think that Dotcor Pinrce Whatever of Nigeria is going to send you TEN MILLLLLION UNITED SATES DOLLARS! and we have laws to protect people against that scam.
I'm not entirely in favour of a ban on online gambling, but there are problems which need to be dealt with, and proving fraud in genuine cases would be very hard unless the operators are complete fools, or located somewhere with no extradition treaties.
I have heard C++ compared to English, both are the best language for everything, but neither are especially good languages for anything. You can almost always find a better language for any particular task, but it is at least tolerable to use for almost anything, so people use it. C is like one of the more formal varieties of English, like what Sir Ernest Gowers calls Madarin Prose: elegant when used properly, terrible and incomprehensible when used badly (which it often is), somewhat antiquated, and often over-used by its supporters.
Common Lisp is like Latin, elegant, powerful, and expressive, but complex and hard to wrap one's head around, so it's rarely used for any "real work". Scheme is like (ancient) Greek, actually using it is generally regarded as at least slightly impressive, but its too unfamiliar for most people to learn.
Somewhere I saw a long list of languages analysed like that, unfortunately I can't find it now, which is a shame,a s some of teh comparisons were rather funny.
And, sadly, Obama, Brown, and other western leaders just play along, making comments like "we mustn't go down the seductive but damaging path of protectionism", not realising that their largest trading partner has already run gleefully down the path of protectionism and the west has just been too blind to notice.
...or too well bribed by their old school-friends in big business to notice.
Actually google are quite obviously unhappy with the American system too, as shown by their support of chillingeffects.org. I suspect google would like it if there were no restrictions on linking to content at all, and would probably be quite happy to see copyright law massively weakened (because of youtube), and other similar things that many/.ers are in favour of.
They are either playing by the rules of the markets, or leaving, but either way, they, like everyone else, want to change the rules to me more favourable to them. They probably aren't going to fight the PRC because it isn't a profitable enough market at the moment, given the enormous cost of hardening their systems even more to deal with the load of attacks the can expect in such a fight.
Google are out to look after themselves, but that doesn't mean that what they want is bad for web users.
Google have the ability to, at very low cost to themselves, help any anti-China advertising campaign enormously. If they added one extra ad box to each search result page, that would be an enormous number of impressions, which could have a noticeable impact on global public opinion, and it would cost them very little to do, so they could give free ads to whatever cause they want to support. If google was prepared to stand up to constant attacks from the PRC, they could post anti-china ads to the rest of the world until china changes their rules to make returning to china worthwhile, altough the cost of security to do that would probably not be justified by the gains from it.
Just be glad google don't openly involve themselves in politics, or they could be a massively powerful force for whoever they want elected.
American is almost invariably used to mean a person of the USA, so attacking Americans is nationalist, not racist. Whether or not nationalism is a good thing, it isn't the same as racism, and confusing the two only justifies racism.
Those ideas go back to Marx and Engels, but they were not the only communist philosophers, and while their ideas are influential, Marxism is not the only form of communism, just like the US Libertarian party isn't the only kind of libertarian.
Most code monkey work doesn't need any sort of certification, because it is unimportant stuff. A typical CRUD application will, if it goes horribly wrong, only cause trouble for the one company using it. Certainly anything where lives are at risk from errors should be formally specified and checked against he specifications, even if it isn't properly proven, and on a major project the organisation responsible would almost certainly want to use experienced SEs for at least the major design roles and other leadership positions, but that doesn't mean all projects need that level of competence.
One of my first jobs was in programming, and that the code I produced was dodgy as all hell, but it worked well enough, was only needed once for an expo, and if they had hired someone certified to do it properly, it would never have been done at all, because my boss's budget wouldn;t have been able to afford it.
The point is that a cabinet minister has to consider more than just the views of his electorate, he has to work for the good of the whole state. Approximately 11200 people voted for Michael Atkinson (as their first preference) in the lower house, whereas about 8300 voted for Gamers 4 Croydon as their first preference for the Upper house (just shy of 10000 votes were distributed to their candidate before he was excluded), and several of the other minor parties also support an r18+ rating for games. These is also the question of the harm done to South Australia's reputation interstate, especially as the premier has often spoken of the need to attract young interstate migrants to the state.
The key point is whether those 11000 people voted for him because of his policy on games (unlikely, there was a 14% swing against him, and only a 3% swing to the Family First Party (Christian right and the main "moral guardians") (indeed, Gamers 4 Croydon got more votes there than the FFP, suggesting that censorship wasn't the main issue there).
I had just spent some time trying to figure out the route (I'm not from or in Melbourne, which was easy enough to figure out since "Telstra" told me its was in Australia, and it didn't fit Adelaide or Sydney), but I was thrown for a while by the presence of "maryimmaculate", which confused me because there is a Catholic organisation of that name, but all of its Melbourne branches are beyond the tram network. Google map searching on likely looking strings from the list and matching the locations of matches to the tram lines gave me the line.
I don;t think it is a tram quiz, I think that sort of thing is just nerd-bait in general, giving someone a set of datapoints and waiting for them to try to figure out information from it. (An evil troll would have been to collect data from several routes and randomly mix them together, then sit back and watch the arguments.)
True, but I for one would rather see them sweeping streets or something rather than acting as hardware perl scripts. The job would get done just as well and at least the streets would be tidier, and there are probably plenty of more useful jobs various levels of government could find, such as drivers for mid-ranking civil servants, which would be a nice perk and doesn't cost very much if you're going to be paying the drivers to do nothing otherwise, or under-gardeners for public parks and gardens.
The Australian Centre for Visual Technologies has a project which aims to help reduce the manpower required to actually catch the person responsible, once you've spotted the crime occurring (amongst other things), which will allow you to follow a person of interest across many video streams until either you get a good, high-res image of their face, or they go close to a policeman (although that would require manual intervention in the current version of their system). The beauty of their system is that it primarily relies on straightforward object tracking, not biometrics, which allows it to work with much lower resolution cameras than biometric-based approaches, provided there is enough space around the target (which would occur even on less busy urban streets), greatly reducing the cost of the system. It can also be added to existing systems, the network can be expanded without human intervention at the software level, and the system lends itself very well to distributed computing.
(There are two of the key papers at the bottom of the linked page.)(Disclaimer: I'm not a member of the centre, but I think I've found an interesting thesis topic related to one of their other projects, so I'm not entirely unbiased.:) )
People who are not happy with that, are entitled to lobby for their point of view.
But I would caution anyone against doing so. There is a very fine line between hypothetical discussion and outright advocacy.
If one cannot advocate any law they desire, then democracy is dead if not dying in that country. You citizens should have the right to ask for any law, from the reasonable, to the patently absurd (everyone must wear red trousers or go to jail for 20 years), to the blatantly self-interested (everyone should be taxed $10 per year, the money all goes to me (that sort of thing works for the record companies)), to the morally repugnant ([re]introducing slavery, for example). Of course, that doesn't mean they should get it, just that they should be allowed to seek public support for their proposal.
In a recent election, there were many minor parties I found offensive and dangerous (or rather, that they would be dangerous if anyone voted for them), and even one of the second-rate parties has policies I find repulsive, but that doesn't mean I (or anyone else) get to prevent them standing and advocating those policies. If we go down the path you are suggesting, where would we draw the line? How many people must support the idea for it to be allowed, and how can we decide if enough people support the idea to allow the idea to be mentioned? That way lies a one-party dictatorship.
Apart from what the SP says, that doesn't mean that hate speech laws are a good thing. Haven't you heard the saying "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me"? That sort of post isn't libellous, slanderous, or defamatory, because it wouldn't actually harm anyone's opinion of either a specific black person or black people in general (anyone who would take it seriously would already believe that crap), and there is no measurable harm done by it.
Even hate crime laws are pretty silly IMO. I had this discussion with a local GLBTQ-rights activist a couple of years ago[1], in the context of a series of gay-bashings that had taken place not long before and the proper response to it. Her understanding of the problem was essentially as a public relations problem, people hate GLTBQ people so let's encourage them to like us, and if they won't we'll punish them for saying so. I saw the problem as a law and order question, people were committing assault and getting away with it, so let's have some more police in the known trouble spots (which were perfectly well known to the general community), because an arbitrary assault[2] for one reason isn't going to hurt any more or less than an arbitrary assault for a different reason. If beating someone up for fun deserves punishment X, it shouldn't matter why you thought it was fun.
To bring this back to your post, if I vandalise your building, it doesn't matter whether I did it because you are Jewish, because of sexual jealousy, becuase you are short/tall/ugly/good-looking, or just for "teh evulz", and yet hate crime laws say, in effect, that it is more legitimate to victimise someone because they are not from some special category.
[1] I actually support GLBTQ rights and whatnot, I just completely disagree about strategy with the local movement. [2] By this I mean an assault which is not the result of an argument or motivated by anything practical (such as a mugging or a mob shakedown)
Yeah, these copypasta trolls are tedious and annoying, but this guy is no worse than the tron fanzine guy, the library shit-eater, and the GNAA's broken Markov chain that posts the goatse links. He's just another retard.
ISTR (from/., so it may be utter bullshit) that many developed countries make capital gains from share trading much more tax-efficient than actually receiving the dividends from the shares because dividends are treated as income. ISTM that if that is true, it is something which needs to be fixed, and which possibly could be done without hurting anyone but the day traders and really short-term VC-grabbing schemes (since analysts and so on would still be necessary, and you could still make money on your shares, just in a different way). It would probably also reduce the incidence of bubbles like the.com bubble.
Where I live there are no hurricanes or tornadoes, no earthquakes worth mentioning, and except in two small areas of the state, no risk of flooding. The only potential natural disaster is fire, and very few houses are fire-proof, and it is perfectly possible to build an indefensible house to code. Debris is the least of your neighbours' worries.
In the UK you are, or were recently, allowed to wire your own house, do your own plumbing and so on, and when you sold your house, it was up to the purchaser to check the quality of the work if they didn't want to have to fix it themselves. Where I am now, you have to have any wiring inside your walls inspected by an licensed electrician, who is liable if it is wrong. Even ethernet cables need to be approved if they are installed in a wall, not to check that the installer hasn't cut through a structural beam or anything, just for electrical safety. A builder's permit is required to be a professional house painter, even for interior work where any fool can see if the job has been done badly. You even need a plumber's licence to work on your own plumbing, even if you are not connected to the mains and are drinking untreated rain or bore water from an unsealed concrete tank, which is regarded as perfectly normal, so it has nothing to do with water quality.
A lot of the requirements here are just protection for tradesmen, not for consumers, whatever the government says.
The jury was foolish, or the law is foolish. The dangers of using a table saw are well documented, and so are the perfectly straightforward safety procedures. The man chose to act carelessly, and was injured in a manner which should have been perfectly predictable to any child.
Not only that, there were saws with the feature available, he chose not to buy one and to save his money.
It's my house, it's me living in it, I'm the one who is risking losing it. If I want to get insurance on it, then it is fair enough that the company would want it to meet standards, and basic consumer protection law should prevent me selling the house and pretending it meets standards it doesn't.
I'm not saying that planning laws shouldn't be used, but that should only apply to the external character of the building, not the implementation details (expect where they impact the community), and things like anti-fortification laws are reasonable, but I am in general of the opinion that there should be no laws against anything which cannot be proven to be harming others against their will.
Yet another set of musings from a thread on this story. To search for people, the public profile pages mentioned in the link can be left as searchable html pages, or one could choose to subscribe to a search application, which can index some of your user data (as much or little as you permit), although I envisage that for the most part people would hand out their IDs in person, much like their IM details.
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of clubs magically become less full if attractive ladies want to get in, it would be far more reasonable if they were allowed to tell you the reason you're not getting in.
Ignoring the current anti-discrimination laws, "No Catholics" would be a fairly silly rule, since the only way to tell if a person is Catholic is to either ask them, recognise some identifying item of clothing (which round here would pretty much only be a World Youth Day shirt, since all the other Catholic organisations with shirts or whatnot are too small for a non-Catholic to be likely to know, and a lot of non-Catholics attend Catholic schools because most private schools are Catholic), or by knowing them personally. "No Kykes" would be even more pointless because there are almost no obvious Jews (ultra-orthodox, or visibly ethnic Jews) round here.
"No Blacks" (or at least "No Abos") would be a sensible business decision in some places, since there is a perception that they are more likely to be disorderly or objectionable than white or asian people, so a bar or nightclub might be more profitable if they refuse entry to all Aboriginal people. I have heard of that being done on the sly in Alice and the more racist parts of Queensland. Of course, if such behaviour was legal, then in publicly-traded companies it would still have to be in the best interests of the shareholders.
Of course, all that ignores the fact that "No shirt, no shoes, no service" is currently legal, whereas the examples you gave are currently not.
I think he was trying to make it clear that he meant n-somes too, without having to re-write his entire sentence or become really convoluted. It's just like "yous" to mean plural you, it's ugly and if I were his teacher I'd take marks off for it, but as a quick kludge it worked well enough.
I think the problem with online gambling is that if you aren't using a reputable site, you have no real way of telling what the odds are. In, for example, blackjack, it is fairly easy to find out the odds of the game. However, if the cards are generated electronicly, the house can be slightly luckier, without anyone noticing, and they can pull stunts like making the odds less favourable if you bet more (so the punter feels that they are on a winning streak and so up the stakes or simply commit more money to their account (slots machines were allowed to do crap like that until recently where I am, they only had to publish the average odds over something like 1000 games).
Of course you're an idiot if you think that you're going to win on some dodgy foreign site, but you're just as much of a fool if you think that Dotcor Pinrce Whatever of Nigeria is going to send you TEN MILLLLLION UNITED SATES DOLLARS! and we have laws to protect people against that scam.
I'm not entirely in favour of a ban on online gambling, but there are problems which need to be dealt with, and proving fraud in genuine cases would be very hard unless the operators are complete fools, or located somewhere with no extradition treaties.
I have heard C++ compared to English, both are the best language for everything, but neither are especially good languages for anything. You can almost always find a better language for any particular task, but it is at least tolerable to use for almost anything, so people use it. C is like one of the more formal varieties of English, like what Sir Ernest Gowers calls Madarin Prose: elegant when used properly, terrible and incomprehensible when used badly (which it often is), somewhat antiquated, and often over-used by its supporters.
Common Lisp is like Latin, elegant, powerful, and expressive, but complex and hard to wrap one's head around, so it's rarely used for any "real work". Scheme is like (ancient) Greek, actually using it is generally regarded as at least slightly impressive, but its too unfamiliar for most people to learn.
Somewhere I saw a long list of languages analysed like that, unfortunately I can't find it now, which is a shame,a s some of teh comparisons were rather funny.
I liked it, but then I've already posted, so I can't use my modpoints.
And, sadly, Obama, Brown, and other western leaders just play along, making comments like "we mustn't go down the seductive but damaging path of protectionism", not realising that their largest trading partner has already run gleefully down the path of protectionism and the west has just been too blind to notice.
...or too well bribed by their old school-friends in big business to notice.
Actually google are quite obviously unhappy with the American system too, as shown by their support of chillingeffects.org. I suspect google would like it if there were no restrictions on linking to content at all, and would probably be quite happy to see copyright law massively weakened (because of youtube), and other similar things that many /.ers are in favour of.
They are either playing by the rules of the markets, or leaving, but either way, they, like everyone else, want to change the rules to me more favourable to them. They probably aren't going to fight the PRC because it isn't a profitable enough market at the moment, given the enormous cost of hardening their systems even more to deal with the load of attacks the can expect in such a fight.
Google are out to look after themselves, but that doesn't mean that what they want is bad for web users.
Google have the ability to, at very low cost to themselves, help any anti-China advertising campaign enormously. If they added one extra ad box to each search result page, that would be an enormous number of impressions, which could have a noticeable impact on global public opinion, and it would cost them very little to do, so they could give free ads to whatever cause they want to support. If google was prepared to stand up to constant attacks from the PRC, they could post anti-china ads to the rest of the world until china changes their rules to make returning to china worthwhile, altough the cost of security to do that would probably not be justified by the gains from it.
Just be glad google don't openly involve themselves in politics, or they could be a massively powerful force for whoever they want elected.
overweight Americans
almost-racist generalizations
American is almost invariably used to mean a person of the USA, so attacking Americans is nationalist, not racist. Whether or not nationalism is a good thing, it isn't the same as racism, and confusing the two only justifies racism.
Those ideas go back to Marx and Engels, but they were not the only communist philosophers, and while their ideas are influential, Marxism is not the only form of communism, just like the US Libertarian party isn't the only kind of libertarian.
Most code monkey work doesn't need any sort of certification, because it is unimportant stuff. A typical CRUD application will, if it goes horribly wrong, only cause trouble for the one company using it. Certainly anything where lives are at risk from errors should be formally specified and checked against he specifications, even if it isn't properly proven, and on a major project the organisation responsible would almost certainly want to use experienced SEs for at least the major design roles and other leadership positions, but that doesn't mean all projects need that level of competence.
One of my first jobs was in programming, and that the code I produced was dodgy as all hell, but it worked well enough, was only needed once for an expo, and if they had hired someone certified to do it properly, it would never have been done at all, because my boss's budget wouldn;t have been able to afford it.
The point is that a cabinet minister has to consider more than just the views of his electorate, he has to work for the good of the whole state. Approximately 11200 people voted for Michael Atkinson (as their first preference) in the lower house, whereas about 8300 voted for Gamers 4 Croydon as their first preference for the Upper house (just shy of 10000 votes were distributed to their candidate before he was excluded), and several of the other minor parties also support an r18+ rating for games.
These is also the question of the harm done to South Australia's reputation interstate, especially as the premier has often spoken of the need to attract young interstate migrants to the state.
The key point is whether those 11000 people voted for him because of his policy on games (unlikely, there was a 14% swing against him, and only a 3% swing to the Family First Party (Christian right and the main "moral guardians") (indeed, Gamers 4 Croydon got more votes there than the FFP, suggesting that censorship wasn't the main issue there).
I had just spent some time trying to figure out the route (I'm not from or in Melbourne, which was easy enough to figure out since "Telstra" told me its was in Australia, and it didn't fit Adelaide or Sydney), but I was thrown for a while by the presence of "maryimmaculate", which confused me because there is a Catholic organisation of that name, but all of its Melbourne branches are beyond the tram network. Google map searching on likely looking strings from the list and matching the locations of matches to the tram lines gave me the line.
I don;t think it is a tram quiz, I think that sort of thing is just nerd-bait in general, giving someone a set of datapoints and waiting for them to try to figure out information from it. (An evil troll would have been to collect data from several routes and randomly mix them together, then sit back and watch the arguments.)
True, but I for one would rather see them sweeping streets or something rather than acting as hardware perl scripts. The job would get done just as well and at least the streets would be tidier, and there are probably plenty of more useful jobs various levels of government could find, such as drivers for mid-ranking civil servants, which would be a nice perk and doesn't cost very much if you're going to be paying the drivers to do nothing otherwise, or under-gardeners for public parks and gardens.
The Australian Centre for Visual Technologies has a project which aims to help reduce the manpower required to actually catch the person responsible, once you've spotted the crime occurring (amongst other things), which will allow you to follow a person of interest across many video streams until either you get a good, high-res image of their face, or they go close to a policeman (although that would require manual intervention in the current version of their system). The beauty of their system is that it primarily relies on straightforward object tracking, not biometrics, which allows it to work with much lower resolution cameras than biometric-based approaches, provided there is enough space around the target (which would occur even on less busy urban streets), greatly reducing the cost of the system. It can also be added to existing systems, the network can be expanded without human intervention at the software level, and the system lends itself very well to distributed computing.
(There are two of the key papers at the bottom of the linked page.)(Disclaimer: I'm not a member of the centre, but I think I've found an interesting thesis topic related to one of their other projects, so I'm not entirely unbiased. :) )
People who are not happy with that, are entitled to lobby for their point of view.
But I would caution anyone against doing so. There is a very fine line between hypothetical discussion and outright advocacy.
If one cannot advocate any law they desire, then democracy is dead if not dying in that country. You citizens should have the right to ask for any law, from the reasonable, to the patently absurd (everyone must wear red trousers or go to jail for 20 years), to the blatantly self-interested (everyone should be taxed $10 per year, the money all goes to me (that sort of thing works for the record companies)), to the morally repugnant ([re]introducing slavery, for example). Of course, that doesn't mean they should get it, just that they should be allowed to seek public support for their proposal.
In a recent election, there were many minor parties I found offensive and dangerous (or rather, that they would be dangerous if anyone voted for them), and even one of the second-rate parties has policies I find repulsive, but that doesn't mean I (or anyone else) get to prevent them standing and advocating those policies. If we go down the path you are suggesting, where would we draw the line? How many people must support the idea for it to be allowed, and how can we decide if enough people support the idea to allow the idea to be mentioned? That way lies a one-party dictatorship.
Apart from what the SP says, that doesn't mean that hate speech laws are a good thing. Haven't you heard the saying "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me"? That sort of post isn't libellous, slanderous, or defamatory, because it wouldn't actually harm anyone's opinion of either a specific black person or black people in general (anyone who would take it seriously would already believe that crap), and there is no measurable harm done by it.
Even hate crime laws are pretty silly IMO. I had this discussion with a local GLBTQ-rights activist a couple of years ago[1], in the context of a series of gay-bashings that had taken place not long before and the proper response to it. Her understanding of the problem was essentially as a public relations problem, people hate GLTBQ people so let's encourage them to like us, and if they won't we'll punish them for saying so. I saw the problem as a law and order question, people were committing assault and getting away with it, so let's have some more police in the known trouble spots (which were perfectly well known to the general community), because an arbitrary assault[2] for one reason isn't going to hurt any more or less than an arbitrary assault for a different reason. If beating someone up for fun deserves punishment X, it shouldn't matter why you thought it was fun.
To bring this back to your post, if I vandalise your building, it doesn't matter whether I did it because you are Jewish, because of sexual jealousy, becuase you are short/tall/ugly/good-looking, or just for "teh evulz", and yet hate crime laws say, in effect, that it is more legitimate to victimise someone because they are not from some special category.
[1] I actually support GLBTQ rights and whatnot, I just completely disagree about strategy with the local movement.
[2] By this I mean an assault which is not the result of an argument or motivated by anything practical (such as a mugging or a mob shakedown)
Yeah, these copypasta trolls are tedious and annoying, but this guy is no worse than the tron fanzine guy, the library shit-eater, and the GNAA's broken Markov chain that posts the goatse links. He's just another retard.
ISTR (from /., so it may be utter bullshit) that many developed countries make capital gains from share trading much more tax-efficient than actually receiving the dividends from the shares because dividends are treated as income. ISTM that if that is true, it is something which needs to be fixed, and which possibly could be done without hurting anyone but the day traders and really short-term VC-grabbing schemes (since analysts and so on would still be necessary, and you could still make money on your shares, just in a different way). It would probably also reduce the incidence of bubbles like the .com bubble.
Where I live there are no hurricanes or tornadoes, no earthquakes worth mentioning, and except in two small areas of the state, no risk of flooding. The only potential natural disaster is fire, and very few houses are fire-proof, and it is perfectly possible to build an indefensible house to code. Debris is the least of your neighbours' worries.
In the UK you are, or were recently, allowed to wire your own house, do your own plumbing and so on, and when you sold your house, it was up to the purchaser to check the quality of the work if they didn't want to have to fix it themselves. Where I am now, you have to have any wiring inside your walls inspected by an licensed electrician, who is liable if it is wrong. Even ethernet cables need to be approved if they are installed in a wall, not to check that the installer hasn't cut through a structural beam or anything, just for electrical safety. A builder's permit is required to be a professional house painter, even for interior work where any fool can see if the job has been done badly. You even need a plumber's licence to work on your own plumbing, even if you are not connected to the mains and are drinking untreated rain or bore water from an unsealed concrete tank, which is regarded as perfectly normal, so it has nothing to do with water quality.
A lot of the requirements here are just protection for tradesmen, not for consumers, whatever the government says.
He did say "with some safety warnings". If someone chooses to buy an item after reading the warnings, that is their choice.
The jury was foolish, or the law is foolish. The dangers of using a table saw are well documented, and so are the perfectly straightforward safety procedures. The man chose to act carelessly, and was injured in a manner which should have been perfectly predictable to any child.
Not only that, there were saws with the feature available, he chose not to buy one and to save his money.
It's my house, it's me living in it, I'm the one who is risking losing it. If I want to get insurance on it, then it is fair enough that the company would want it to meet standards, and basic consumer protection law should prevent me selling the house and pretending it meets standards it doesn't.
I'm not saying that planning laws shouldn't be used, but that should only apply to the external character of the building, not the implementation details (expect where they impact the community), and things like anti-fortification laws are reasonable, but I am in general of the opinion that there should be no laws against anything which cannot be proven to be harming others against their will.
Yet another set of musings from a thread on this story.
To search for people, the public profile pages mentioned in the link can be left as searchable html pages, or one could choose to subscribe to a search application, which can index some of your user data (as much or little as you permit), although I envisage that for the most part people would hand out their IDs in person, much like their IM details.
Advertisements, same as they do now.