Maybe I'm mistaken, but don't pretty much all of those countries have laws against hate speech? Not that I'm a big fan of the hate speech, but I'm a bit of a fan of the ol' Voltaire (possibly mis-)quote. And the US's policies on speeching, which is pretty much all the internet is good for, seem to be about as liberal as there currently is.
Now if the rest of the world is smart, they'll get to work on setting up plan B servers to bring out on a moment's notice and distributing the info to their big ISPs in case the US suddenly goes nuts. Which has the added bonus of giving the US incentive not to go nuts, and we can all feel better about it.
God, anyone with this attitude, you included, should be taken out to the woodshed and removed from the gene pool. I am serious.
You're a dick. I, too, am serious. I don't mind being disagreed with, because I'm often wrong, but learn to disagree politely or keep your mouth shut, please, you jackass.
Taxing by gasoline consumption forces everyone to pay in direct proportion to the amount of problem they create. That is fair.
Increasing the gas tax on people that can't pay and don't drive much is not fair. If we're insisting on taxing, your solution leaves absolutely no recourse for the vast numbers of people that are barely getting by as it is.
What you are suggesting is far from fair, with some big polluters paying little (somebody who drives a "normal" vehicle quite a lot)
Valid point. It ain't perfect, but at least it makes a dent without destroy anybody.
some small polluters paying lots (someone who drives an SUV, but not many miles)
Paying no more than they would with a gas tax increase, to which this is a counter-proposal. Vehicle life = 200,000 miles-ish. MPG = 18. Gallons used = ~11000. Gas tax increase = $1. Resulting sticker increase = $11000. With increased gas tax, practical cost of car ownership increase = $11000. Gas guzzler breaks even. Second sale price of the car, hopefully (though I suppose it depends on the market), goes up by (200,000 - miles driven) * $11000.
It's a bit of a screwing that you pay for your gas tax hike over 4 years instead of 10, but maybe loans on those cars can get different terms to make it even.
And while it does suck that someone buying a new guzzler after this went into effect and only driving it 4,000 miles gets screwed, they'll probably buy a cheaper alternative if it's a big deal (since this wouldn't be sprung on already existing cars the way the gas tax hike would be) and they'll drive their more efficient car 4,000 miles, saving gas, as was the point to begin with.
and (not surprisingly) you paying nothing.
I'm already doing what everyone claims they want everyone else to do, so yeah, I pay nothing.
It's not fair, no. You can have fair, or you can have practical and not economically devastating. I understand if you don't agree, it's not fair after all, but I'll go with the second on this one.
Hey, there ya go. Just up those numbers by about 10 grand and raise the mpg numbers so the lowest is 24 and people can stop talking about raising the gas tax.
You do realize that there are a lot of SUVs that get the same mileage as regular sized passenger cars?
Which is why I limited it to ones that get worse mileage than whatever number gets plucked out of an official's butt.
This constant demonization of SUVs kind of gets on my nerves--especially since I own one and drive less than 4000 miles per year.
It gets on my nerves that every second jerk on the road feels like he needs to be six feet up in the air and dangerously block the view from cars behind him. We'll both have to learn to live with our anger.
Since we're concerned about the environment, why don't we just pass uniform emissions standards (for trucks and cars) and require annual testing? This way we attack the actual problem: emissions.
If we were worried about smog and acid rain, that would be great, but since smog is less of a problem than it used to be and I haven't heard anyone use the words "acid rain" in years, the current emissions testing seems to be adequate. But there are two current environmental concerns: carbon dioxide production and depletion of oil supplies, both of which are directly related to gas mileage, not emissions (when used in the way that word is usually used. I do realize carbon dioxide is technically an emission).
So if you mean to enact standards for maximum CO2 emissions, okay, but that's much easier to do by enacting minimum gas mileage standards. And if that's your goal, I'd be glad to back you.
Until the US starts to tax gasoline products in order to encourage fuel efficiency, then the US will continue to drive around in inefficient gas guzzlers.
And for those of us who drive fuel efficient cars and can't afford the gas already, you recommend what course of action?
How about we just tax the hell out of SUVs? Take the average lifetime of an SUV in miles, multiply it by your gas tax hike, and add that to the sticker price. Roll it into the loan payment. Make it apply only to cars that get fewer than x miles per gallon, with the limit announced a couple years in advance so that manufacturers aren't left with a bunch of unsellable inventory all of a sudden. Drop the x by a mpg per year until you get your target mileage. No punishing people that are already struggling that way. Punishes people who drive their SUV 8 blocks a year, sure, but there's not that many of them. There are plenty of poor people, and they're already in rough shape.
It's been a while since I've used C++, so maybe the part of my memory that held the reason why this is about to be a stupid question was repurposed, but why are you passing it as a const reference instead of just a reference? It still won't make a new copy of the object, right? But then you aren't stuck with only const methods.
Since this guy might not have had it in the first place and might be cooperating, I'm going to abstract slightly so as not to be mean to a guy who might already be doing what he can to help. So this isn't regarding the article guy, just a guy who is what the article claims.
This hypothetical guy, doing what you said, is a dick. First of all, get retested, buddy. Make sure it wasn't the second one that was a fluke before you find yourself a new boy/girlfriend. Second, maybe my experience was atypical, but having weekly blood extraction is a minor annoyance at worst. I bet they'll even come to him and give him some cash for his time.
Ghod help him if some pharmaceutical corporate patents his blood and makes him pay up or give up.
That's just dumb.
he will be drafted/conscripted/incarcerated under some obscure public safety law and turned into State property in the UK/SCotland
Possibly, and that's grey area for the government that others, I'm sure, would be happy to argue about, but he could avoid that by not being a dick in the first place. And I sympathise, but if there's a reasonable chance your arm contains a method for saving 40 million lives and you won't sit down and make a fist, you're a dick.
it's highly doubtful that the medical companies will ever let him see a penny for it.
That's true. Kinda sucks. At least they should give the guy a big cardboard check with 5 or 6 zeroes.
There are people in power in Washington who perpetrated this despicable attack to pump up the frenzy for invading Iraq over WMD's.
Let's please not go accusing a small group of people of being murderers until we have something better than "it would have worked out well for them." It's just not cool.
"Right wing nutjobs", I'm okay with. There's enough of them to absorb that, but if it was an Iraq thing, then the order would have had to have come from one of a very small group of people, and that's a big accusation to make.
Virtually any time money changes hands, you pay tax. If you gave the money as a gift, they'd have to pay taxes on it. Think of it as a gift that you give your family in celebration of you dying.
a columnist during the past election cycle quoted her child as having said to her 'John Kerry wants to make medicine out of babies.'
I remember that. And right after that, my 1-year-old son put down his Tonka truck and asked, "Daddy, why do columnists make up bad propaganda lines and then pretend their kid said it to make up for the fact that if an adult said it, he'd look really, really dumb?" Then he burped up on himself.
If cloning ends up having the potential to prevent birth defects and such, is forcing someone to give up her eggs, worth it in the end?
Don't worry about it. Never going to happen. You can't take a chunk of someone's liver by force to save someone else, and there's no reason to think that would be different with other parts of people.
To everyone else, please don't respond to the troll portion about embryos. Don't let him win.
Where I'm from, they get signatures from everyone voting in a book. If the signature count doesn't match the total votes, something's gone wrong. So at least automated fraud is trickier. The people running it could still sign in for people that didn't show up and vote for them, but no more so with an electronic system than an manual one.
Which is why I propose adding the amendment, "Scratch all that other stuff. Just don't be a dick. And give some cash to the government so they can afford to judge severe dickery and push the guilty out to sea on a poorly constructed raft. And also to build roads."
If you do produce a program that will affect this software's ability to perform its function, then you may have to prove in criminal court that you have not infringed this warning.
Is it legal for contracts to include conditions that are physically impossible to do? If so, my next bit of software is coming with a "If you can't prove you didn't make copies of the software, you owe us for as many copies as could possibly have been made between the time you first run the program and the time we sue you." Since nobody reads those things anyway.
On a mostly unrelated note, I wrote a program that shows funny pictures. It's awesome, and it's only 1 cent, for... processing purposes, if anyone's interested in a download.
Since CD sales have been falling, and it's cheaper to blame piracy than develop original artists
I'm not sure why people say things like that. It's a hell of a lot easier to find new good music today than it was 5 years ago, and a thousand times easier than it was 5 years before that. Maybe I just live in some weird radio paradise area that doesn't only play Avril Lavigne.
If there's a problem, and I'm not sure there is, it's that they play the same song off a CD for 3 months on the radio. Me and everyone I know, all of whom are fine paying for CDs, wait until we know there are at least two or three good songs on a disc before we pay for it. But with the radio set up the way it is now, I'm usually sick of the first song by the time the second one comes out.
The second problem is 90% of the CDs I buy are ones that don't get much time on the radio. If I hear a song three times on my way to work every day, I'm not going to buy it.
So my recommendation, record guys, if you're reading this, is to stop pushing that one single so hard. Give a song 3 weeks if it's really, really, fantastically great, then move on to the next one. I assume before you paid the band you made sure they had at least three good songs, right?
Of course, maybe I don't know how radio works. Maybe the stations are the ones making that call. And I suppose there's always a chance I'm not the typical CD buyer.
What part of that do you consider "talking out of [my] ass"?
The part I responded to where you accused me of having made up the town my parents grew up in and my dad's sister. I don't doubt your credentials. Your town sucked. I just doubt that you can extrapolate your experience to my family's town in the 1940's and 50's (which is roughly the same now. Filled to the brim with people over 70).
If you have two or more humans in close proximity, one of them will find a way to gain advantage over the other(s).
That's just not true. You're going to need at least a few dozen to be absolutely sure one is going to be a jerk, and more if everyone knows each other and has no means of escape from the shame that would come from doing something truly wrong. People aren't nearly the simple self-serving mechanisms you seem to think they are.
Your aunt either doesn't exist...
Dick.
or you should have her locked up for her own safety
She's 50 years older than me and in fine health. That would be tricky.
the environment required to cause that level of trust in any sane human with an IQ over 80 most certainly does not exist.
Have you ever even spoken to someone over 70? Their thought process, in my experience, boils down to "they go to my church, so they're okay," and, "that looks official, so it's okay."
"But at least as long as it continues what protection it offers, a few stupid people will get their money back from evil bastards. I hate stupid people, but I hate evil bastards more."
Sorry, which part of that did I misinterpret?
The part where, as I mentioned, me and the parent poster were both talking about scams in general, not this guy selling moon land. Off-topic, maybe, but only a little.
But the government doesn't have the job title of "babysitter of the weak", as much as they try to wear that particular hat.
But let's still not pretend that them taking action against fraud is making people take risks they otherwise wouldn't, as was the original point.
I didn't. I grew up in a suburb, but the town I was talking about is a dying factory town where I've spent quite a bit of time.
And they don't match the Donna Reed TV fantasy world you appear to believe in.... Then (if she exists)...
You're a dick, and I'm going to ask that you quit talking out of your ass.
Does this guy really strike you as evil?
No, buddy, but the context wasn't hard to grasp. Go up two parent posts and you'll find it. It was in reply to a comment about eliminating the government's fraud protection efforts for the benefit of stupid people.
... you'd think scams would go away. They won't. The only way that scams will be unprofitable is when government stops "protecting" citizens and lets people learn to be aware of what they're buying.
My aunt doesn't fall for these things because she's protected. She falls for it because she's gullible and has always lived in a town filled with people she can trust absolutely. She's not taking risks because she thinks she has nothing to lose, so the government ceasing its protection is not going to help her. And her situation is exactly like everyone else's. But at least as long as it continues what protection it offers, a few stupid people will get their money back from evil bastards. I hate stupid people, but I hate evil bastards more.
If you want people to learn to distrust, teach them that (and good freaking luck. Those people don't learn things), don't blame the government for trying to help the ones that get screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm mistaken, but don't pretty much all of those countries have laws against hate speech? Not that I'm a big fan of the hate speech, but I'm a bit of a fan of the ol' Voltaire (possibly mis-)quote. And the US's policies on speeching, which is pretty much all the internet is good for, seem to be about as liberal as there currently is.
Now if the rest of the world is smart, they'll get to work on setting up plan B servers to bring out on a moment's notice and distributing the info to their big ISPs in case the US suddenly goes nuts. Which has the added bonus of giving the US incentive not to go nuts, and we can all feel better about it.
God, anyone with this attitude, you included, should be taken out to the woodshed and removed from the gene pool. I am serious.
You're a dick. I, too, am serious. I don't mind being disagreed with, because I'm often wrong, but learn to disagree politely or keep your mouth shut, please, you jackass.
Taxing by gasoline consumption forces everyone to pay in direct proportion to the amount of problem they create. That is fair.
Increasing the gas tax on people that can't pay and don't drive much is not fair. If we're insisting on taxing, your solution leaves absolutely no recourse for the vast numbers of people that are barely getting by as it is.
What you are suggesting is far from fair, with some big polluters paying little (somebody who drives a "normal" vehicle quite a lot)
Valid point. It ain't perfect, but at least it makes a dent without destroy anybody.
some small polluters paying lots (someone who drives an SUV, but not many miles)
Paying no more than they would with a gas tax increase, to which this is a counter-proposal. Vehicle life = 200,000 miles-ish. MPG = 18. Gallons used = ~11000. Gas tax increase = $1. Resulting sticker increase = $11000. With increased gas tax, practical cost of car ownership increase = $11000. Gas guzzler breaks even. Second sale price of the car, hopefully (though I suppose it depends on the market), goes up by (200,000 - miles driven) * $11000.
It's a bit of a screwing that you pay for your gas tax hike over 4 years instead of 10, but maybe loans on those cars can get different terms to make it even.
And while it does suck that someone buying a new guzzler after this went into effect and only driving it 4,000 miles gets screwed, they'll probably buy a cheaper alternative if it's a big deal (since this wouldn't be sprung on already existing cars the way the gas tax hike would be) and they'll drive their more efficient car 4,000 miles, saving gas, as was the point to begin with.
and (not surprisingly) you paying nothing.
I'm already doing what everyone claims they want everyone else to do, so yeah, I pay nothing.
It's not fair, no. You can have fair, or you can have practical and not economically devastating. I understand if you don't agree, it's not fair after all, but I'll go with the second on this one.
Hey, there ya go. Just up those numbers by about 10 grand and raise the mpg numbers so the lowest is 24 and people can stop talking about raising the gas tax.
You do realize that there are a lot of SUVs that get the same mileage as regular sized passenger cars?
Which is why I limited it to ones that get worse mileage than whatever number gets plucked out of an official's butt.
This constant demonization of SUVs kind of gets on my nerves--especially since I own one and drive less than 4000 miles per year.
It gets on my nerves that every second jerk on the road feels like he needs to be six feet up in the air and dangerously block the view from cars behind him. We'll both have to learn to live with our anger.
Since we're concerned about the environment, why don't we just pass uniform emissions standards (for trucks and cars) and require annual testing? This way we attack the actual problem: emissions.
If we were worried about smog and acid rain, that would be great, but since smog is less of a problem than it used to be and I haven't heard anyone use the words "acid rain" in years, the current emissions testing seems to be adequate. But there are two current environmental concerns: carbon dioxide production and depletion of oil supplies, both of which are directly related to gas mileage, not emissions (when used in the way that word is usually used. I do realize carbon dioxide is technically an emission).
So if you mean to enact standards for maximum CO2 emissions, okay, but that's much easier to do by enacting minimum gas mileage standards. And if that's your goal, I'd be glad to back you.
To adopt a lifestyle more in line with their financial means, perhaps? One that has zero automobile?
Oh. So become jobless shut-in, then. I'll get started on that right quick.
Until the US starts to tax gasoline products in order to encourage fuel efficiency, then the US will continue to drive around in inefficient gas guzzlers.
And for those of us who drive fuel efficient cars and can't afford the gas already, you recommend what course of action?
How about we just tax the hell out of SUVs? Take the average lifetime of an SUV in miles, multiply it by your gas tax hike, and add that to the sticker price. Roll it into the loan payment. Make it apply only to cars that get fewer than x miles per gallon, with the limit announced a couple years in advance so that manufacturers aren't left with a bunch of unsellable inventory all of a sudden. Drop the x by a mpg per year until you get your target mileage. No punishing people that are already struggling that way. Punishes people who drive their SUV 8 blocks a year, sure, but there's not that many of them. There are plenty of poor people, and they're already in rough shape.
It's been a while since I've used C++, so maybe the part of my memory that held the reason why this is about to be a stupid question was repurposed, but why are you passing it as a const reference instead of just a reference? It still won't make a new copy of the object, right? But then you aren't stuck with only const methods.
Since this guy might not have had it in the first place and might be cooperating, I'm going to abstract slightly so as not to be mean to a guy who might already be doing what he can to help. So this isn't regarding the article guy, just a guy who is what the article claims.
This hypothetical guy, doing what you said, is a dick. First of all, get retested, buddy. Make sure it wasn't the second one that was a fluke before you find yourself a new boy/girlfriend. Second, maybe my experience was atypical, but having weekly blood extraction is a minor annoyance at worst. I bet they'll even come to him and give him some cash for his time.
Ghod help him if some pharmaceutical corporate patents his blood and makes him pay up or give up.
That's just dumb.
he will be drafted/conscripted/incarcerated under some obscure public safety law and turned into State property in the UK/SCotland
Possibly, and that's grey area for the government that others, I'm sure, would be happy to argue about, but he could avoid that by not being a dick in the first place. And I sympathise, but if there's a reasonable chance your arm contains a method for saving 40 million lives and you won't sit down and make a fist, you're a dick.
it's highly doubtful that the medical companies will ever let him see a penny for it.
That's true. Kinda sucks. At least they should give the guy a big cardboard check with 5 or 6 zeroes.
There are people in power in Washington who perpetrated this despicable attack to pump up the frenzy for invading Iraq over WMD's.
Let's please not go accusing a small group of people of being murderers until we have something better than "it would have worked out well for them." It's just not cool.
"Right wing nutjobs", I'm okay with. There's enough of them to absorb that, but if it was an Iraq thing, then the order would have had to have come from one of a very small group of people, and that's a big accusation to make.
But tax has already been paid on that money
Virtually any time money changes hands, you pay tax. If you gave the money as a gift, they'd have to pay taxes on it. Think of it as a gift that you give your family in celebration of you dying.
a columnist during the past election cycle quoted her child as having said to her 'John Kerry wants to make medicine out of babies.'
I remember that. And right after that, my 1-year-old son put down his Tonka truck and asked, "Daddy, why do columnists make up bad propaganda lines and then pretend their kid said it to make up for the fact that if an adult said it, he'd look really, really dumb?" Then he burped up on himself.
If cloning ends up having the potential to prevent birth defects and such, is forcing someone to give up her eggs, worth it in the end?
Don't worry about it. Never going to happen. You can't take a chunk of someone's liver by force to save someone else, and there's no reason to think that would be different with other parts of people.
To everyone else, please don't respond to the troll portion about embryos. Don't let him win.
Where I'm from, they get signatures from everyone voting in a book. If the signature count doesn't match the total votes, something's gone wrong. So at least automated fraud is trickier. The people running it could still sign in for people that didn't show up and vote for them, but no more so with an electronic system than an manual one.
Which is why I propose adding the amendment, "Scratch all that other stuff. Just don't be a dick. And give some cash to the government so they can afford to judge severe dickery and push the guilty out to sea on a poorly constructed raft. And also to build roads."
There is no law against being a jerk.
And oddly enough, it's the only thing there actually should be a law against.
If you do produce a program that will affect this software's ability to perform its function, then you may have to prove in criminal court that you have not infringed this warning.
Is it legal for contracts to include conditions that are physically impossible to do? If so, my next bit of software is coming with a "If you can't prove you didn't make copies of the software, you owe us for as many copies as could possibly have been made between the time you first run the program and the time we sue you." Since nobody reads those things anyway.
On a mostly unrelated note, I wrote a program that shows funny pictures. It's awesome, and it's only 1 cent, for... processing purposes, if anyone's interested in a download.
Because they store less than one coulomb per volt.
I don't get it.
Sure, no problem.
Sorry about that guy, too. He's kind of a douche.
Your point is well-taken, but:
Since CD sales have been falling, and it's cheaper to blame piracy than develop original artists
I'm not sure why people say things like that. It's a hell of a lot easier to find new good music today than it was 5 years ago, and a thousand times easier than it was 5 years before that. Maybe I just live in some weird radio paradise area that doesn't only play Avril Lavigne.
If there's a problem, and I'm not sure there is, it's that they play the same song off a CD for 3 months on the radio. Me and everyone I know, all of whom are fine paying for CDs, wait until we know there are at least two or three good songs on a disc before we pay for it. But with the radio set up the way it is now, I'm usually sick of the first song by the time the second one comes out.
The second problem is 90% of the CDs I buy are ones that don't get much time on the radio. If I hear a song three times on my way to work every day, I'm not going to buy it.
So my recommendation, record guys, if you're reading this, is to stop pushing that one single so hard. Give a song 3 weeks if it's really, really, fantastically great, then move on to the next one. I assume before you paid the band you made sure they had at least three good songs, right?
Of course, maybe I don't know how radio works. Maybe the stations are the ones making that call. And I suppose there's always a chance I'm not the typical CD buyer.
Sorry about that guy.
-America
What part of that do you consider "talking out of [my] ass"?
The part I responded to where you accused me of having made up the town my parents grew up in and my dad's sister. I don't doubt your credentials. Your town sucked. I just doubt that you can extrapolate your experience to my family's town in the 1940's and 50's (which is roughly the same now. Filled to the brim with people over 70).
If you have two or more humans in close proximity, one of them will find a way to gain advantage over the other(s).
That's just not true. You're going to need at least a few dozen to be absolutely sure one is going to be a jerk, and more if everyone knows each other and has no means of escape from the shame that would come from doing something truly wrong. People aren't nearly the simple self-serving mechanisms you seem to think they are.
Your aunt either doesn't exist...
Dick.
or you should have her locked up for her own safety
She's 50 years older than me and in fine health. That would be tricky.
the environment required to cause that level of trust in any sane human with an IQ over 80 most certainly does not exist.
Have you ever even spoken to someone over 70? Their thought process, in my experience, boils down to "they go to my church, so they're okay," and, "that looks official, so it's okay."
"But at least as long as it continues what protection it offers, a few stupid people will get their money back from evil bastards. I hate stupid people, but I hate evil bastards more."
Sorry, which part of that did I misinterpret?
The part where, as I mentioned, me and the parent poster were both talking about scams in general, not this guy selling moon land. Off-topic, maybe, but only a little.
But the government doesn't have the job title of "babysitter of the weak", as much as they try to wear that particular hat.
But let's still not pretend that them taking action against fraud is making people take risks they otherwise wouldn't, as was the original point.
I grew up in a small rural town.
... Then (if she exists)...
I didn't. I grew up in a suburb, but the town I was talking about is a dying factory town where I've spent quite a bit of time.
And they don't match the Donna Reed TV fantasy world you appear to believe in.
You're a dick, and I'm going to ask that you quit talking out of your ass.
Does this guy really strike you as evil?
No, buddy, but the context wasn't hard to grasp. Go up two parent posts and you'll find it. It was in reply to a comment about eliminating the government's fraud protection efforts for the benefit of stupid people.
... you'd think scams would go away. They won't. The only way that scams will be unprofitable is when government stops "protecting" citizens and lets people learn to be aware of what they're buying.
My aunt doesn't fall for these things because she's protected. She falls for it because she's gullible and has always lived in a town filled with people she can trust absolutely. She's not taking risks because she thinks she has nothing to lose, so the government ceasing its protection is not going to help her. And her situation is exactly like everyone else's. But at least as long as it continues what protection it offers, a few stupid people will get their money back from evil bastards. I hate stupid people, but I hate evil bastards more.
If you want people to learn to distrust, teach them that (and good freaking luck. Those people don't learn things), don't blame the government for trying to help the ones that get screwed.
At 50k per acre, it's almost $1.15 per square foot. Not so cheap-sounding now, is it? Suck on THAT!
Okay, you're right.