This headline needs rewriting as "Man wins Pyrrhic Victory". $7500 worse off and he didn't even get an apology. Hell, if he'd actually been shoplifting he'd have got a smaller fine than that. There was absolutely no reason he needed to blow $7500 on lawyers or whatever. That was his choice as much as if he blew that cash in Vegas. This case was pretty cut and dry once you broke down who was right and wrong. The only thing done legally wrong as opposed to just honest bad judgment was the police officer taking him into custody for no good reason. Even the initial arrest, both citizens and police could be justified on suspicion of shoplifting. But the subsequent charge and detainment once it was clear he didn't steal anything was an abuse of authority. He was clearly able to defend himself and there was no reason he needed to blow a lot of money on anything besides travel expenses and time off from work.
Is offering a proprietary converter box (digital to analog), for a nice monthly fee, going to qualify as available? That could mean that citizens wouldn't be allowed to purchase any third party devices, essentially enlarging cable operator monopolies. Exactly. This isn't the FCC getting tough on the cable companies to give consumers something they want, this is the FCC being manipulated to give the cable companies a good excuse to get everyone using digital cable boxes.
The FCC could have required the cable companies to output a digital signal compatible with the new subsidized converter boxes for over the air broadcasts. And thus make sure that basic cable was broadcast in the same digital format without DRM that would come over the air. Instead, the cable companies get to retain control of the digital hardware by requiring their own converter boxes.
Who needs a broadcast flag to prevent fair use when most people have cable tv service and the cable companies can prevent people from making digital recordings of content by controlling your hardware.
You are a fool to choose a career that doesn't interest you. Pick something you love, and you'll be happy. And as far as money is concerned, if you actually enjoy it, it will show in your work and you will be sought after. Pick "something you love"? That usually ends up being your spouse and your children, and once they come first then making a living (money) comes first. Sure, if you plan to lead a single life and don't care about your own well being, then pick something you love irrespective of income potential. Otherwise pick someone you love and something you are good at that can pay the bills.
You can have a hobby and sometimes your hobby will even become a lucrative thing. But you should go into anything with a full view of what it takes to be successful and how likely that is. Much better than projections about future employment, is to look at the previous trends and current job situation. See where the jobs are and what the trends have been the last few years. Doesn't mean the trend will continue, but it is a good place to start planning.
Apples new word processor looks interesting because it separates content from layout, too bad they don't support ODF I understand that.doc is still dominant, but it seems that Apple would have at least made.odt an option. I would think OpenOffice and thus OpenDocument would be very popular in Schools and Universities and Apple used to at least go after that market.
This story was obviously submitted so that you would see something like an "501 of 896" posting count. It is 100% pure flamebait or perhaps on a higher level a poorly written satire. Sounds like the "study" and article itself is a poorly written political satire, I was actually waiting for the Onion attribution while reading the article. Choosing "W" as the oddball letter and deciding that not following the instructions meant "that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives" is clearly biased, how about concluding instead that 'Conservatives and are less subservient and eager to please than those spineless liberals' as being the conclusion. Try paying conservatives for how many times they follow the instructions for performing a repetitive task and see how the numbers change.
And how do you define "conservative" or "liberal"? How did they define it? Was it self described or tested through question and answer? I am sure their methodology is in the paper, but these are fundamentally meaningless descriptions which include a lot of variability in opinion on specific issues. Also, conservative is one society is often liberal in another, even within different regions of the United States. A Massachusetts' conservative, for instance, might be considered a flaming liberal under most standards.
Not an informative study more of a wordy insult against conservatives, at least based on this article, but a worthy if unintended parody of itself.
Therefore, all the man has to do to be in the right is provide the police with 10% of the proceeds from the sale. Taxes must be pretty low in New Zealand then?!
You order a package from Amazon. Amazon ships it to you via UPS. Along the way, UPS takes your package along a toll road. The toll operator looks inside the truck, sees an Amazon package, wants to force the truck to take the slow lanes unless Amazon pays a toll in addition to the toll UPS is paying. Should that be allowed? That is a good way of looking at this. The Telecoms want to tax the value of the content delivered beyond the standard rate which both the customer and value content providers are already paying.
I am a Verizon FIOS customer and they are holding back a lot of bandwidth that would otherwise be available on that fiber because they want to squeeze a lot more cash out of their customers.
Mathematician here, though this isn't my field. Slashdot isn't a very good place to ask this kind of question, since there aren't many mathematicians on here, and it's a very broad topic. I suggest Usenet -- specificially the sci.math newsgroup. I know at least 50 mathematicians who post regularly, and a lot more lurk (and occassionally answer questions). I think that is probably an inaccurate statement. I am guessing there are more than 50 mathematicians that read Slashdot. Problem is not quantity, it is sifting through the jokes and the offtopic posts, and the helpful suggestions to look elsewhere:) before you get to the guy that actually knows what you are asking and might have an idea of what you want.
As such at a presidential level, it's extremely stacked for a two party system. On other levels where it's a pure popular, who ever gets the most gets the job system, it is easier and indeed third party candidates to win from time to time. But it's a real problem in the presidential election. I mean look at how wound up people got about a president winning the electoral vote without winning the popular vote (also has happened before). Think the fury a congressional election would generate. Most State elections are also very stacked towards a two party system. Where the two parties have primaries to weed out their candidates, leaving the rest to be seen as spoilers in a general election. It is essentially true, because it is designed that way, a third party or independent candidate can split the majority vote and lead to candidates with less popular positions getting elected. It has led to people resigning themselves to either voting Republican or Democrat or not voting at all, not because they don't care, but because the two-parties don't represent them, but the system won't allow a third party.
Really all we can do is bitch about it in blogs and keep our options open in case our unrepresentative government gets too eager.
Ultimately though, I think most people that get elected are Patriots and once enough people realize how unrepresentative our "Democracy" is they will choose to do something about it such as instituting a run-off balloting system or instant run-off elections which allow for more real choices without people having to waste their votes.
That doesn't mean it's over: there's a resolution process over the next few months, culminating in a vote in February, to address the comments submitted with "no, with comments" votes. If the comments are resolved to the voter's satisfaction, the "no" vote can be changed to a "yes". Which really would work to microsoft's benefit since they have already implemented MS OOXML according to their own standard so to go back and change a few things to make member countries happier would make the standard even more incompatible with what they have already implemented in MS Office. And as others have pointed out, a major flaw in the Microsoft license is that they have given people free license to implement OOXML according to the standard, but not according to what they have actually implemented themselves.
I am sure they will be more than happy if competitors are 100% compatible with ISO OOXML, but only 95% percent compatible with MS OOXML. And see how long it takes to hear from Microsoft legal if you call it OOXML, but don't follow the spec so it is compatible with the MS OOXML variant.
After Katrina and New Orleans, I have often thought of the description in "Atlas shrugged" where 'society falls apart'. And I get a little bit scared. Well, societies do fail from time to time for a variety of reasons. Atlas Shrugged portrayed how people can help cause a corrupt society to fail, Katrina showed how a natural event can cause a corrupt society to fail.
Hank was maybe the best-developed, I agree. But to me. all his inner conflict was still one-dimensional. Or maybe I am just a more complicated person than others, and that's why my inner self works so differently from these characters? No, I don't think so.
Well, I think the obviousness of his wife's abuse of him was one dimensional. Like something you might watch on the Lifetime channel (or might not watch if you are smart). But the character moves from being completely committed to a loveless marriage, committed to his work, and latching on to every bit of reason in the face of utter corruption until he is pushed to the breaking point. He then engages in a passionate romance and becomes a revolutionary, loses his love, and ends up in what very much reads like a Gay (before such things were acceptable in polite company) or at least very close companion type of relationship with Taggart's first lover. The writing was at least vivid enough for me to remember that much after many years. My bigger criticism of Rand's writing would be that she was not succinct in conveying the things her characters were feeling. I think she leaves a lot of things up to the imagination and tries to evoke sympathy for Hank Reardon because we see his life's and how much it means to him being slowly taken from him from people that neither deserve it and can't even fully benefit from it without him to keep it together.
As far as real, non-flat character is discernible in the (good) protagonists, they struck me mostly as selfish and snotty pricks who built themselves a grand ideology to conceal it. They are so sure of themselves that you just know that in the real world, sooner or later they would land on their asses, hard. For much of the book I was hoping that something would break through their perfect and contradiction-free little view of the world, but it never happened. In contrast, much of modern literature (forced by the modern world!) was about showing that perfect and contraction-free world views can only be one thing: delusions.
I wonder though what you think were delusions? The characters in the book are very real today as they were then and you needn't work a government job to run into one or two. There are a lot of fearful people out there who try to attain high places in order to meet their own sense of insecurity at the expense of others freedom. I think therein lies the truth in her writing, that a society of drones cannot function, that society requires human intelligence at every level, that ultimately a centralized command and control society is corrupt and against human nature.
And there was real tragedy in this book, not just for the little people when the titans left the world, but for the titans themselves who made great sacrifices in order to act in the way they saw as ethical, right and natural. Maybe a better ending would have had John Galt lose his life in the end for his beliefs, perhaps a more Jesus like figure. But I think ultimately Rand couldn't bring herself to kill him off, then again neither could the writers of the Bible have Jesus turn to dust without resurrecting him. But John Galt was imprisoned and tortured, so it wasn't as if she let him off free without any sacrifice or tragedy.
I found it a shame that Rand didn't expand on this, since it was on of the very few passages of the book where the characters are not on rails to a bright future and of god-like lucidity. This part struck me as having potentially lots of sexual undertones and submission/dominance themes (and it is not the only time in the book), and I can attribute Rand's failure to delve deeper only on either an ineptitude as a writer, or unwillingness to do so. It's a shame, since this conflict (between total personal freedom and voluntary submission) is one of the more interesting things in "objectivism" to me, since here it touches on a general human topic instead of the la-la land it usually concerns itself with.
Right, and all her characters, even the good guys, are unbelievable flat. There is scarcely any character development, the souls of these people have no depth, they have no hidden desires, no demons that haunt them, etc. In short,they are not at all like real people, which makes it just bad writing and a bad idea to hinge a theory of the real world on it. It's enjoyable though, like Star Trek. I thought the character of Hank Rearden was well developed. A lot of inner conflict, sexual tension with the protagonist, a lot of social tension with those whom were living off of his work. Really i thought the four main characters were pretty well developed, except for John Galt being somewhat engimatic and aloof.
No, it is not a book to run the world on. It did become somewhat farcical in the end when society falls apart. But we have seen societies fall apart like that in very similar ways during real revolutions. All in all I think she did a good job of showing how political corruption can eventually cause social chaos and upheaval and the personal toll that it causes people when their dignity is taken away.
I have just spent way too much time googling for a comic that someone once linked in a/. comment. It was possibly titled "Atlas Shrugged, the sequel", or "Atlas Shrugged, Part II", or similar. It tells the story, in approx. one page, of how the story continued after all the Atlas heroes had settled down in their mountain seclusion: after some bragging of how they finally had gotten rid of all the useless people, they discover that they actually have no clue how to do all the mundane every-day tasks these people had done for them, like actually producing metals, cooking, or cleaning up. They all end up having to work the fields, muttering about how much it sucks. It was hilarious, and an extremely to-the-point comment on the shortcomings of Rand's "philosophy". Well, I partially agree that there were short comings in her philosophy as it relates to the real world. Especially, today we live in a very differentiated society where no one person knows how to do every job. I think those of us in any work situation were we rely on others and then change jobs or companies know how startling it is when we suddenly have to do something that seemed easy when other people were doing it.
But I think that is partially portrayed in the book when Dagny Taggart is thrown into that new society and there are no railroads to run, so the first thing she can do in order to make her way is to clean dishes and be John Galt's maid. And it wasn't as if all the 'haves' are portrayed as being superior to the 'have nots'. In fact, the real villains of the book are the ones that do not attain their wealth through being smarter and more hard working than everyone else, but through advancement through interpersonal relations and political capital. If anything it is the corrupting influence of favor without merit that is the villain of Atlas Shrugged. Actual working people are very much portrayed as the unwitting victims in the book, which is an unfavorable treatment in some cases, but it is those that expect others to take care of them and tell them what to do which are treated most harshly. But there is a lot in that book for everyone, even its critics, to find.
Oh and having a near limitless and clean source of power certainly helps when trying to set up your own little enclave in the mountains.
Sorry if this upsets all you libertarians but real life has a way of doing that. A free market is one that has rules that everyone has to follow. A thoughtful libertarian understands that government has an important and proper role in setting rules for the marketplace and enforcing them on everyone equally. I think it is right that government authority should be imposed when any company or individual has achieved a monopoly of control over the market and it is good that elected representatives should make sure that a monopolist doesn't use that market control to keep others from competing or to prevent others from getting goods and services at a fair price.
Liberty and Freedom are not equivalent to anarchy, and you do a disservice to everyone by perpetuating that falsehood.
The flying car is a terrible idea. Besides being extremely dangerous, it is wasteful of energy, has little cargo capacity, and still requires professional maintenance. So, you are saying that short distance air travel would be more dangerous than the million plus people a year that are killed in car accidents? Because if fewer than a million people would be killed then this would be a big improvement to transportation safety.
And 20mpg is much more efficient overall if you are getting where you are going 4 to 10 times faster and if you are taking 4 passengers.
Really your points seem like ignorant fear mongering and I really hope the FAA doesn't listen to people like yourself, because millions of people will die needlessly and our economy will be hobbled if they do.
Yes, and Microsoft has every right to do whatever the hell they want to do with their own damn proprietary OOXML format.
I believe it is the part where Microsoft is pretending that OOXML is an open standard and pretending that it is what is being implemented in Office 2007 that people are calling MS on.
I don't see an intrinsic reason why it would be fairer for government to demand a flat chunk of my time than a flat sum of my money. What business is it of government's if my skills are deemed by the market to be more or less valuable than another's? Well, I would rather think of it as the government is really demanding a persons time rather than money and allowing them to pay a percentage of income in lieu of public service. So the amount they pay is equal to the amount they would otherwise make for that period of time. I really don't see how it would be fair that Michael Jordan would spend 1 second paying his taxes versus making a poor person spend their entire lives paying theirs... that is feudalism not fair taxation.
I think we pay too much in taxes for too many unnecessary things, but still a fixed rate income tax is the fairest way to tax.
When the government hands me a free passport, I don't know how much it really costs, so I would not be inclined to object if they spent too much money producing it. If I have to pay what it costs, then it's easier for me to get a sense of whether I am getting a fair deal or not (in terms of how much I am paying for the passport). ... assuming that 100% of the cost would be passed on to you in the form of a fee, then yes it might be a good way to gauge government efficiency. But more likely you pay some arbitrary set fee which does not reflect the real cost of the bureaucracy which is in place to handle passports. So your taxes will likely be paying most of the cost anyway with the fee only paying for a small portion of the cost.
First there is tax fairness. I don't think the free market should value everyone's labor the same, but I think government should. Income tax does that, ideally it would be flat rather than progressive, but the general idea is that we make people work the same amount of time, whatever they do, every year in order to contribute to society. Currently that works out to be about 3 months of your, mine and everyone else's labor which goes towards the common good. Obviously, excepting those that cannot work for physical ailments and such.
However, a fee based system values people's labor differently by putting a greater burden on those, (as the free market has determined) who have less valuable skills. So, fees are inherently an inequitable and undemocratic means of taxation in effect.
Secondly, you might not see it differently, but an elected representative haggling over a budget might. Instead of being seen as a cost, programs that generate their own independent revenue are seen more as an opportunity to create additional government jobs. Even if those jobs don't go to party insiders and loyalists, they will be jobs that will give more people a financial stake in supporting the status quo and expanding government. It is self perpetuating, very organic and ultimately it is very bad for society.
Much better to make politicians, bureaucrats and citizens alike see plainly the chunk of people's lives they are demanding as one percentage and then to force them to work within those means. That means forcing politicians to choose between checkpoints and Federal IDs or new schools and better trained soldiers.
What we don't want is what Mitt Romney did here in Massachusetts. He balanced the budget not by reducing the size of government, but by raising fees by half a billion dollars. Things like fees to be allowed to have your marriage recognized by the State, fees to own a gun, fees to run a business, etc.
Sure I can see some fees as being valid. Say if you loose your Passport, then you get charged a fee to get it replaced. Fees to prevent abuse. But if it is a matter of public safety and we are going to be forced as part of our daily lives to have something or do something, then the general expenses should be paid for from the public coffers and those coffers should be filled in an equitable way.
But why have physical IDs nowadays anyway? What is the point? Seems more like an excuse to charge a fee... like 'you get this shiny ID with a hologram sticker on it and we get your money'. Just put everyone's records in the computer and network everything and then just ask people their name or scan their fingerprints, then pop their picture and record up on the screen. But for God's sake, don't stop everyone's lives when the network goes down like happened in LA last week. Which is, I suppose, the point of having people carry around a physical token in the first place.
But then that goes back to one of my original points, what does knowing someone's name and last known physical address or even anything about their record or credit report tell you about their intentions? If you treat people suspiciously aren't you just going to piss them off and create the enemy that you feared? To me, you either let guns and explosives into a Federal building or you don't. Treating people differently based on some bullet point on their resume or their skin color isn't going to help. And charging us a fee for the pleasure is just a kick in the pants.
Okay, so I might have said more clearly that there shouldn't be a direct fee and that issuing passports should be paid for out of our general Federal Taxes. The cost would be probably be about $10 Billion to start but less than a billion a year after that to continue.
Social Security cards are given out without a fee, unlike passports, partly because people have a right to make a living and if people weren't allowed to work without paying a fee then that would be very unconstitutional. So, handing out social security cards is just considered as part of the cost of administering the Social Security program.
Likewise, if we are going to start living in a police state, then we shouldn't have to pay a fee at every checkpoint like we are living in a tin hat dictatorship. I think you will see if you don't let the government get away with charging exorbitant fees then a police state becomes a much more undesirable thing to pay for when weighed against spending money on things that constituents actually want.
Police states are not about surveillance and crime, they are about fees and taxes.
Oh I am sure someone will just add another few thousand pages of law to account for all the exceptions to our hair brained rules.
Laws are being written like computer code these days, bad computer code. And then at some point having too many poorly conceived and written laws becomes the same as having no laws at all. Nothing to do but hit the reset button then, and I hope you aren't doing anything important when that happens.
Given that there are two competing potential standards and one has patents and the other doesn't then why should ISO choose the one with patents? There aren't two competing potential ISO standards.
OpenDocument format is already an ISO standard and has been since last year.
I think OOXML has already achieved Microsoft objective of creating confusion and doubt in the marketplace. ISO should swiftly reject OOXML to help eliminate that doubt.
Other than closing loopholes, I'm not sure why they require it to enter a federal park - are we afraid the terrorist will go after the deer and chipmunks? Closing loopholes? What loophole would that be? I suppose they are most concerned about people visiting national monuments in the capital and such and doing bad things to them... not that knowing what someone's name and last known address really prevents people from doing bad things, but it sure does make politicians look like they aren't quite so stupid when they can identify the bad guys after the fact.
Even the Federal building access seems very questionable, it really doesn't matter who I am as long as I am not carrying an AK47 or some C4. If I get called for Jury Duty and need to show a passport to get to the court room... well that seems pretty stupid to me and I don't think I would comply even if I have a passport floating around.
If passports are going to be required universally for access to public spaces, then they should be given out for free along with citizenship like a social security card is.
The point is to have a clean article to read, if you care about the history then look at the history.
Most current events or controversial subjects and people are appropriately tagged as such and a warning is included in the article. Perhaps the "last modified" date could be included in this warning section pretty easily instead of at the bottom of the page. But I think having colored backgrounds in the article itself to show changed content is a terrible idea for the default view. Articles can be hard enough to read already with disjointed writing styles and content to make them even busier with different background colors just puts Wikipedia on the slippery slope to greater unreadability.
Maybe there should be some visible element depicting the last few significant changes. It's not enough that the data is available. It must be obvious to get and easy to understand. That would be information overload. The history of edits is found by clicking the "history" tab and clicking to show the edits between any two versions of the article. I don't think it gets any easier than that without some sort of flash animation.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that the signal is degraded. That is all they are interested in.
The FCC could have required the cable companies to output a digital signal compatible with the new subsidized converter boxes for over the air broadcasts. And thus make sure that basic cable was broadcast in the same digital format without DRM that would come over the air. Instead, the cable companies get to retain control of the digital hardware by requiring their own converter boxes.
Who needs a broadcast flag to prevent fair use when most people have cable tv service and the cable companies can prevent people from making digital recordings of content by controlling your hardware.
You can have a hobby and sometimes your hobby will even become a lucrative thing. But you should go into anything with a full view of what it takes to be successful and how likely that is. Much better than projections about future employment, is to look at the previous trends and current job situation. See where the jobs are and what the trends have been the last few years. Doesn't mean the trend will continue, but it is a good place to start planning.
And how do you define "conservative" or "liberal"? How did they define it? Was it self described or tested through question and answer? I am sure their methodology is in the paper, but these are fundamentally meaningless descriptions which include a lot of variability in opinion on specific issues. Also, conservative is one society is often liberal in another, even within different regions of the United States. A Massachusetts' conservative, for instance, might be considered a flaming liberal under most standards.
Not an informative study more of a wordy insult against conservatives, at least based on this article, but a worthy if unintended parody of itself.
I am a Verizon FIOS customer and they are holding back a lot of bandwidth that would otherwise be available on that fiber because they want to squeeze a lot more cash out of their customers.
Really all we can do is bitch about it in blogs and keep our options open in case our unrepresentative government gets too eager.
Ultimately though, I think most people that get elected are Patriots and once enough people realize how unrepresentative our "Democracy" is they will choose to do something about it such as instituting a run-off balloting system or instant run-off elections which allow for more real choices without people having to waste their votes.
I am sure they will be more than happy if competitors are 100% compatible with ISO OOXML, but only 95% percent compatible with MS OOXML. And see how long it takes to hear from Microsoft legal if you call it OOXML, but don't follow the spec so it is compatible with the MS OOXML variant.
Hank was maybe the best-developed, I agree. But to me. all his inner conflict was still one-dimensional. Or maybe I am just a more complicated person than others, and that's why my inner self works so differently from these characters? No, I don't think so.
Well, I think the obviousness of his wife's abuse of him was one dimensional. Like something you might watch on the Lifetime channel (or might not watch if you are smart). But the character moves from being completely committed to a loveless marriage, committed to his work, and latching on to every bit of reason in the face of utter corruption until he is pushed to the breaking point. He then engages in a passionate romance and becomes a revolutionary, loses his love, and ends up in what very much reads like a Gay (before such things were acceptable in polite company) or at least very close companion type of relationship with Taggart's first lover. The writing was at least vivid enough for me to remember that much after many years. My bigger criticism of Rand's writing would be that she was not succinct in conveying the things her characters were feeling. I think she leaves a lot of things up to the imagination and tries to evoke sympathy for Hank Reardon because we see his life's and how much it means to him being slowly taken from him from people that neither deserve it and can't even fully benefit from it without him to keep it together.
As far as real, non-flat character is discernible in the (good) protagonists, they struck me mostly as selfish and snotty pricks who built themselves a grand ideology to conceal it. They are so sure of themselves that you just know that in the real world, sooner or later they would land on their asses, hard. For much of the book I was hoping that something would break through their perfect and contradiction-free little view of the world, but it never happened. In contrast, much of modern literature (forced by the modern world!) was about showing that perfect and contraction-free world views can only be one thing: delusions.
I wonder though what you think were delusions? The characters in the book are very real today as they were then and you needn't work a government job to run into one or two. There are a lot of fearful people out there who try to attain high places in order to meet their own sense of insecurity at the expense of others freedom. I think therein lies the truth in her writing, that a society of drones cannot function, that society requires human intelligence at every level, that ultimately a centralized command and control society is corrupt and against human nature.
And there was real tragedy in this book, not just for the little people when the titans left the world, but for the titans themselves who made great sacrifices in order to act in the way they saw as ethical, right and natural. Maybe a better ending would have had John Galt lose his life in the end for his beliefs, perhaps a more Jesus like figure. But I think ultimately Rand couldn't bring herself to kill him off, then again neither could the writers of the Bible have Jesus turn to dust without resurrecting him. But John Galt was imprisoned and tortured, so it wasn't as if she let him off free without any sacrifice or tragedy.
I found it a shame that Rand didn't expand on this, since it was on of the very few passages of the book where the characters are not on rails to a bright future and of god-like lucidity. This part struck me as having potentially lots of sexual undertones and submission/dominance themes (and it is not the only time in the book), and I can attribute Rand's failure to delve deeper only on either an ineptitude as a writer, or unwillingness to do so. It's a shame, since this conflict (between total personal freedom and voluntary submission) is one of the more interesting things in "objectivism" to me, since here it touches on a general human topic instead of the la-la land it usually concerns itself with.
As for the sexual themes, I thi
No, it is not a book to run the world on. It did become somewhat farcical in the end when society falls apart. But we have seen societies fall apart like that in very similar ways during real revolutions. All in all I think she did a good job of showing how political corruption can eventually cause social chaos and upheaval and the personal toll that it causes people when their dignity is taken away. I have just spent way too much time googling for a comic that someone once linked in a
It was hilarious, and an extremely to-the-point comment on the shortcomings of Rand's "philosophy". Well, I partially agree that there were short comings in her philosophy as it relates to the real world. Especially, today we live in a very differentiated society where no one person knows how to do every job. I think those of us in any work situation were we rely on others and then change jobs or companies know how startling it is when we suddenly have to do something that seemed easy when other people were doing it.
But I think that is partially portrayed in the book when Dagny Taggart is thrown into that new society and there are no railroads to run, so the first thing she can do in order to make her way is to clean dishes and be John Galt's maid. And it wasn't as if all the 'haves' are portrayed as being superior to the 'have nots'. In fact, the real villains of the book are the ones that do not attain their wealth through being smarter and more hard working than everyone else, but through advancement through interpersonal relations and political capital. If anything it is the corrupting influence of favor without merit that is the villain of Atlas Shrugged. Actual working people are very much portrayed as the unwitting victims in the book, which is an unfavorable treatment in some cases, but it is those that expect others to take care of them and tell them what to do which are treated most harshly. But there is a lot in that book for everyone, even its critics, to find.
Oh and having a near limitless and clean source of power certainly helps when trying to set up your own little enclave in the mountains.
Liberty and Freedom are not equivalent to anarchy, and you do a disservice to everyone by perpetuating that falsehood.
And 20mpg is much more efficient overall if you are getting where you are going 4 to 10 times faster and if you are taking 4 passengers.
Really your points seem like ignorant fear mongering and I really hope the FAA doesn't listen to people like yourself, because millions of people will die needlessly and our economy will be hobbled if they do.
Yes, and Microsoft has every right to do whatever the hell they want to do with their own damn proprietary OOXML format.
I believe it is the part where Microsoft is pretending that OOXML is an open standard and pretending that it is what is being implemented in Office 2007 that people are calling MS on.
I think we pay too much in taxes for too many unnecessary things, but still a fixed rate income tax is the fairest way to tax. When the government hands me a free passport, I don't know how much it really costs, so I would not be inclined to object if they spent too much money producing it. If I have to pay what it costs, then it's easier for me to get a sense of whether I am getting a fair deal or not (in terms of how much I am paying for the passport). ... assuming that 100% of the cost would be passed on to you in the form of a fee, then yes it might be a good way to gauge government efficiency. But more likely you pay some arbitrary set fee which does not reflect the real cost of the bureaucracy which is in place to handle passports. So your taxes will likely be paying most of the cost anyway with the fee only paying for a small portion of the cost.
Well, there are a couple differences.
First there is tax fairness. I don't think the free market should value everyone's labor the same, but I think government should. Income tax does that, ideally it would be flat rather than progressive, but the general idea is that we make people work the same amount of time, whatever they do, every year in order to contribute to society. Currently that works out to be about 3 months of your, mine and everyone else's labor which goes towards the common good. Obviously, excepting those that cannot work for physical ailments and such.
However, a fee based system values people's labor differently by putting a greater burden on those, (as the free market has determined) who have less valuable skills. So, fees are inherently an inequitable and undemocratic means of taxation in effect.
Secondly, you might not see it differently, but an elected representative haggling over a budget might. Instead of being seen as a cost, programs that generate their own independent revenue are seen more as an opportunity to create additional government jobs. Even if those jobs don't go to party insiders and loyalists, they will be jobs that will give more people a financial stake in supporting the status quo and expanding government. It is self perpetuating, very organic and ultimately it is very bad for society.
Much better to make politicians, bureaucrats and citizens alike see plainly the chunk of people's lives they are demanding as one percentage and then to force them to work within those means. That means forcing politicians to choose between checkpoints and Federal IDs or new schools and better trained soldiers.
What we don't want is what Mitt Romney did here in Massachusetts. He balanced the budget not by reducing the size of government, but by raising fees by half a billion dollars. Things like fees to be allowed to have your marriage recognized by the State, fees to own a gun, fees to run a business, etc.
Sure I can see some fees as being valid. Say if you loose your Passport, then you get charged a fee to get it replaced. Fees to prevent abuse. But if it is a matter of public safety and we are going to be forced as part of our daily lives to have something or do something, then the general expenses should be paid for from the public coffers and those coffers should be filled in an equitable way.
But why have physical IDs nowadays anyway? What is the point? Seems more like an excuse to charge a fee... like 'you get this shiny ID with a hologram sticker on it and we get your money'. Just put everyone's records in the computer and network everything and then just ask people their name or scan their fingerprints, then pop their picture and record up on the screen. But for God's sake, don't stop everyone's lives when the network goes down like happened in LA last week. Which is, I suppose, the point of having people carry around a physical token in the first place.
But then that goes back to one of my original points, what does knowing someone's name and last known physical address or even anything about their record or credit report tell you about their intentions? If you treat people suspiciously aren't you just going to piss them off and create the enemy that you feared? To me, you either let guns and explosives into a Federal building or you don't. Treating people differently based on some bullet point on their resume or their skin color isn't going to help. And charging us a fee for the pleasure is just a kick in the pants.
Okay, so I might have said more clearly that there shouldn't be a direct fee and that issuing passports should be paid for out of our general Federal Taxes. The cost would be probably be about $10 Billion to start but less than a billion a year after that to continue.
Social Security cards are given out without a fee, unlike passports, partly because people have a right to make a living and if people weren't allowed to work without paying a fee then that would be very unconstitutional. So, handing out social security cards is just considered as part of the cost of administering the Social Security program.
Likewise, if we are going to start living in a police state, then we shouldn't have to pay a fee at every checkpoint like we are living in a tin hat dictatorship. I think you will see if you don't let the government get away with charging exorbitant fees then a police state becomes a much more undesirable thing to pay for when weighed against spending money on things that constituents actually want.
Police states are not about surveillance and crime, they are about fees and taxes.
Oh I am sure someone will just add another few thousand pages of law to account for all the exceptions to our hair brained rules.
Laws are being written like computer code these days, bad computer code. And then at some point having too many poorly conceived and written laws becomes the same as having no laws at all. Nothing to do but hit the reset button then, and I hope you aren't doing anything important when that happens.
OpenDocument format is already an ISO standard and has been since last year.
I think OOXML has already achieved Microsoft objective of creating confusion and doubt in the marketplace. ISO should swiftly reject OOXML to help eliminate that doubt.
Even the Federal building access seems very questionable, it really doesn't matter who I am as long as I am not carrying an AK47 or some C4. If I get called for Jury Duty and need to show a passport to get to the court room... well that seems pretty stupid to me and I don't think I would comply even if I have a passport floating around.
If passports are going to be required universally for access to public spaces, then they should be given out for free along with citizenship like a social security card is.
The point is to have a clean article to read, if you care about the history then look at the history.
Most current events or controversial subjects and people are appropriately tagged as such and a warning is included in the article. Perhaps the "last modified" date could be included in this warning section pretty easily instead of at the bottom of the page. But I think having colored backgrounds in the article itself to show changed content is a terrible idea for the default view. Articles can be hard enough to read already with disjointed writing styles and content to make them even busier with different background colors just puts Wikipedia on the slippery slope to greater unreadability.