The good thing is it only covers a very small section of the city. There are very active civil liberties groups in NYC. As soon as there is any abuse (that they discover, of course) they will be making a huge stink. It is intended as a prototype for wider deployment and for more American Cities to follow.
I don't have great civil liberties concerns, as long as punishments and laws are reduced in accordance with the police's new abilities to enforce the law. Previously we gave the police and courts greater discretion and harsher punishments on the argument that only a few lawbreakers could be caught and so the laws and punishments have been devised with the idea that for the few that you catch you must have a deterrent effect by imposing a harsher penalty.
Having persistent surveillance and more pressure on police to enforce the laws universally will lead to less discretion and inappropriately harsh penalties for misdemeanors. Drunks for instance should not be convicted of felony lewd and lascivious act for urinating on the street in the middle of the night... maybe a $30 ticket, but they are not a sex offender unless they were waving their thing around a playground in the middle of a crowd of children.
We have been desensitized to harsh sentences for commonly stupid things that people do. And given that there are an enormity of stupid and inappropriate laws on the books, especially in New York... think permits for free speech zones, and illegal possession of a weapon for chefs carrying knives in the trunk of their car. Universally applying the laws we have without discretion will lead either to a paralysing of society in fear of the law, I feel we are already close to that now or else laws will be adjusted to make so many exceptions to the general rules to make a mockery of the concept of equal protection.
And then there won't be room for abuse, because the system of laws will already be abusive just by following the letter of an imperfect law. If you don't see this happening already, then just look closer.
In NYC most of the cameras are private. The police aren't actively using these private cameras to monitor citizens. They don't have anywhere near the manpower to make this possible even if they wanted to. Camera footage is typically only viewed by the police if it happened to catch a crime. not so.
And wouldn't the original meaning of "journalist" be more akin to "blogger" than "reporter" anyway. I could see "reporter" or "investigative reporter" being a label for someone who actually fact checks and takes an unbiased tone in their reporting of stories, but to write in a "journal" which is the word at the root of "journalist" is no different that to write in a log, which is at the root of "blog" (being a contraction of "web log"). Journalism and blogging should contain some personal viewpoint and analysis and not necessarily just new facts that were previously not public knowledge.
Traditional journalism, in my lifetime, has largely meant rehashing of government released information. Fact checking has only really meant whether the government really released certain information or not, or is anyone publicly contradicting what the press release (or what a "unnamed high level government official") has said. And it is pretty impossible to fact check many types of government information, without leaks, unless what is being said is completely at odds with reality.
Real investigative journalism (you know when some out of luck public servant gets outed for taking bribes) is few and far between and is usually targeted at some bureaucrat or elected official who is out of favor with the political elite. Whereas well connected people like Ted Kennedy can literally kill someone and run for President with some level of press support just a few years later.
To say that journalism is or was ever more than a bunch of people trying to make a few bucks writing for a living about current events is to write just a little bit of revisionist history or is to ignore the vast majority of very mediocre writing that has found its way to print. Mediocre and just plain bad writing is nothing new. And the so called "training" that journalist go through could be taught in an afternoon to someone with two halves of a brain.
While small pieces are likely to be burned up in the atmosphere, this isn't exactly a joyous event.
Atmospheric heating of the objects, if there are enough of them, can result in a significant increase in the temperature of the atmosphere in general. This is the very, very bad effect of either the "Armageddon" or the endgame in "Deep Impact".
Deflection is the right answer. Probably the only good answer. Totally depends on the original size of the asteroid/comet and the resulting size of the fragments. The smaller that both are, the better off we would be. Something just a couple hundred meters across like the estimated size of apophis and it might make sense to break it up into as many chunks as possible. Anything less than a few meters diameter in size will not cause much damage. Spread out over a large enough area, or over the ocean and meteors that size will not cause much damage at all. I think the correct answer is that it really just depends on the size and composition of the asteroid and how long we have to deflect it or pulverize it, but I don't think you should dismiss the idea of destroying an asteroid unless it is bigger than about half a kilometer wide. Heck even vaporizing some portion of the rock will have a potentially beneficial effect to reduce overall damage. Definitely, deflection is the best way to deal with an asteroid threat, but don't rule out just blowing it up either. And if we get short notice it would be our only option.
One of the implications of such patents is that anyone attempting to decode their contents may find themselves in violation of MS's patents. In the US, such decoding can be a crime that can get you a $500,000 fine and five years in a federal prison. I read that as... now Microsoft is literally trying to bend us over. Not just screwing us over with perpetual fees to access the product of our own work.
[quote]While we are at it, let's make the Republicans and Democrats the only legal parties so as to reduce ambiguity, save money, and remove the third party spoiler effect.[/quote]
People use tactical voting to mitigate the spoiler effect... which is the problem. With a rigged two-party system, people like me don't get a candidate that they can vote for, because you get parties which end up with alliances which de facto disallow candidates of particular combinations of positions. So, for instance you won't see a pro-choice and pro-gun rights candidate get nominated for the general election, even though that might be just fine with the general electorate. And you won't see an anti big government candidate from either party because you get the most allies in political party by handing out government paychecks to supporters, their relatives and friends.
Other combinations are also de facto disallowed from time to time when activists get control over one of the party's. Can you imagine a Democrat that wanted to cut taxes? Or a Republican who wanted to cut the defense budget?
With the nature of politics controlled by private institutions which are in turn controlled by unelected activists, the democratic and representative form of government is threatened.
If anything we should ban special treatment for the two-parties on the ballot and we can best mitigate the spoiler problem by using run-off ballots.
Just a bit less portable. Which is the whole point from the providers standpoint. Understand this: Companies will try try try and try to get you to buy into their proprietary addressing and communication scheme. "They" want you to be tied to their service, so that either you continue to pay them or they continue to get revenue from advertising to you. As google's gmail has shown, with their conversation threading and integration with IM, email is just a simple protocol for sending messages which can be read and sent from and to different clients. Cell phone text messages are convenient ways to send quick messages to other people that have cell phones, and they do a good job of filtering out spam, but email addresses are key for business communications so that you have a good idea that the person really is affiliated with that business and the protocol is very flexible and simple so that it could be used with a variety of clients, even cell phones.
Remember AOL Intant Messaging? Still around, but for a while there people thought it would be the only relevant communication protocol around. AOL itself was at first a little reluctant to open up its email network to be able to send and receive messages from the outside... it took a large number of people wanting to talk with college kids to make it happen. It is the ultimate goal of many companies to have a monopoly over our communication protocols, it is up to customers to make sure that we never again let one company or even a small number of companies control all our communications options.
But remember, it is the ultimate goal of many companies to have a monopoly over our communication protocols.
It could have been just a stupid random act or it could have something to do with the billions of dollars Microsoft invested in Comcast... that's a tough call.
Wind power is now almost the same cost per kWh as coal, natural gas or oil, but you have to have big enough turbines in constantly windy locations. And it is cheaper than nuclear, because of all the regulatory costs associated with using nuclear fuel. Much cheaper than solar because the solar panels cost a lot.
But you do have to have enough turbines in the right locations with enough constant wind to make it worth it. Having them tethered to the sea bed means that you can just get a tug to bring them back to shore for repair or could even just swap out an old one with a new one relatively quickly when the time comes. But the biggest advantage of having them farther out at sea in deeper water is that they will be over the horizon so they can be bigger than if you have them around where people live. The bigger the turbine, the more efficient it is and so it is more cost efficient. There is extra cost laying the undersea cables to get the electricity to shore, but siting a landing for a cable is a lot easier than getting a seaside community to let a power company clutter up their ocean views or a State to give up its majestic mountain tops to wind farms.
Yes, there will always be some time that there is less power output during calmer days, but that can be dealt with by storing excess energy from the more windy days, or simply by having wind as a percentage of energy production, so that more expensive (when resources are more scarce) oil and natural gas generators can go offline for maintenance during high wind periods.
I would like to give a little perspective to the US System.
US employer based health care grew directly from WWII tax and rationing policy. During the war the income tax was extremely high and rationing was in place. But workers needed to be taken care of in order to maintain productivity. Health care and other "benefits" therefore became tax exempt and were excluded from the income tax calculation. That system made sense during wartime and afterwards when much of the US had lifetime employment and society valued life differently than we do today.
Then during the 1970s in a wrongheaded approach to controlling health care costs, government encouraged the establishment of HMOs and other forms of insurance middlemen with the idea that it would be in their interest to control costs and provide the most benefits. But the government still propped up employer based health care primarily as a response to the generous benefits that were lavished on the big unions by GM and Ford and the big industrial companies. The fear amongst many older union workers was that they would lose out on benefits they were soon going to start really needing.
In the US you get to deduct health insurance expenses only if it is provided through an employer (that might change once health insurance is essentially a tax as it is now in Massachusetts), but health insurance that you buy on your own because maybe you found better insurance outside your employers plans (which the employer might have gotten kickbacks from the insurance companies to exclusively provide) doesn't get you a deduction at all. The effect of which is to hand over buying power to your employer even though they might not even be subsidizing the insurance at all, so they will generally offer 3 plans, the least of which is not likely to be chosen by those who decided on the plans, but which is most likely to be chosen by the lowest paid employees. This distortion, putting purchasing decisions in the hands of people that don't have a direct interest in what is being purchased helps to cause the ever increasing medical costs which the employers are more than happy to support with their employees money. There is also a more insidious effect in that the lower cost plans subsidize the actual costs of the higher benefit plans because the lower costs plans provide fewer benefits and charge higher deductibles making it impractical to actually use them. So, you have a system where it is the decision makers that benefit from screwing over the weakest employees in their organizations.
Far from being a system where the free market acts in a healthy and natural way to control costs, the US government has created a system where inequality rules and fear is used as the primary motivating factor in all decisions.
Which brings us to Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, we have chosen to push the current system to its logical conclusion and completely take buying power out of the hands of individuals. Individuals will now have to choose between a dozen health insurance plans which could cost as much as 10-16% of a persons yearly income for those in the middle income range (but much less a percentage for the high income persons). At the low end, the plans are basically worthless because of high co payments ($100 to 150) to discourage doctors and hospital visits and a person will still be forced to pay up to $5000 of the yearly medical bill when they actually get sick. Meaning that the lower income persons likely to choose such a plan will likely be bankrupted by an illness anyway.
The moral theory being applied here is that by at least forcing people to pay into the insurance system now even though they are young and unlikely to get seriously ill, then they will be "prepaying" for when they eventually do get old and more prone to disease. A theory which seems very convenient for the older and richer people that want to get subsidized by the young and healthy, but as we see with social security such a system works well when population is growing and soci
You picked a pretty poor example. In 2004 the early front runner for the dems was Howard Dean. Kerry was widely seen as the leading contender in the Summer of 2003 when Howard Dean was just a fringe candidate, then Howard Dean came on strong and made a decent run at it until the scream in Iowa played into the fringe candidate image that had been spread around by the press for so many months So it knocked him back down. If it hadn't been for that original portrayal, then a single hoarse yell may not have been taken the same way it was. And despite many political flaws, including the fact that many veteran's groups despised and considered John Kerry almost as much of a traitor as Jane Fonda, Kerry was groomed as the War Hero candidate.
It is best not to confuse "front runner" in the polls and "front runner" with the pols.
If you could separate out representation on tax and spending, from representation on civil and criminal laws that apply to everyone, then it would be most fair to only allow representation on tax and spend issues from those being taxed, but still allow representation by everyone on what laws we live under. But that is not the way things are divided.
An interesting idea though, if we could split up the two forms of lawmaking into different branches of the legislature. So, say the Senate makes civil and criminal laws while the house of representatives makes tax and spending laws. Would take another revolution to happen, so I wouldn't make any bets on it, but an interesting idea. Maybe something for the states to experiment with.
Everyone, to vote, needs a voter registration card (or your vote is provisional), that being the case making this voter id card have a picture and still be free is *not* any more of a hurdle for the poor than current voter id cards. I've never heard of this. Where I vote, Massachusetts, you need to tell them who you are and where you live and they verify this according to the voter list they have. No need for any card or ID as long as you are registered.
Im with you on the free but it takes more than 10 minutes now and why should 10 minuted or half an hour make a difference? should voting not have more of a commitment then say the dmv? Right, so lets make that commitment proportional to your position in society. If you make 10 times what a poor person makes, then you have to wait ten times as long to vote... seems fair to me if people need to prove an equal commitment to democracy.
There are many ways we could put hurdles in front of the weak to prevent them from having a say in society.
LOL I live in a 'rich suburb' (its ok I live in an apartment so I myself am not rolling in it) and I had to wait far longer than a minute or two to vote the last time. The number and locates of polling places is set up locally not by the fed so if the inner city which is usually vvery heavily democrat has too few polling places you know where to look. How long then? And if you are living in an apartment, then maybe you are really in a poorer district in a rich town? What I am suggesting is that there should be at least a maximum number of registered voters per polling place/polling worker/polling machine otherwise it is de facto disenfranchisement. No, I don't think disenfranchisement should be simply measured by how long you have to wait in line, things can happen and people should be expected to step up during exceptional circumstances, but if hours long lines are a predictable byproduct of not providing enough ballots or polling machines or places to fill out your ballot, then I think it is reasonable for the Federal Government to issue guidelines for managing Federal elections.
Mass media doesn't pick the candidates, that is backwards... the party power brokers tell the media who has a chance to be nominated and they go along like sheep to the slaughter. Just look at Kerry in 2004, he was the declared the front runner far in advance because he had the most party support. Media would love an underdog story, but they are savvy enough to know the system is rigged and the only competition is going to be between which of the two candidates to be nominated by the two-parties will get elected.
I would describe the American primary system like such: The party leadership and organizers choose who they want to support, then they present them to their members and the general public to vet them, only if the members and public find something they really dislike about the candidate then does the party find someone else. Only time there is real competition is when party leadership is nearly equally divided over who they want to support.
Now a lot of people just thought to themselves: 'what is wrong with that' or 'that sounds like democracy to me' Well, they are wrong. Democracy is about fair elections not just elections. Democracy isn't just about being presented with a multiple choice question.
Oh yeah, and we could use some actual candidates to vote for. Only way to legislate that is to reduce the number of signatures needed for ballot access and level the playing field by creating non-partisan run-off elections.
Now if we could just get mandatory picture IDs for voting, we'd eliminate nearly all of the election rigging. That this is a major problem is a fallacy spread by Republicans to try and prevent poor people that otherwise have no need for a picture ID not to vote. Make picture IDs free for everyone, not cost $50 or whatever they cost these days and not make people wait more than 10 minutes in line, and I might agree with you.
Better to just make sure people aren't registered in more than one town.
Oh and there should be a requirement for a certain number of polling stations per number of registered voters, otherwise big cities with not enough polling stations are effectively disenfranchising their citizens. Nobody should be made to wait over an hour to vote, while we in the rich suburbs never have to wait more than a minute or two.
What spam filters? In your client software? Because what they are selling is a paid for whitelist at the ISP email server, so if you are running spam filters on your own email server, then this wouldn't effect you. For webmail users it would mean that paid for emails would go right into your inbox (as I suspect some less scrupulous email providers have been doing all along).
Like the junk mail that gets sent to your house, it would be up to the receiver to do with it whatever they wanted, but clearly it is an effective form of advertisement and some industries seem to rely on it for advertisement... which they can't do right now with email because of the spam connotation. But if the ISP says they are going to do this and you are their customer, especially if you aren't paying much or anything for the email, then it would effectively legitimize a form of unsolicited email.
The charge is invalid because it flouts privacy laws. Under the fourth amendment the expectation of privacy is not reasonable at such public places as automobile thoroughfares. The 4th amendment is not a defense against this charge. The fourth amendment protects privacy of people from the government, not the other way around. I believe the 1st amendment would be appropriately applied here, to protect the right of the person recording in a public space.
But it is better to just apply the actual state statute in this case which provides an exemption for public places rather than try to make a freedom of expression argument which is much more nuanced.
I would expect a police officer acting on public grounds would not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. A police officer, acting on public grounds... and... as it is explained in the article was already being recorded by a police recording device back in the cruiser!
Thanks for citing the statute... even though the person tried to hide the recording device, it was clearly not a violation since there was absolutely no expectation of privacy on the part of the patrolman. There is nothing ambiguous about this case.
But the law should still be changed to say what can be done with unauthorized recordings, not whether they can be made in the first place.
We all know that there is a difference between trying to embarrass an ex girlfriend with a recording of phone sex posted online and trying to embarrass a police officer or politician because they acted inappropriately or in a corrupt manner. Should be the same rules as apply to publishing photographs: expectation of privacy, notoriety and commercial intent should be considered with penalties that are civil and not criminal.
and a judge will hopefully sort this all out. Or maybe I have too much faith in the system:) I really hope this is the case, but it sounds like he has been convinced that he technically violated the law and will be happy with a lesser charge. But he didn't violate the law, so caving is just going to embolden police and prosecutors to overreach.
What are you getting for the 1/4 cent per email, assuming your email is not spam? An assurance that Goodmail will not misclassify it as spam? Yes, this is definately a net neutrality issue, but I think the whole point of this is for businesses to pay for a way for unsolicited emails to get through... meaning spam. The receiver would likely already be able to "whitelist" other senders to ensure they get through.
Goodmail is in essence creating a new way for "legitimate businesses" like coke, nike or mortgage lenders to spam people. Let's not be confused here, these are bulk email rates not for individual to individual. Businesses are really desperate for ways to reach people with their marketing, and sending unsolicited email gets too much backlash and negative attention. Many companies get big money from other companies wanting to reach customers who have opted into their mailing lists, the ISPs and email providers want a piece of that action.
This isn't in any way meant to help email subscribers or recipients reduce junk email, it is meant to increase junk email.
You've got some good point. However, that's not the opionions of the majority of the CIOs in US. What I'm trying to say is that for the CIOs it is far more important for them to look good while keeping their job, and in many cases their conclusion is staying with MS Prodouct, non-withstanding the Office 2007 and Windows Vista. What I am saying is that a CIO that actually cares about their job beyond just treading water for a few years while they cash in stock options and make enough money to get out, they need to consider the longer term well being of their company. Getting stuck with Microsoft as an unintended business partner on their terms is not good for your business.
They look far too different for too many average Joe to accpet them. However, Office 2000 and Office 2003 are just fine for most people. Again, I think this "average joe" view you have is completely wrong. I find it is much more the very few "power users" of excel and the like that are the ones that have so much invested in certain products, learning all the details of their use, that they don't want jump to a new software product. But for the vaste majority of "average joe" users they could care less what document viewer they use every once in a while to read a memo written as an attachment. And you don't need to force everyone to drop MS Office in order to standardize on an OpenDocument Format, but it does make it harder to enforce an OpenDocument policy when MS products will try to get you to save in their own formats.
I have used Open Office myself. Be honest with you however, I can still tell the subtle difference between it and Office 2k or 2k3 that may cause issues with the Average Joe. My parents both decides it is far easier to use Office 2000 and 2003 than using Open Office, just to give you two examples of people who won't care about "getting screwed" by MS licensing issue. Now if a lot of people don't care about the issue itself, then by definition liking the deal or not becomes a moral issue, whether you like the terms or not. At work I uninstalled MS Office because I couldn't patch it without the original CD. Figured if it was going to screw up my system with patch warning, but wasn't going to let me patch, then I didn't really need it. I think the licensing issues are serious. One of the main reasons that MS Office remains popular is that it has been easy to acquire and use illegal copies. I think to a large degree this is built into the $100+ price, so that if three people go in on Office together then the per person costs drop to a more reasonable $30-40 price. This is serious because every time Microsoft wants more money they seem to clamp down on illegal copying, which is their right to do under the law, but it is a practice very similar to entrapment. People are lured in under one premise, but find themselves unable to switch products when the vendor executes a bait and switch on them. Yes, most people don't care about getting screwed until they get screwed.
Choice of product is not a moral dilemma for the user, no more than buying a used car from an untrustworthy business is. It is all about what is in the users best interest. Buyer beware. Getting stuck with all your company's work in one vendor's proprietary format, so you are at the mercy of their future business practices, given a clear history of monopolistic business practices designed to promote vendor lock-in to maximize Microsoft profit beyond what they could reasonably expect in a free market, is not in any company's or user's best interest.
No. A Smart CIO will standardize on MS Office products because the average Joe and Jane knows their ways around Office Suite. No they don't. And if they did, does this mean that people shouldn't upgrade to Office 2007 because it has too many new features? Might as well move to OpenOffice in that case.
Software selection was never about superior technology and morale high ground in the first place. Since when is simply not wanting to get shafted by Microsoft the "morale high ground"? It is pure self interest to want to avoid being stuck with all your corporate information in files that have been purposefully made so that they can only be effectively used with the help of one particular vendor's product. I would be perfectly fine with MS Office if it would simply use the standard OpenDocument format instead of using proprietary add ons.
No, as a corporate CIO I probably wouldn't ban Microsoft products altogether, but like the former CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I would make sure that using standard open formats were a primary criteria for software selection. With proprietary formats only being used if no other software was available to fill a need.
Using open formats isn't about taking some moral high ground, it is about business continuity and being able to do what you want with your own assets. Nothing should piss off senior management more than discovering that you can't use the data that your own employees have generated over many years just because Microsoft doesn't support what you want to do.
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I don't have great civil liberties concerns, as long as punishments and laws are reduced in accordance with the police's new abilities to enforce the law. Previously we gave the police and courts greater discretion and harsher punishments on the argument that only a few lawbreakers could be caught and so the laws and punishments have been devised with the idea that for the few that you catch you must have a deterrent effect by imposing a harsher penalty.
Having persistent surveillance and more pressure on police to enforce the laws universally will lead to less discretion and inappropriately harsh penalties for misdemeanors. Drunks for instance should not be convicted of felony lewd and lascivious act for urinating on the street in the middle of the night... maybe a $30 ticket, but they are not a sex offender unless they were waving their thing around a playground in the middle of a crowd of children.
We have been desensitized to harsh sentences for commonly stupid things that people do. And given that there are an enormity of stupid and inappropriate laws on the books, especially in New York... think permits for free speech zones, and illegal possession of a weapon for chefs carrying knives in the trunk of their car. Universally applying the laws we have without discretion will lead either to a paralysing of society in fear of the law, I feel we are already close to that now or else laws will be adjusted to make so many exceptions to the general rules to make a mockery of the concept of equal protection.
And then there won't be room for abuse, because the system of laws will already be abusive just by following the letter of an imperfect law. If you don't see this happening already, then just look closer.
The plan for New York is to include real time feeds from private security cameras:
I agree.
And wouldn't the original meaning of "journalist" be more akin to "blogger" than "reporter" anyway. I could see "reporter" or "investigative reporter" being a label for someone who actually fact checks and takes an unbiased tone in their reporting of stories, but to write in a "journal" which is the word at the root of "journalist" is no different that to write in a log, which is at the root of "blog" (being a contraction of "web log"). Journalism and blogging should contain some personal viewpoint and analysis and not necessarily just new facts that were previously not public knowledge.
Traditional journalism, in my lifetime, has largely meant rehashing of government released information. Fact checking has only really meant whether the government really released certain information or not, or is anyone publicly contradicting what the press release (or what a "unnamed high level government official") has said. And it is pretty impossible to fact check many types of government information, without leaks, unless what is being said is completely at odds with reality.
Real investigative journalism (you know when some out of luck public servant gets outed for taking bribes) is few and far between and is usually targeted at some bureaucrat or elected official who is out of favor with the political elite. Whereas well connected people like Ted Kennedy can literally kill someone and run for President with some level of press support just a few years later.
To say that journalism is or was ever more than a bunch of people trying to make a few bucks writing for a living about current events is to write just a little bit of revisionist history or is to ignore the vast majority of very mediocre writing that has found its way to print. Mediocre and just plain bad writing is nothing new. And the so called "training" that journalist go through could be taught in an afternoon to someone with two halves of a brain.
Atmospheric heating of the objects, if there are enough of them, can result in a significant increase in the temperature of the atmosphere in general. This is the very, very bad effect of either the "Armageddon" or the endgame in "Deep Impact".
Deflection is the right answer. Probably the only good answer. Totally depends on the original size of the asteroid/comet and the resulting size of the fragments. The smaller that both are, the better off we would be. Something just a couple hundred meters across like the estimated size of apophis and it might make sense to break it up into as many chunks as possible. Anything less than a few meters diameter in size will not cause much damage. Spread out over a large enough area, or over the ocean and meteors that size will not cause much damage at all. I think the correct answer is that it really just depends on the size and composition of the asteroid and how long we have to deflect it or pulverize it, but I don't think you should dismiss the idea of destroying an asteroid unless it is bigger than about half a kilometer wide. Heck even vaporizing some portion of the rock will have a potentially beneficial effect to reduce overall damage. Definitely, deflection is the best way to deal with an asteroid threat, but don't rule out just blowing it up either. And if we get short notice it would be our only option.
[quote]While we are at it, let's make the Republicans and Democrats the only legal parties so as to reduce ambiguity, save money, and remove the third party spoiler effect.[/quote]
People use tactical voting to mitigate the spoiler effect... which is the problem. With a rigged two-party system, people like me don't get a candidate that they can vote for, because you get parties which end up with alliances which de facto disallow candidates of particular combinations of positions. So, for instance you won't see a pro-choice and pro-gun rights candidate get nominated for the general election, even though that might be just fine with the general electorate. And you won't see an anti big government candidate from either party because you get the most allies in political party by handing out government paychecks to supporters, their relatives and friends.
Other combinations are also de facto disallowed from time to time when activists get control over one of the party's. Can you imagine a Democrat that wanted to cut taxes? Or a Republican who wanted to cut the defense budget?
With the nature of politics controlled by private institutions which are in turn controlled by unelected activists, the democratic and representative form of government is threatened.
If anything we should ban special treatment for the two-parties on the ballot and we can best mitigate the spoiler problem by using run-off ballots.
Remember AOL Intant Messaging? Still around, but for a while there people thought it would be the only relevant communication protocol around. AOL itself was at first a little reluctant to open up its email network to be able to send and receive messages from the outside... it took a large number of people wanting to talk with college kids to make it happen. It is the ultimate goal of many companies to have a monopoly over our communication protocols, it is up to customers to make sure that we never again let one company or even a small number of companies control all our communications options.
But remember, it is the ultimate goal of many companies to have a monopoly over our communication protocols.
It could have been just a stupid random act or it could have something to do with the billions of dollars Microsoft invested in Comcast... that's a tough call.
Wind power is now almost the same cost per kWh as coal, natural gas or oil, but you have to have big enough turbines in constantly windy locations. And it is cheaper than nuclear, because of all the regulatory costs associated with using nuclear fuel. Much cheaper than solar because the solar panels cost a lot.
But you do have to have enough turbines in the right locations with enough constant wind to make it worth it. Having them tethered to the sea bed means that you can just get a tug to bring them back to shore for repair or could even just swap out an old one with a new one relatively quickly when the time comes. But the biggest advantage of having them farther out at sea in deeper water is that they will be over the horizon so they can be bigger than if you have them around where people live. The bigger the turbine, the more efficient it is and so it is more cost efficient. There is extra cost laying the undersea cables to get the electricity to shore, but siting a landing for a cable is a lot easier than getting a seaside community to let a power company clutter up their ocean views or a State to give up its majestic mountain tops to wind farms.
Yes, there will always be some time that there is less power output during calmer days, but that can be dealt with by storing excess energy from the more windy days, or simply by having wind as a percentage of energy production, so that more expensive (when resources are more scarce) oil and natural gas generators can go offline for maintenance during high wind periods.
I would like to give a little perspective to the US System.
US employer based health care grew directly from WWII tax and rationing policy. During the war the income tax was extremely high and rationing was in place. But workers needed to be taken care of in order to maintain productivity. Health care and other "benefits" therefore became tax exempt and were excluded from the income tax calculation. That system made sense during wartime and afterwards when much of the US had lifetime employment and society valued life differently than we do today.
Then during the 1970s in a wrongheaded approach to controlling health care costs, government encouraged the establishment of HMOs and other forms of insurance middlemen with the idea that it would be in their interest to control costs and provide the most benefits. But the government still propped up employer based health care primarily as a response to the generous benefits that were lavished on the big unions by GM and Ford and the big industrial companies. The fear amongst many older union workers was that they would lose out on benefits they were soon going to start really needing.
In the US you get to deduct health insurance expenses only if it is provided through an employer (that might change once health insurance is essentially a tax as it is now in Massachusetts), but health insurance that you buy on your own because maybe you found better insurance outside your employers plans (which the employer might have gotten kickbacks from the insurance companies to exclusively provide) doesn't get you a deduction at all. The effect of which is to hand over buying power to your employer even though they might not even be subsidizing the insurance at all, so they will generally offer 3 plans, the least of which is not likely to be chosen by those who decided on the plans, but which is most likely to be chosen by the lowest paid employees. This distortion, putting purchasing decisions in the hands of people that don't have a direct interest in what is being purchased helps to cause the ever increasing medical costs which the employers are more than happy to support with their employees money. There is also a more insidious effect in that the lower cost plans subsidize the actual costs of the higher benefit plans because the lower costs plans provide fewer benefits and charge higher deductibles making it impractical to actually use them. So, you have a system where it is the decision makers that benefit from screwing over the weakest employees in their organizations.
Far from being a system where the free market acts in a healthy and natural way to control costs, the US government has created a system where inequality rules and fear is used as the primary motivating factor in all decisions.
Which brings us to Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, we have chosen to push the current system to its logical conclusion and completely take buying power out of the hands of individuals. Individuals will now have to choose between a dozen health insurance plans which could cost as much as 10-16% of a persons yearly income for those in the middle income range (but much less a percentage for the high income persons). At the low end, the plans are basically worthless because of high co payments ($100 to 150) to discourage doctors and hospital visits and a person will still be forced to pay up to $5000 of the yearly medical bill when they actually get sick. Meaning that the lower income persons likely to choose such a plan will likely be bankrupted by an illness anyway.
The moral theory being applied here is that by at least forcing people to pay into the insurance system now even though they are young and unlikely to get seriously ill, then they will be "prepaying" for when they eventually do get old and more prone to disease. A theory which seems very convenient for the older and richer people that want to get subsidized by the young and healthy, but as we see with social security such a system works well when population is growing and soci
It is best not to confuse "front runner" in the polls and "front runner" with the pols.
If you could separate out representation on tax and spending, from representation on civil and criminal laws that apply to everyone, then it would be most fair to only allow representation on tax and spend issues from those being taxed, but still allow representation by everyone on what laws we live under. But that is not the way things are divided.
An interesting idea though, if we could split up the two forms of lawmaking into different branches of the legislature. So, say the Senate makes civil and criminal laws while the house of representatives makes tax and spending laws. Would take another revolution to happen, so I wouldn't make any bets on it, but an interesting idea. Maybe something for the states to experiment with.
There are many ways we could put hurdles in front of the weak to prevent them from having a say in society. LOL I live in a 'rich suburb' (its ok I live in an apartment so I myself am not rolling in it) and I had to wait far longer than a minute or two to vote the last time. The number and locates of polling places is set up locally not by the fed so if the inner city which is usually vvery heavily democrat has too few polling places you know where to look. How long then? And if you are living in an apartment, then maybe you are really in a poorer district in a rich town? What I am suggesting is that there should be at least a maximum number of registered voters per polling place/polling worker/polling machine otherwise it is de facto disenfranchisement. No, I don't think disenfranchisement should be simply measured by how long you have to wait in line, things can happen and people should be expected to step up during exceptional circumstances, but if hours long lines are a predictable byproduct of not providing enough ballots or polling machines or places to fill out your ballot, then I think it is reasonable for the Federal Government to issue guidelines for managing Federal elections.
Mass media doesn't pick the candidates, that is backwards... the party power brokers tell the media who has a chance to be nominated and they go along like sheep to the slaughter. Just look at Kerry in 2004, he was the declared the front runner far in advance because he had the most party support. Media would love an underdog story, but they are savvy enough to know the system is rigged and the only competition is going to be between which of the two candidates to be nominated by the two-parties will get elected.
I would describe the American primary system like such: The party leadership and organizers choose who they want to support, then they present them to their members and the general public to vet them, only if the members and public find something they really dislike about the candidate then does the party find someone else. Only time there is real competition is when party leadership is nearly equally divided over who they want to support.
Now a lot of people just thought to themselves: 'what is wrong with that' or 'that sounds like democracy to me' Well, they are wrong. Democracy is about fair elections not just elections. Democracy isn't just about being presented with a multiple choice question.
Better to just make sure people aren't registered in more than one town.
Oh and there should be a requirement for a certain number of polling stations per number of registered voters, otherwise big cities with not enough polling stations are effectively disenfranchising their citizens. Nobody should be made to wait over an hour to vote, while we in the rich suburbs never have to wait more than a minute or two.
What spam filters? In your client software? Because what they are selling is a paid for whitelist at the ISP email server, so if you are running spam filters on your own email server, then this wouldn't effect you. For webmail users it would mean that paid for emails would go right into your inbox (as I suspect some less scrupulous email providers have been doing all along).
Like the junk mail that gets sent to your house, it would be up to the receiver to do with it whatever they wanted, but clearly it is an effective form of advertisement and some industries seem to rely on it for advertisement... which they can't do right now with email because of the spam connotation. But if the ISP says they are going to do this and you are their customer, especially if you aren't paying much or anything for the email, then it would effectively legitimize a form of unsolicited email.
But it is better to just apply the actual state statute in this case which provides an exemption for public places rather than try to make a freedom of expression argument which is much more nuanced.
Thanks for citing the statute... even though the person tried to hide the recording device, it was clearly not a violation since there was absolutely no expectation of privacy on the part of the patrolman. There is nothing ambiguous about this case.
But the law should still be changed to say what can be done with unauthorized recordings, not whether they can be made in the first place.
We all know that there is a difference between trying to embarrass an ex girlfriend with a recording of phone sex posted online and trying to embarrass a police officer or politician because they acted inappropriately or in a corrupt manner. Should be the same rules as apply to publishing photographs: expectation of privacy, notoriety and commercial intent should be considered with penalties that are civil and not criminal. and a judge will hopefully sort this all out. Or maybe I have too much faith in the system
Goodmail is in essence creating a new way for "legitimate businesses" like coke, nike or mortgage lenders to spam people. Let's not be confused here, these are bulk email rates not for individual to individual. Businesses are really desperate for ways to reach people with their marketing, and sending unsolicited email gets too much backlash and negative attention. Many companies get big money from other companies wanting to reach customers who have opted into their mailing lists, the ISPs and email providers want a piece of that action.
This isn't in any way meant to help email subscribers or recipients reduce junk email, it is meant to increase junk email.
Choice of product is not a moral dilemma for the user, no more than buying a used car from an untrustworthy business is. It is all about what is in the users best interest. Buyer beware. Getting stuck with all your company's work in one vendor's proprietary format, so you are at the mercy of their future business practices, given a clear history of monopolistic business practices designed to promote vendor lock-in to maximize Microsoft profit beyond what they could reasonably expect in a free market, is not in any company's or user's best interest.
No, as a corporate CIO I probably wouldn't ban Microsoft products altogether, but like the former CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I would make sure that using standard open formats were a primary criteria for software selection. With proprietary formats only being used if no other software was available to fill a need.
Using open formats isn't about taking some moral high ground, it is about business continuity and being able to do what you want with your own assets. Nothing should piss off senior management more than discovering that you can't use the data that your own employees have generated over many years just because Microsoft doesn't support what you want to do.