These people are then arrested regardless of whether or not they show signs of actual impairment.
Good, they should be. Why? Because *they're breaking the fucking law*.
Now, you may not like the limits that have been put in place. That's fine. Maybe.08 is too low. Who knows. Although some level *must* be set ("actual impairment" is *far* too wishy-washy a definition, and IMHO would simply leave the law open to *more* abuse by law enforcement, not less). But if you drive with a BAC over the legal limit, whatever that limit is, then you're breaking the law and you deserve to be thrown in jail. Period.
No. You fail at logic. Just because something is against the law does NOT mean that it should be, you are begging the question in your argument here, we are discussing what the law ought to be and you are telling us what it is. We know what the law is, we are questioning why it is what it is. Way back when it was illegal for a woman to vote. If that law were still on the books, and a woman were caught disguised as a man attempting to cast a vote, would you be really say "But if you vote with a vagina, then you're breaking the law and you deserve to be thrown in jail. Period."? Is that really what you would say? Or would it be more reasonable to question why the law existed in the first place?
Then there's the loss of our civil liberties that go along with the war on drunk driving. Random police roadblocks, "implied consent" laws and the 21 drinking age all come to mind. The fact that my 19 year old brother can join the army but can't legally buy a beer is offensive the notion of free choice and liberty. I find the fact that I have to drive through a roadblock on my way home at night just because my house happens to be near a bar to be particularly insulting. We are treated as though we are guilty until proven innocent and that is not how things are supposed to work in the United States.
Please print this out, sign it, and mail it to your senator. The biggest thing that gets me there are the roadblocks -- can someone please explain to me the twisted reasoning by which it was determined that sobriety check points aren't a blatant violation of the 4th Amendment? Or did they even try? Because a cop stopping my car and making me talk to him for no reason better than the fact that I happen to be driving down a particular street is beyond infuriating. Whether or not it stops drunk drivers is 100% irrelevant. To prove this point I will take it to its absurd logical extreme -- we can stop drunk driving by banning alcohol and motor vehicles. See? Just because there is a problem, even a very big one, you need to be very careful in dealing with it. In this case we are definitely throwing out the baby (civil liberties) with the bathwater (drunk driving).
This doesn't exempt them from responsibility for unjust actions, though, anymore than the fact that they were the ones on the ground would exempt those who passed the laws.
Ummm...There's a slight difference in determining the moral wrongness in trying to slaughter an entire race of people just because you don't like them and bypassing the encryption on an electronic device. I think one can, with a fair amount of confidence, say that it is morally wrong to try and slaughter an entire race of people and have the vast majority of people agree with that statement. You're on slightly more ambiguous ground it declaring certain provisions of DMCA a morally bankrupt. And those carrying out the orders are much less likely to know enough to judge whether the DMCA is morally bankrupt.
Really? You can't see that it is objectively wrong and evil to lock someone in a cage for TEN YEARS for copyright infringement? That seems pretty black and white to me.
The heinousness of the crimes are obviously not comparable, but I never claimed that they were, the term Nuremberg Defense simply refers to a very specific moral/legal argument that was named thus after being established as legal precedent during the Nuremberg trials. The fact that they happened to be trying Nazis is entirely irrelevant to the term. Please, leave your straw man out in the fields where he belongs.
Except he wasn't using a hacked and modded console, he was SELLING them, a LOT of them. No matter how you look at it, even if you agree that you hacking a console yourself should be legal, reselling consoles that are basically being designed to pay illegally copied games rather than imports is NOT ok.
The only problem with what you say here is that he is being charged with the hacking, not the selling. And even if this were the case, why is that not okay? It is okay to sell a non-modded console. I see absolutely no defensible reason that modding a console should be illegal. It should then follow that there is no defensible reason for selling a modded console to be illegal. What if someone were to mod their XBox, put Linux on it to use as a media server, and then sell it to someone else to use as a media server? Are we going to make a certain number of systems illegal? If so, where is the line? 5? 10? If you follow all of the basic assumptions that lead to this arrest you realize that the ground that all of these laws stand on is extremely shaky from a personal freedom standpoint.
Since this circumvention has about a 1% chance of being used for legal purposes
The 1% is who we are worried about here. By making this sort of action illegal you are making people that mess with their consoles for non-piracy purposes (maybe they just want to hack it to install Linux on it and use it as a media server) liable to be SENT TO JAIL for nothing more than modifying a piece of hardware that they legally own. The government is letting a corporation decide what I am and am not allowed to do with something that I own, which is not acceptable. If there was a way to mod your XBox that turned it into a nuclear bomb, then we can talk about making it against the law to mod it, but if it is just piracy we are talking about (something I also think should be legal, but that is a different story), is it really reasonable to allow this sort of collateral damage?
Yes there is. The justification is in allowing a company to tell us what we can and can't do with our own private property -- it is entirely irrelevant that he was doing this for profit to others' machines, the fact remains that he is being busted for circumventing copyright. This sort of thing is unprecedented -- that would be like (WARNING: Obligatory car analogy) making it against the law to use aftermarket parts in a car AFTER buying the car in full. Are we really going to allow companies to tell us what we can and cannot do with a product after we purchase it? It is well within their rights to void your warranty and disallow returns after you do something like this, but to make it illegal? I see no way that this can be justifiable.
No one accepted these arguments of "just doing my job" in the Nuremberg trials -- why should we now? (Sorry, Godwin.)
It interests me when a geek equates the enforcement arm of US customs and immigration to the SS. That his right to a hacked and modded PS3 seems to count for as much as what a prisoner lost in the Nazi death camps.
The Nuremberg defendants were charged with crimes against humanity - and, and among the specific changes, the crime of institutionalized murder on an industrial scale. That is why the defense of "just following orders" does not work. They were the ones giving the orders.
Your apologies to Godwin are fraudulent.
This is a common logical fallacy I see all the time -- that just a comparison differs in degree that the comparison is invalid. In this case, the term Nuremberg Defense is a commonly used term to refer to a specific legal/moral argument, the "I am not morally/legally responsible for the actions in question because I was just following orders."
You are creating a blatant straw man in arguing that the commenter is honestly considering a modded PS3 equal in worth to a death camp inmate, he is using a commonly accepted figure of speech.
To get more to the heart of the issue, you do have a right to a hacked and modded PS3, it is absurd that the government can get away with passing a law telling me what I can and cannot do with a piece of hardware that I own, never mind mandating a decade of jail time for it. This young man's civil rights are being violated, and EVERYONE down the line is responsible for it, from the arresting officer to the prosecuting attorney, to the jury who convicts him and the judge that sentences him, and the politicians and lobbyists that pushed through the DMCA. "Just doing my job" is NO excuse, and the legal precedent for this was set during the Nuremberg trials, that is all that is meant in the comparison.
*I know very well that this is likely not the case, it seems that she is more upset that she still doesn't have a job DESPITE the services being offered -- if the school is living up to their end of the bargain this girl is just an idiot, as opposed to being an idiot with a legitimate complaint.
Yes, they are doing their job. This doesn't exempt them from responsibility for unjust actions, though, anymore than the fact that they were the ones on the ground would exempt those who passed the laws. This is called the Nuremberg defense, and it is increasingly common now as peoples' roles in society become increasingly narrow and more specialized (ie, I just build the bombs, its not my responsibility what happens after that). "Just following orders" or "just doing my job" are not usable defenses. In certain cases they could bring about slight mitigation to the crimes, but certainly not exemption from personal responsibilities.
I didn't ask for anything in writing mostly because I was not planning on needing the assistance, but I was told all sorts of things that ended up not being true at all, about career placement people getting us in the door all sorts of places we wouldn't be able to go otherwise (ie, they contact the school looking for grads before they take apps from anyone else) and that they would use their connections out there to get us all sorts of interviews and what not. After graduation, I realized that really all they had was a list of jobs around up on a website, which was a far cry from what was advertised. I am sure that if I had asked for it in writing, though, it would have been much closer to the truth;-)
To whomever modded this down -- please remember that disagreeing with someone does not make them a troll, and that voicing an unpopular opinion does not make one a flame warrior.
"an economy with very high employment rates is actually bad for business as it puts to much power in the hands of the workforce and has a nasty habit of leading to increased unionisation."
Yes. This is a very good thing.
"Also, high unemployment makes it easier to keep wages lower."
And low unemployment forces you to pay employees enough so that they can survive. Screw you.
"It allows me to pay less and even hand out pay or overtime cuts as people fear losing their job if they know getting another one will be difficult."
Yeah. Again, it is good that you can't do those sorts of things. It is good that you have to treat your employees as, you know, human beings. Your mentality is the one that human kind is struggling to dig out from under and is the cause of almost all the violence and hatred in the world. You feel that just because you and an employer you are entitled to treat employees however badly you want. You do realize that when you pass down that pay cut the employee needs the money a LOT more than you do, right? You might be able to buy another yacht, but that is at the expense of your employees' kids' college money. This mindset is psychopathy, plain and simple. All you see is your own greedy wants and the bottom line in a ledger book, but you are unable to see and feel the human cost of your decisions. I will be glad when the economy turns around and you can't randomly fire people for demanding fair treatment, or randomly cut pay by 20%. I would rather that you did these things on your own, that you would have a soul and a little bit of human decency, but I know that this is too much to ask. I will just be glad that you can be forced into treating people like humans, that is the way it should be.
Wow. Just wow. I have seen a lot of stupid replies to my comment, but congrats, mspohr, you win. You packed so much stupid into two sentences that I don't even know where to start... Cowboy delusion? Flowers for the liberators? I am incredibly anti-interventionist, and I think the Iraq War is one of the worst decisions this nation has ever made (and I thought so when I first heard that it was on the horizon). The precise problem in Iraq is that it was a police action, and that we pulled almost all of our punches. We set unattainable goals (not even sure what they are anymore). If our goal in Iraq had been to just go in and decimate them, and we pulled no punches, the war would have been over in about 30 minutes. I made not statement as to what we should do, only what we could do. We have enough nuclear weapons to turn North Korea into a sheet of glass by 10 AM today. This is a fact. There is absolutely no disputing this. I obviously know all of the ramifications, and again, am making no statement about what we ought to do, just what we are capable of. So please, try to address the actual content of the comment next time, rather than just vomiting out a random mess of thoughts that are currently passing through your simian mind.
The world's greatest superpower who has nevertheless continually refused to exercise any semblance of the imperialism of its predecessors.
Sorry, but you are wrong. The only difference is that the good ole' U.S. of A. has been a little more sly about their imperialism than other nations in the past, instead of going in with full military force, we usually just choose to send in the CIA, overthrow a democratically elected socialist government (read: not friendly to US economic interests:'-( ) or two, put in place a brutal fascist regime (read: friendly to US economic interests;-D ). This has happened over and over and over again -- please look into CIA actions in Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, the Congo, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, and many, many others. Or better yet, pick up a copy of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. We are an empire, we have just had the good sense to push this fact into the shadows and dominate the planet economically instead of militarily (well, we still do the military thing sometimes, it makes for great television).
Umm... no they don't actually. Please inform us. They have nukes, but no way to deploy them. They have a large army, but are incredibly underfunded. The U.S. military could destroy North Korea and be back by lunch if they pulled no punches. Oh and if by "threat" you mean they could kill a few thousand, then we are talking at cross terms here -- ANYONE could do that, what we are discussing here is whether or not NK has the ability to do REAL damage to the U.S., which I would define as at least knocking the U.S. off of its perch as the dominant superpower. I don't think that any one nation, save China (maybe) has the potential to do that. But hey, you are the smarmy "educated"* one. Please "educate" me.
Ok -- this girl is a brat, I will not for a second say that she is not. I will not, however, immediately dismiss this lawsuit as being frivolous -- a lot of schools advertise heavily on their job placement programs. If she chose to attend this school, and she chose to give them tens of thousands of dollars on a promise that they would offer her a great deal of help in finding a job upon graduation, then she certainly does have a right to be upset about, as that is blatant false advertising. I know how this thing works from experience -- the school I attended (which shall remain nameless) made a huge to-do about their career assistance programs before I chose to attend and rack up $40,000 in debt. Upon graduation, I realized that their career placement was not much more than what I would have gotten off of monster.com. Granted, I was not dumb enough to depend on this and found work on my own, but I do feel ripped off.
The bottom line is, if you are going to advertise a particular service, you had better be prepared to put your money where your mouth is.* These schools need to learn that they cannot get away with making false promises to get you in the door, it is false advertising, and is nothing less than grand larceny.
*I know very well that this is likely not the case, it seems that she is more upset that she still doesn't have a job DESPITE the services being offered -- if the school is living up to their end of the bargain this girl is just an idiot, as opposed to being an idiot with a legitimate complaint. Regardless of whether or not the school is providing the necessary services, she is a 'tard for expecting to have a job 4 months after graduation with a 2.7 GPA, and even more of a 'tard for relying solely on the school's career placement to help her, as everyone knows that they are generally bullshit. This will not work out well for her, but if she is successful, it could work out well for future students in giving schools a bit more incentive to be honest.
By eliminating all false positives, you greatly reduce the possibility of errors of firing on a toy or not firing on a real weapon mistaken for a toy.
If this is the case, why not ban toy weapons altogether? I mean, aren't they concerned about, you know, shooting little kids with fake guns?
And just maybe they'll consider traveling by land, sea, or telepresence instead if they're not willing to give up some individual liberty temporarily for the security of the collective.
This argument doesn't wash and sets up a dangerous slippery slope -- we can always be safer by sacrificing more of our liberty. We could slash the crime rate down to next to nothing if only we all put CCTV cameras in all of our houses, and let the police come in for periodic spot checks to make sure you are being nice. I for one feel that this extra measure of security is not worth the cost of liberty. Some would disagree, but the Constitution is on my side.
I feel that the same goes for air travel -- it is the only viable means of real long distance travel, and the government has made it so that we cannot utilize this wonderful tool without bending over and giving up every last one of our civil liberties. They can even tell you at random that you aren't allowed to fly! I find this to be extremely odious and bodes very badly for society as a whole. We have no evidence to suggest that airliners are at any more risk than they ever have been, and there is very little evidence to suggest that airport security is even that effective. It seems entirely excessive to me and I am sure that Thomas Jefferson would roll over in his grave.
Word definitely should be on its way out. Not because we don't print everything out (digital distribution is MORE of a reason for everyone using the same program), but because the free alternatives do everything just as well (or better, they are much more lightweight) and are interoperable. Not that this will happen soon, as the vast majority of computer users are idiots and will continue to shell out thousands of dollars to Micro$oft, since M$ Word still is synonymous with 'word processor' in the common lexicon (and Office with office productivity suites), in the same manner as 'xerox', 'kleenex', 'band-aid', etc. This leads millions of fools to think that they need to shell out a few extra hundred dollars AFTER paying a few hundred bucks on their OS just to get it up and running. The subscription anti-virus companies are in the same racket.
Touche -- yes if you look at the phrase as a bit of Orwellian (Microsoftian?) doublespeak, then it does certainly make sense. Microsoft's new software offerings are doubleplus open, says the Ministry of Truth.
Ummm... no. I would expect 100 batteries to "explode", the vast majority of which would do little more than scare the pants off of the owner (which is the greatest harm that seems to come from the few cases of exploding iPods). It would take a seriously freak occurrence for one of these incidents to result in a house burning down, say 1 in 10,000 or so. That would mean that for every 110 billion batts sold, you could expect one house to burn down, which is probably about the same odds you have of winning the lottery every day for the rest of your life. Even if you go with 1 in 100 as a better estimate (which is clearly far too liberal), we are still only talking about one house fire per 1.1 billion sold, not bad odds. Are you saying that we shouldn't put wires in walls, or use gas stoves? Oh yeah, I forgot, we are used to those things and can properly put the risk in perspective. Humans are skittish herd animals that don't know how to deal with new things.
"Yeah, that's right, because an average person has the dexterity and movement speed of an industrial assembly robot and doesn't drop anything in a lifetime. So making everyday devices that explode when dropped is all safe and good."
Umm... these devices don't just explode when dropped, there is a very small statistical chance that if dropped under the right set of circumstances they could explode. This is a very big difference. Even if it were a bigger risk, it is a fundamental limitation of the Lithium Ion battery tech and not the iPod. I would agree that Lithium Ion batteries are not perfect, but we don't have anything better and there is no way we could eliminate them without taking handheld electronics tech back a decade or more. Like I said before, the overall failure rate for iPods is 1 in 11 million (this figure obviously includes all the instances of grotesque abuse as well), which I would definitely consider to be more than reasonably safe, especially since they have not even had one case of serious personal injury or property damage. Please take your FUD elsewhere, I hear Fox News is looking for new commentators...
"At the end, if the interrogating officer is left looking like a fool for falling for it, what does that make the audience?"
Strange, this is not the impression I walked away with at all... I was impressed by the Spacey character's ingenuity in fooling his captors, I never felt that his captors were fools for believing him. And I think that knowing the ending makes it more enjoyable to watch the film again through the lens of knowing the ending. It does not seem that there were that many clues left as to the actual identity of Keiser Soze, but it does seem very clear through the telling of the story that all is not as it seems, due to various inconsistencies. Not sure if this was intentional or not, but it is definitely fun to try to pick it apart.
I was actually thinking that if they were going to change one part of their name, calling the store a 'shack' is certainly more likely to turn away customers than implying that you sell radios... would you buy anything from the Computer Hovel? The Cell Phone Shanty? Meh... I won't be sad to see them go in any case, they have totally missed the opportunity to dominate the hobbyist market by making a half-assed attempt at edging into the mainstream.
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These people are then arrested regardless of whether or not they show signs of actual impairment.
Good, they should be. Why? Because *they're breaking the fucking law*.
Now, you may not like the limits that have been put in place. That's fine. Maybe .08 is too low. Who knows. Although some level *must* be set ("actual impairment" is *far* too wishy-washy a definition, and IMHO would simply leave the law open to *more* abuse by law enforcement, not less). But if you drive with a BAC over the legal limit, whatever that limit is, then you're breaking the law and you deserve to be thrown in jail. Period.
No. You fail at logic. Just because something is against the law does NOT mean that it should be, you are begging the question in your argument here, we are discussing what the law ought to be and you are telling us what it is. We know what the law is, we are questioning why it is what it is. Way back when it was illegal for a woman to vote. If that law were still on the books, and a woman were caught disguised as a man attempting to cast a vote, would you be really say "But if you vote with a vagina, then you're breaking the law and you deserve to be thrown in jail. Period."? Is that really what you would say? Or would it be more reasonable to question why the law existed in the first place?
Then there's the loss of our civil liberties that go along with the war on drunk driving. Random police roadblocks, "implied consent" laws and the 21 drinking age all come to mind. The fact that my 19 year old brother can join the army but can't legally buy a beer is offensive the notion of free choice and liberty. I find the fact that I have to drive through a roadblock on my way home at night just because my house happens to be near a bar to be particularly insulting. We are treated as though we are guilty until proven innocent and that is not how things are supposed to work in the United States.
Please print this out, sign it, and mail it to your senator. The biggest thing that gets me there are the roadblocks -- can someone please explain to me the twisted reasoning by which it was determined that sobriety check points aren't a blatant violation of the 4th Amendment? Or did they even try? Because a cop stopping my car and making me talk to him for no reason better than the fact that I happen to be driving down a particular street is beyond infuriating. Whether or not it stops drunk drivers is 100% irrelevant. To prove this point I will take it to its absurd logical extreme -- we can stop drunk driving by banning alcohol and motor vehicles. See? Just because there is a problem, even a very big one, you need to be very careful in dealing with it. In this case we are definitely throwing out the baby (civil liberties) with the bathwater (drunk driving).
This doesn't exempt them from responsibility for unjust actions, though, anymore than the fact that they were the ones on the ground would exempt those who passed the laws.
Ummm...There's a slight difference in determining the moral wrongness in trying to slaughter an entire race of people just because you don't like them and bypassing the encryption on an electronic device. I think one can, with a fair amount of confidence, say that it is morally wrong to try and slaughter an entire race of people and have the vast majority of people agree with that statement. You're on slightly more ambiguous ground it declaring certain provisions of DMCA a morally bankrupt. And those carrying out the orders are much less likely to know enough to judge whether the DMCA is morally bankrupt.
Really? You can't see that it is objectively wrong and evil to lock someone in a cage for TEN YEARS for copyright infringement? That seems pretty black and white to me.
The heinousness of the crimes are obviously not comparable, but I never claimed that they were, the term Nuremberg Defense simply refers to a very specific moral/legal argument that was named thus after being established as legal precedent during the Nuremberg trials. The fact that they happened to be trying Nazis is entirely irrelevant to the term. Please, leave your straw man out in the fields where he belongs.
Except he wasn't using a hacked and modded console, he was SELLING them, a LOT of them. No matter how you look at it, even if you agree that you hacking a console yourself should be legal, reselling consoles that are basically being designed to pay illegally copied games rather than imports is NOT ok.
The only problem with what you say here is that he is being charged with the hacking, not the selling. And even if this were the case, why is that not okay? It is okay to sell a non-modded console. I see absolutely no defensible reason that modding a console should be illegal. It should then follow that there is no defensible reason for selling a modded console to be illegal. What if someone were to mod their XBox, put Linux on it to use as a media server, and then sell it to someone else to use as a media server? Are we going to make a certain number of systems illegal? If so, where is the line? 5? 10? If you follow all of the basic assumptions that lead to this arrest you realize that the ground that all of these laws stand on is extremely shaky from a personal freedom standpoint.
The 1% is who we are worried about here. By making this sort of action illegal you are making people that mess with their consoles for non-piracy purposes (maybe they just want to hack it to install Linux on it and use it as a media server) liable to be SENT TO JAIL for nothing more than modifying a piece of hardware that they legally own. The government is letting a corporation decide what I am and am not allowed to do with something that I own, which is not acceptable. If there was a way to mod your XBox that turned it into a nuclear bomb, then we can talk about making it against the law to mod it, but if it is just piracy we are talking about (something I also think should be legal, but that is a different story), is it really reasonable to allow this sort of collateral damage?
Yes there is. The justification is in allowing a company to tell us what we can and can't do with our own private property -- it is entirely irrelevant that he was doing this for profit to others' machines, the fact remains that he is being busted for circumventing copyright. This sort of thing is unprecedented -- that would be like (WARNING: Obligatory car analogy) making it against the law to use aftermarket parts in a car AFTER buying the car in full. Are we really going to allow companies to tell us what we can and cannot do with a product after we purchase it? It is well within their rights to void your warranty and disallow returns after you do something like this, but to make it illegal? I see no way that this can be justifiable.
No one accepted these arguments of "just doing my job" in the Nuremberg trials -- why should we now? (Sorry, Godwin.)
It interests me when a geek equates the enforcement arm of US customs and immigration to the SS. That his right to a hacked and modded PS3 seems to count for as much as what a prisoner lost in the Nazi death camps.
The Nuremberg defendants were charged with crimes against humanity - and, and among the specific changes, the crime of institutionalized murder on an industrial scale. That is why the defense of "just following orders" does not work. They were the ones giving the orders.
Your apologies to Godwin are fraudulent.
This is a common logical fallacy I see all the time -- that just a comparison differs in degree that the comparison is invalid. In this case, the term Nuremberg Defense is a commonly used term to refer to a specific legal/moral argument, the "I am not morally/legally responsible for the actions in question because I was just following orders."
You are creating a blatant straw man in arguing that the commenter is honestly considering a modded PS3 equal in worth to a death camp inmate, he is using a commonly accepted figure of speech.
To get more to the heart of the issue, you do have a right to a hacked and modded PS3, it is absurd that the government can get away with passing a law telling me what I can and cannot do with a piece of hardware that I own, never mind mandating a decade of jail time for it. This young man's civil rights are being violated, and EVERYONE down the line is responsible for it, from the arresting officer to the prosecuting attorney, to the jury who convicts him and the judge that sentences him, and the politicians and lobbyists that pushed through the DMCA. "Just doing my job" is NO excuse, and the legal precedent for this was set during the Nuremberg trials, that is all that is meant in the comparison.
Yes, they are doing their job. This doesn't exempt them from responsibility for unjust actions, though, anymore than the fact that they were the ones on the ground would exempt those who passed the laws. This is called the Nuremberg defense, and it is increasingly common now as peoples' roles in society become increasingly narrow and more specialized (ie, I just build the bombs, its not my responsibility what happens after that). "Just following orders" or "just doing my job" are not usable defenses. In certain cases they could bring about slight mitigation to the crimes, but certainly not exemption from personal responsibilities.
I didn't ask for anything in writing mostly because I was not planning on needing the assistance, but I was told all sorts of things that ended up not being true at all, about career placement people getting us in the door all sorts of places we wouldn't be able to go otherwise (ie, they contact the school looking for grads before they take apps from anyone else) and that they would use their connections out there to get us all sorts of interviews and what not. After graduation, I realized that really all they had was a list of jobs around up on a website, which was a far cry from what was advertised. I am sure that if I had asked for it in writing, though, it would have been much closer to the truth ;-)
To whomever modded this down -- please remember that disagreeing with someone does not make them a troll, and that voicing an unpopular opinion does not make one a flame warrior.
"an economy with very high employment rates is actually bad for business as it puts to much power in the hands of the workforce and has a nasty habit of leading to increased unionisation."
Yes. This is a very good thing.
"Also, high unemployment makes it easier to keep wages lower."
And low unemployment forces you to pay employees enough so that they can survive. Screw you.
"It allows me to pay less and even hand out pay or overtime cuts as people fear losing their job if they know getting another one will be difficult."
Yeah. Again, it is good that you can't do those sorts of things. It is good that you have to treat your employees as, you know, human beings. Your mentality is the one that human kind is struggling to dig out from under and is the cause of almost all the violence and hatred in the world. You feel that just because you and an employer you are entitled to treat employees however badly you want. You do realize that when you pass down that pay cut the employee needs the money a LOT more than you do, right? You might be able to buy another yacht, but that is at the expense of your employees' kids' college money. This mindset is psychopathy, plain and simple. All you see is your own greedy wants and the bottom line in a ledger book, but you are unable to see and feel the human cost of your decisions. I will be glad when the economy turns around and you can't randomly fire people for demanding fair treatment, or randomly cut pay by 20%. I would rather that you did these things on your own, that you would have a soul and a little bit of human decency, but I know that this is too much to ask. I will just be glad that you can be forced into treating people like humans, that is the way it should be.
Wow. Just wow. I have seen a lot of stupid replies to my comment, but congrats, mspohr, you win. You packed so much stupid into two sentences that I don't even know where to start... Cowboy delusion? Flowers for the liberators? I am incredibly anti-interventionist, and I think the Iraq War is one of the worst decisions this nation has ever made (and I thought so when I first heard that it was on the horizon). The precise problem in Iraq is that it was a police action, and that we pulled almost all of our punches. We set unattainable goals (not even sure what they are anymore). If our goal in Iraq had been to just go in and decimate them, and we pulled no punches, the war would have been over in about 30 minutes. I made not statement as to what we should do, only what we could do. We have enough nuclear weapons to turn North Korea into a sheet of glass by 10 AM today. This is a fact. There is absolutely no disputing this. I obviously know all of the ramifications, and again, am making no statement about what we ought to do, just what we are capable of. So please, try to address the actual content of the comment next time, rather than just vomiting out a random mess of thoughts that are currently passing through your simian mind.
Sorry, but you are wrong. The only difference is that the good ole' U.S. of A. has been a little more sly about their imperialism than other nations in the past, instead of going in with full military force, we usually just choose to send in the CIA, overthrow a democratically elected socialist government (read: not friendly to US economic interests:'-( ) or two, put in place a brutal fascist regime (read: friendly to US economic interests ;-D ). This has happened over and over and over again -- please look into CIA actions in Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, the Congo, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, and many, many others. Or better yet, pick up a copy of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. We are an empire, we have just had the good sense to push this fact into the shadows and dominate the planet economically instead of militarily (well, we still do the military thing sometimes, it makes for great television).
Umm... no they don't actually. Please inform us. They have nukes, but no way to deploy them. They have a large army, but are incredibly underfunded. The U.S. military could destroy North Korea and be back by lunch if they pulled no punches. Oh and if by "threat" you mean they could kill a few thousand, then we are talking at cross terms here -- ANYONE could do that, what we are discussing here is whether or not NK has the ability to do REAL damage to the U.S., which I would define as at least knocking the U.S. off of its perch as the dominant superpower. I don't think that any one nation, save China (maybe) has the potential to do that. But hey, you are the smarmy "educated"* one. Please "educate" me.
*Note: Fox News does not count as education
Ok -- this girl is a brat, I will not for a second say that she is not. I will not, however, immediately dismiss this lawsuit as being frivolous -- a lot of schools advertise heavily on their job placement programs. If she chose to attend this school, and she chose to give them tens of thousands of dollars on a promise that they would offer her a great deal of help in finding a job upon graduation, then she certainly does have a right to be upset about, as that is blatant false advertising. I know how this thing works from experience -- the school I attended (which shall remain nameless) made a huge to-do about their career assistance programs before I chose to attend and rack up $40,000 in debt. Upon graduation, I realized that their career placement was not much more than what I would have gotten off of monster.com. Granted, I was not dumb enough to depend on this and found work on my own, but I do feel ripped off.
The bottom line is, if you are going to advertise a particular service, you had better be prepared to put your money where your mouth is.* These schools need to learn that they cannot get away with making false promises to get you in the door, it is false advertising, and is nothing less than grand larceny.
*I know very well that this is likely not the case, it seems that she is more upset that she still doesn't have a job DESPITE the services being offered -- if the school is living up to their end of the bargain this girl is just an idiot, as opposed to being an idiot with a legitimate complaint. Regardless of whether or not the school is providing the necessary services, she is a 'tard for expecting to have a job 4 months after graduation with a 2.7 GPA, and even more of a 'tard for relying solely on the school's career placement to help her, as everyone knows that they are generally bullshit. This will not work out well for her, but if she is successful, it could work out well for future students in giving schools a bit more incentive to be honest.
If this is the case, why not ban toy weapons altogether? I mean, aren't they concerned about, you know, shooting little kids with fake guns?
This argument doesn't wash and sets up a dangerous slippery slope -- we can always be safer by sacrificing more of our liberty. We could slash the crime rate down to next to nothing if only we all put CCTV cameras in all of our houses, and let the police come in for periodic spot checks to make sure you are being nice. I for one feel that this extra measure of security is not worth the cost of liberty. Some would disagree, but the Constitution is on my side.
I feel that the same goes for air travel -- it is the only viable means of real long distance travel, and the government has made it so that we cannot utilize this wonderful tool without bending over and giving up every last one of our civil liberties. They can even tell you at random that you aren't allowed to fly! I find this to be extremely odious and bodes very badly for society as a whole. We have no evidence to suggest that airliners are at any more risk than they ever have been, and there is very little evidence to suggest that airport security is even that effective. It seems entirely excessive to me and I am sure that Thomas Jefferson would roll over in his grave.
Word definitely should be on its way out. Not because we don't print everything out (digital distribution is MORE of a reason for everyone using the same program), but because the free alternatives do everything just as well (or better, they are much more lightweight) and are interoperable. Not that this will happen soon, as the vast majority of computer users are idiots and will continue to shell out thousands of dollars to Micro$oft, since M$ Word still is synonymous with 'word processor' in the common lexicon (and Office with office productivity suites), in the same manner as 'xerox', 'kleenex', 'band-aid', etc. This leads millions of fools to think that they need to shell out a few extra hundred dollars AFTER paying a few hundred bucks on their OS just to get it up and running. The subscription anti-virus companies are in the same racket.
Scare mongering is the new American pastime, didn't you get the memo?
Well... It is a post 9-11 world... we all know how everything changed on 9-11...
*gag*
Touche -- yes if you look at the phrase as a bit of Orwellian (Microsoftian?) doublespeak, then it does certainly make sense. Microsoft's new software offerings are doubleplus open, says the Ministry of Truth.
Ummm... no. I would expect 100 batteries to "explode", the vast majority of which would do little more than scare the pants off of the owner (which is the greatest harm that seems to come from the few cases of exploding iPods). It would take a seriously freak occurrence for one of these incidents to result in a house burning down, say 1 in 10,000 or so. That would mean that for every 110 billion batts sold, you could expect one house to burn down, which is probably about the same odds you have of winning the lottery every day for the rest of your life. Even if you go with 1 in 100 as a better estimate (which is clearly far too liberal), we are still only talking about one house fire per 1.1 billion sold, not bad odds. Are you saying that we shouldn't put wires in walls, or use gas stoves? Oh yeah, I forgot, we are used to those things and can properly put the risk in perspective. Humans are skittish herd animals that don't know how to deal with new things.
"Yeah, that's right, because an average person has the dexterity and movement speed of an industrial assembly robot and doesn't drop anything in a lifetime. So making everyday devices that explode when dropped is all safe and good."
Umm... these devices don't just explode when dropped, there is a very small statistical chance that if dropped under the right set of circumstances they could explode. This is a very big difference. Even if it were a bigger risk, it is a fundamental limitation of the Lithium Ion battery tech and not the iPod. I would agree that Lithium Ion batteries are not perfect, but we don't have anything better and there is no way we could eliminate them without taking handheld electronics tech back a decade or more. Like I said before, the overall failure rate for iPods is 1 in 11 million (this figure obviously includes all the instances of grotesque abuse as well), which I would definitely consider to be more than reasonably safe, especially since they have not even had one case of serious personal injury or property damage. Please take your FUD elsewhere, I hear Fox News is looking for new commentators...
"At the end, if the interrogating officer is left looking like a fool for falling for it, what does that make the audience?"
Strange, this is not the impression I walked away with at all... I was impressed by the Spacey character's ingenuity in fooling his captors, I never felt that his captors were fools for believing him. And I think that knowing the ending makes it more enjoyable to watch the film again through the lens of knowing the ending. It does not seem that there were that many clues left as to the actual identity of Keiser Soze, but it does seem very clear through the telling of the story that all is not as it seems, due to various inconsistencies. Not sure if this was intentional or not, but it is definitely fun to try to pick it apart.
I was actually thinking that if they were going to change one part of their name, calling the store a 'shack' is certainly more likely to turn away customers than implying that you sell radios... would you buy anything from the Computer Hovel? The Cell Phone Shanty? Meh... I won't be sad to see them go in any case, they have totally missed the opportunity to dominate the hobbyist market by making a half-assed attempt at edging into the mainstream.