A rational nation-state planning for possible cyberwar would have domestic attacks preprogrammed to act in the event of significant (perhaps more than a few days, and with a backup in-country operator) disruption of links to the offensive nation. A communications disruption can mean only one thing...
Not at all. Christians can be entirely reasonable, as can Christian periodicals. But a data source called the "Christian Science Monitor" one would expect, given the role that religion plays in debates over science in America, to be creationist anti-cloning anti-abortion and generally not to give an unbiased voice to issues. Add to that the level of ignorance generally displayed (to be fair, often by necessity due to their business models) by most popular periodicals and there is no reason to expect them to be good or fair.
Also, you lack a basis to call me just an ignorant hypocrite. You don't know whether I criticize myself or for what, nor my level of knowledge about any issue, nor do you know whether I am an ignorant hypocrite and also a hypointelligent shade of the color blue.
Nerd v. Goth v. Jock is not always something that a person controls, rather than something a person is.
People grow up to be who they are. I don't care whether they're a nerd or a goth or a jock or black or pink or Andorian. I care about whether they are generous, about whether they will have my back, about whether they have knowledge or spirit that lets us be more together than we each are separately, and about whether our personalities mesh.
Asking whether nerds are cool is just recycling the problematic classifications that got us here in the first place.
You are thinking of Chapter 7 bankruptcies, which are liquidations. A chapter 11 bankruptcy can include discharge of debt via re-writing contracts, for example.
My understanding is that the potency of the pot on the street today is a lot higher than the potency of what was there thirty years ago; this may be process-specific rather than strain specific. I don't know, and it is irrelevant to my point; forgive me if my language on that point should have been directed to process.
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/actually-take-these-petitions-seriously-instead-just-using-them-excuse-pretend-you-are-listening/grQ9mNkN even funnier
Agreed. This is the petition to sign. Call them on their doublespeak.
1) The question is whether "what seems like an honest statement of fact" is based on an unbiased study. I'm not sure how they do addiction studies... train chimps to smoke? Or take a sample of student users and ask them to quit for 90 days, while doing drug testing? An interesting study from IRB and institutional politics perspectives as well. The problem of bias on the issue would also make me very hesitant to fully trust a study on either side of the issue unless I was running it myself or had a good understanding both of the methodology and of the person running the study.
2) Your comment is not off-topic, since Marijuana use is one of the petitions at issue. I would hope we would be beyond modding down posts we disagree with, but even scientific communities like slashdot are not beyond their human foibles.
I have government based federal student loans, I can tell you even on minimum wage and unable to pay my loans the government didn't really care and certainly didn't let me repay at 15% IBR. Even more I still have those federal loans and I doubt even more I'll be allowed to repay them now at 10% of IBR. Instead what I could do was defer for 4 years or go back to school (& acquire more debt), during which I didn't have to repay them.
I'd love to know how one goes about getting either this mythical 10-15% IBR or forgiveness. They certainly have never brought up either with me as options no matter how bad off I was over the last decade.
The legislation generally only changes new loans that are issued. If you have student loans from ten years ago, you're pretty much screwed. If you have student loans from four years ago, you are more screwed than new student loans issued next year, but less screwed than student loans issued ten years ago.
Political student debt policy changes are effectively never retroactive, AFAIK.. So the policy improvement DOES NOT impact the outstanding trillion dollars in loans.
To see whether a particular loan has income-based repayment or public service debt forgiveness options, I believe the place to check is the Master Promissory Note for the loan.
If you're doing bad what does it matter if you're in debt or not? Obviously you can't pay it back right then, but that doesn't mean you should be let off the hook.
So you would repeal all bankruptcy law?
Problem is that a company (or person) may be in hock for more money than they will make in the forseeable future. If you can't discharge that debt, it doesn't make sense to keep operating the company in a capitalist society because the income will be eaten away by the debt repayment until there is basically no profit, or at least until the profit is too small to justify choosing that investment over other investments. There are variations on it, but that's the basic problem.
But if the company can discharge or fundamentally alter its debt, then it may be possible to run it profitably, in which case creditors will lose out as compared to what they have been promised, but there may well be a net gain to society over the cost of the business shutting down (or the person never being able to get out of debt).
The vast majority of people who support the decriminalization of pot are people who would vote for Obama anyways. (There might be some libertarians in the Tea Party but even bringing up legalization at their rallies had lead to booing. See e.g. http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Pot-Legalization-Brings-Boos-at-Tea-Party-Rally.).
At least some pot--not necessarily the stronger strains--should be legalized because nearly all of the anti-nausea medication out there is completely ineffective and is massively expensive. Even if pot of traditional potency were as bad in terms of addiction as the naysayers suggest (personally, the stench of it is what bothers me), it should still absolutely 100% be available for people undergoing intense chemo. Even if you limit the people able to give prescriptions to oncologists with particular CME training. There are lot of people for whom no drug at all works, they're miserable, and the drugs that the docs prescribe are much more expensive than pot.
Yeah, it costs a bit for the extra bandwidth. I think our default plan came with 2GB, and we needed like $5/mo extra to go up to 7GB. If you're a power user, it actually costs you real money up there.
In the US on the other hand, my cap is around 250GB.
You are underestimating the degree to which big media's copyright propaganda war has succeeded.
It has.
In the geek community, pretty much everyone knows that the law doesn't make sense, because while it incentivizes creation it goes so much farther than that that it is laughable.
But in real life, in the United States middle class, particularly with the risk of civil suits rising, people generally aren't sharing a lot of files with strangers.
That's not to say people don't still buy from bootleggers on the street, of course.
Actually, the attention they are (rightly) paying to that negotiation is what led to their current problem, or at least a part of it. They need more money for increasing content costs and library, and they made a pricing decision based on that rather than based on the consumer side. Setting your output price points based on the price of inputs rather than the price the market will bear for your outputs is kind of a classic example of stuff that doesn't work in economics. This particular case was public enough and expensive enough that it should be an example in microeconomic texts (and exams) for years to come.
Report it to them through their investor relations. As a potential investor, you're concerned that you had this problem, other people may have the same problem, and there isn't even a way to report it through customer service.
That's a really poor stereotype. The number of truckers who actually account for the drug using ones is a very small percentage, you just don't hear about your average Joe Sixpack driving his truck from point A to point B without incident because it doesn't make headlines.
This. Truckers spend all their time driving, and people don't trust you with millions in cargo if you're regularly drunk or high.
Actually, my favorite trucking+drugs story has nothing to do with the driver being high--it involves the guy who took a semi full of pot on the lower (cars only) level of the George Washington Bridge...
I was not considering any distinction between whether one hacker or a collective did the act, although it would affect the calculus. Note also that if individual action is indistinct from collective action in terms of morality, then a nation-state is privileged no more than an individual, so perhaps it should not then have the ability to make law under that argument.
I was also not attempting to mitigate the morality of the act, merely noting that in deciding whether it is moral to commit an act, one should look at the harm and benefit to everybody who is affected by it while and take that as part of your weighted inputs to the morality of the act.
I also noted that the consequences of our institutional system that the OWS people are criticizing are not necessarily less bad than murder.
I also did not say *anything* about how morality applied to either the formulation of legislation or the administration of justice. There's a distinction between morality and justice, a difference between legislation and justice, and a difference between law and any of the above.
Actually, no--this is much closer by analogy to self-defense. Murderers kill people, and so when a murderer seriously threatens your life, it is okay to fight back.
The difference is that here the harm is much more diffuse, so more difficult to quantify, and the same things that creates harm have redeeming value as well. However, realistically, that thing is so institutionally entrenched that it is hard to see meaningful change being accomplished through the expedient of writing your Congressperson, for example. Defacing systems, while certainly not terribly moral, is also not something likely to injure anyone. (There is a slightly higher risk of causing consequential harm to real people when taking down police websites, but since we have the fairly universal 911 system in North America, it is not much higher.) The real result is (1) economic harm, perhaps amounting to as much as a few million bucks, (2) a bit of news coverage, (3) incentivizing people to run secure websites and (4) giving the clamp-down-on-the-internet-people an enemy they can point at.
From a utilitarian perspective, the question is whether the gain from (2) and (3) exceed the cost of (1) and (4), which is of course hard to quantify. Anonymous also does not really care about (1), meaning that there's a negative externality which they are not factoring into their calculus. (3) is great, but obviously (4) is problematic. I suppose you also have (5), the personal consequences of getting caught.
From a moral perspective, obviously it becomes more problematic. At that point, the question becomes whether the likely gain to society as a whole makes it worth the individual's cost in becoming a lawbreaker--which, of course, is a huge no-no. It is also possible to do the Miltonian "differences of kind rather than degree" morality, in which case one simply cannot break the law, even when it is the best thing for the largest number of people. This is where Eve biting an apple is as bad as leading a third of the host of heaven into open war against God--not terribly persuasive, but still a morality that many people believe they embrace. (The same people often tell white lies, of course.)
In part because it makes accountability to shareholders (and law, for that matter) harder than it already is. In part because it disincentivizes them from looking at company-wide solutions to security problems. In part because when it is for contact between companies, it turns into a shield for antitrust violations.
Wrong. Both bookselling and publishing are competitive markets. They are becoming less so because of Amazon on the one hand and Barnes and Noble on the other, but they remain competitive, and the profit margins are very thin compared to most businesses.
That's why there are only a few significant publishers left in America.
I think he must have meant back in the 70s or so. There was a time period when there was a lot of hijacking, relatively speaking. Then there was almost none for a long time. Then there was 911 and everyone invented a lot of largely irrational security safeguards. If you secure the cockpit door, it becomes almost impossible to hijack a plane. The most you can do is blow one up, and that involves killing fewer people than you would kill if you blew up a bomb at a medium-sized high school sporting event.
Which makes the TSA, mostly, a massive way of pumping money into the economy. I don't mind a few of those--it's good to keep people employed--but we should have them employed in a productive way, rather than one which makes the system less efficient. Put them on environmental projects, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
There are blond geeks. I'd pretend to be one, but I'd get lots of marriage proposals.
A rational nation-state planning for possible cyberwar would have domestic attacks preprogrammed to act in the event of significant (perhaps more than a few days, and with a backup in-country operator) disruption of links to the offensive nation. A communications disruption can mean only one thing...
Not at all. Christians can be entirely reasonable, as can Christian periodicals. But a data source called the "Christian Science Monitor" one would expect, given the role that religion plays in debates over science in America, to be creationist anti-cloning anti-abortion and generally not to give an unbiased voice to issues. Add to that the level of ignorance generally displayed (to be fair, often by necessity due to their business models) by most popular periodicals and there is no reason to expect them to be good or fair.
Also, you lack a basis to call me just an ignorant hypocrite. You don't know whether I criticize myself or for what, nor my level of knowledge about any issue, nor do you know whether I am an ignorant hypocrite and also a hypointelligent shade of the color blue.
Agreed. You would expect it to be either childishly patronizing or entirely biased, but it's actually quite good.
Nerd v. Goth v. Jock is not always something that a person controls, rather than something a person is.
People grow up to be who they are. I don't care whether they're a nerd or a goth or a jock or black or pink or Andorian. I care about whether they are generous, about whether they will have my back, about whether they have knowledge or spirit that lets us be more together than we each are separately, and about whether our personalities mesh.
Asking whether nerds are cool is just recycling the problematic classifications that got us here in the first place.
See Chapter 11.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chapter_11,_Title_11,_United_States_Code
You are thinking of Chapter 7 bankruptcies, which are liquidations. A chapter 11 bankruptcy can include discharge of debt via re-writing contracts, for example.
The point that they are effectively massless, though, is huge for big collectors or collectors in expensive real-estate areas (NYC or Tokyo).
My understanding is that the potency of the pot on the street today is a lot higher than the potency of what was there thirty years ago; this may be process-specific rather than strain specific. I don't know, and it is irrelevant to my point; forgive me if my language on that point should have been directed to process.
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/actually-take-these-petitions-seriously-instead-just-using-them-excuse-pretend-you-are-listening/grQ9mNkN
even funnier
Agreed. This is the petition to sign. Call them on their doublespeak.
1) The question is whether "what seems like an honest statement of fact" is based on an unbiased study. I'm not sure how they do addiction studies... train chimps to smoke? Or take a sample of student users and ask them to quit for 90 days, while doing drug testing? An interesting study from IRB and institutional politics perspectives as well. The problem of bias on the issue would also make me very hesitant to fully trust a study on either side of the issue unless I was running it myself or had a good understanding both of the methodology and of the person running the study.
2) Your comment is not off-topic, since Marijuana use is one of the petitions at issue. I would hope we would be beyond modding down posts we disagree with, but even scientific communities like slashdot are not beyond their human foibles.
I have government based federal student loans, I can tell you even on minimum wage and unable to pay my loans the government didn't really care and certainly didn't let me repay at 15% IBR. Even more I still have those federal loans and I doubt even more I'll be allowed to repay them now at 10% of IBR. Instead what I could do was defer for 4 years or go back to school (& acquire more debt), during which I didn't have to repay them.
I'd love to know how one goes about getting either this mythical 10-15% IBR or forgiveness. They certainly have never brought up either with me as options no matter how bad off I was over the last decade.
The legislation generally only changes new loans that are issued. If you have student loans from ten years ago, you're pretty much screwed. If you have student loans from four years ago, you are more screwed than new student loans issued next year, but less screwed than student loans issued ten years ago.
Political student debt policy changes are effectively never retroactive, AFAIK.. So the policy improvement DOES NOT impact the outstanding trillion dollars in loans.
To see whether a particular loan has income-based repayment or public service debt forgiveness options, I believe the place to check is the Master Promissory Note for the loan.
If you're doing bad what does it matter if you're in debt or not? Obviously you can't pay it back right then, but that doesn't mean you should be let off the hook.
So you would repeal all bankruptcy law?
Problem is that a company (or person) may be in hock for more money than they will make in the forseeable future. If you can't discharge that debt, it doesn't make sense to keep operating the company in a capitalist society because the income will be eaten away by the debt repayment until there is basically no profit, or at least until the profit is too small to justify choosing that investment over other investments. There are variations on it, but that's the basic problem.
But if the company can discharge or fundamentally alter its debt, then it may be possible to run it profitably, in which case creditors will lose out as compared to what they have been promised, but there may well be a net gain to society over the cost of the business shutting down (or the person never being able to get out of debt).
The vast majority of people who support the decriminalization of pot are people who would vote for Obama anyways. (There might be some libertarians in the Tea Party but even bringing up legalization at their rallies had lead to booing. See e.g. http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Pot-Legalization-Brings-Boos-at-Tea-Party-Rally.).
At least some pot--not necessarily the stronger strains--should be legalized because nearly all of the anti-nausea medication out there is completely ineffective and is massively expensive. Even if pot of traditional potency were as bad in terms of addiction as the naysayers suggest (personally, the stench of it is what bothers me), it should still absolutely 100% be available for people undergoing intense chemo. Even if you limit the people able to give prescriptions to oncologists with particular CME training. There are lot of people for whom no drug at all works, they're miserable, and the drugs that the docs prescribe are much more expensive than pot.
Yeah, it costs a bit for the extra bandwidth. I think our default plan came with 2GB, and we needed like $5/mo extra to go up to 7GB. If you're a power user, it actually costs you real money up there.
In the US on the other hand, my cap is around 250GB.
You are underestimating the degree to which big media's copyright propaganda war has succeeded.
It has.
In the geek community, pretty much everyone knows that the law doesn't make sense, because while it incentivizes creation it goes so much farther than that that it is laughable.
But in real life, in the United States middle class, particularly with the risk of civil suits rising, people generally aren't sharing a lot of files with strangers.
That's not to say people don't still buy from bootleggers on the street, of course.
No. DVD Rental doesn't have anything to do with fair use. DVD rental is about the first sale doctrine.
Disclaimer: Obviously, if this matters to you consult a copyright attorney.
Actually, the attention they are (rightly) paying to that negotiation is what led to their current problem, or at least a part of it. They need more money for increasing content costs and library, and they made a pricing decision based on that rather than based on the consumer side. Setting your output price points based on the price of inputs rather than the price the market will bear for your outputs is kind of a classic example of stuff that doesn't work in economics. This particular case was public enough and expensive enough that it should be an example in microeconomic texts (and exams) for years to come.
Report it to them through their investor relations. As a potential investor, you're concerned that you had this problem, other people may have the same problem, and there isn't even a way to report it through customer service.
That's a really poor stereotype. The number of truckers who actually account for the drug using ones is a very small percentage, you just don't hear about your average Joe Sixpack driving his truck from point A to point B without incident because it doesn't make headlines.
This. Truckers spend all their time driving, and people don't trust you with millions in cargo if you're regularly drunk or high.
Actually, my favorite trucking+drugs story has nothing to do with the driver being high--it involves the guy who took a semi full of pot on the lower (cars only) level of the George Washington Bridge...
I was not considering any distinction between whether one hacker or a collective did the act, although it would affect the calculus. Note also that if individual action is indistinct from collective action in terms of morality, then a nation-state is privileged no more than an individual, so perhaps it should not then have the ability to make law under that argument.
I was also not attempting to mitigate the morality of the act, merely noting that in deciding whether it is moral to commit an act, one should look at the harm and benefit to everybody who is affected by it while and take that as part of your weighted inputs to the morality of the act.
I also noted that the consequences of our institutional system that the OWS people are criticizing are not necessarily less bad than murder.
I also did not say *anything* about how morality applied to either the formulation of legislation or the administration of justice. There's a distinction between morality and justice, a difference between legislation and justice, and a difference between law and any of the above.
murderers kill people, therefore we should too?
ok.
Actually, no--this is much closer by analogy to self-defense. Murderers kill people, and so when a murderer seriously threatens your life, it is okay to fight back.
The difference is that here the harm is much more diffuse, so more difficult to quantify, and the same things that creates harm have redeeming value as well. However, realistically, that thing is so institutionally entrenched that it is hard to see meaningful change being accomplished through the expedient of writing your Congressperson, for example. Defacing systems, while certainly not terribly moral, is also not something likely to injure anyone. (There is a slightly higher risk of causing consequential harm to real people when taking down police websites, but since we have the fairly universal 911 system in North America, it is not much higher.) The real result is (1) economic harm, perhaps amounting to as much as a few million bucks, (2) a bit of news coverage, (3) incentivizing people to run secure websites and (4) giving the clamp-down-on-the-internet-people an enemy they can point at.
From a utilitarian perspective, the question is whether the gain from (2) and (3) exceed the cost of (1) and (4), which is of course hard to quantify. Anonymous also does not really care about (1), meaning that there's a negative externality which they are not factoring into their calculus. (3) is great, but obviously (4) is problematic. I suppose you also have (5), the personal consequences of getting caught.
From a moral perspective, obviously it becomes more problematic. At that point, the question becomes whether the likely gain to society as a whole makes it worth the individual's cost in becoming a lawbreaker--which, of course, is a huge no-no. It is also possible to do the Miltonian "differences of kind rather than degree" morality, in which case one simply cannot break the law, even when it is the best thing for the largest number of people. This is where Eve biting an apple is as bad as leading a third of the host of heaven into open war against God--not terribly persuasive, but still a morality that many people believe they embrace. (The same people often tell white lies, of course.)
In part because it makes accountability to shareholders (and law, for that matter) harder than it already is. In part because it disincentivizes them from looking at company-wide solutions to security problems. In part because when it is for contact between companies, it turns into a shield for antitrust violations.
Digital data is unique as it can be copied over and over again...
=)
Wrong. Both bookselling and publishing are competitive markets. They are becoming less so because of Amazon on the one hand and Barnes and Noble on the other, but they remain competitive, and the profit margins are very thin compared to most businesses.
That's why there are only a few significant publishers left in America.
I think he must have meant back in the 70s or so. There was a time period when there was a lot of hijacking, relatively speaking. Then there was almost none for a long time. Then there was 911 and everyone invented a lot of largely irrational security safeguards. If you secure the cockpit door, it becomes almost impossible to hijack a plane. The most you can do is blow one up, and that involves killing fewer people than you would kill if you blew up a bomb at a medium-sized high school sporting event.
Which makes the TSA, mostly, a massive way of pumping money into the economy. I don't mind a few of those--it's good to keep people employed--but we should have them employed in a productive way, rather than one which makes the system less efficient. Put them on environmental projects, for example.