a rent seeking parasite will talk about capitalism a lot, but what they really want's is their monopoly or oligopoly preserved. so any government regulation or taxation is evil and anti-capitalist
That's nonsense. Rent-seekers ADORE government regulation. It puts smaller competitors at a disadvantage, erects barriers to entry, and if the rent-seeker is politically well-connected, lets the rent-seeker employ regulators as its personal enforcement arm against interlopers in its markets.
I had to go go Google to look it up. Would it KILL people to not assume that everyone knows every damned acronym in the universe when they submit articles?
I've long thought that voting ought to be at least somewhat difficult in order to cull out the people who don't bother to acquaint themselves with the issues before they vote. Chances are if you're motivated enough to overcome a few obstacles in order to vote, then you're more likely to have informed yourself as to what you're voting on and why. I'm not saying make it like walking on broken glass, but having to get yourself physically to a poll, drive to the registrar's office and vote early (because you'll be out of town on election day, which is something I've done) or have the foresight to request a mail ballot seem like small enough barriers to put in somebody's path.
To fix our schools, you need to keep congress's nose out of the process, return responsibility to the individual states and local boards of education.
Would you also eliminate federal funding and let states and localities pay for their own schools? Unless you do, the feds are going to put conditions on what they're paying for, and justifiably so. Personally I'd like to see the feds out of many areas, including education, since their participation comes with a lot of strings.
Ah, there's someone still reading Slashdot who actually remembers this stuff, even used it. These young folks speak of the Zenith tuning fork remote as if it were a relic unearthed in an archaeological dig, and are as unaware of why we call it the "clicker" as they are wondering why we say "dial" the phone.
And what's funny is that same guy is sitting here tinkering with his Perl script that reads radio show RSS feeds, downloads the shows, resamples the audio, combines the show hourly fragments into a single MP3 file, then automatically loads them into iTunes. I feel like my early drafting teacher who would tell us he was born before the Wright Brothers had flown and was now headed out on a jet for a vacation.
My folks were in the TV sales business and I never encountered a remote like the article describes. The first remotes I saw in the 50s were wired: a big box with the channel and volume controls was connected by a thick cable to the TV. The channel tuning was mechanical (a cylinder in the set had a separate tuned circuit for each channel and channel changing required rotating the cylinder to switch in the correct one), so when you changed the channel, the tuner in the set would go *clunk* clunk* *clunk* until it got to the right one. The next ones I remember were Zenith wireless. The remote consisted of several metal cylinders that emitted a tone when struck by a mechanical pushbutton on the remote. Trouble with those was other household sounds would trigger the TV, like the metal tags on a pet's collar.
And I'll bet almost no one here has ever encountered a vertical or horizontal "hold" control. In those days, we had to establish picture sync ourselves, AND WE LIKED IT!
I thought Amazon folded rather abruptly on the CA sales tax issue after having put up a big fight for years. Now I know why. Look for this deal to be cut in other states as well.
Sadly this seems to work and they are resisting scandals that would normally fall a government (eg giving false information to the public is typically certain death for a government in Canada). These people don't respect our democracy or the need for free information from the government, they don't deserve to run our country, but we are stuck with them for the foreseeable future, and it is unlikely any future government will dismantle all this information control infrastructure.:(
If giving false info to the public is certain death to a government then "controlling the message" sounds like a rational response and the panicked flurry of emails in TFA is explained. I'd love it if US bureaucrats were as afraid of lying to the public as Canadian ones apparently are.
Assuming for the sake of argument that global war... uh, climate change is happening and it's entirely caused by human activity, the solutions the CC evangelizers (I get to call them that because other posters are using the equally loaded term, 'deniers') are proposing are more onerous and liberty-infringing than necessary. There are a number of proposals that would use technology to cool the earth, and cheaply, rather than demand such a drastic change in lifestyle and consumption that third-worlders would never attain the state of developed nations. The fact that CC enthusiasts dismiss that type of solution out of hand in favor of transforming and controlling essentially all human activity tells me that this is about more than climate change. It's about power and the shaping of society into the form the CC hypers want.
And if you want to see some "denying" in action, watch this get modded down.
Maybe I've gotten cynical as I've gotten older, but it seems to me that a lot science is being politically weaponized these days. Perhaps it was always so, but it's become particularly noticeable to me in recent years. A good case in point is the climate change (nee global warming) debate. I don't get the sense that anyone involved has the attitude of, "Let's see what the evidence really is, what it means, and what we should do about it if anything". The science has become tainted by the money and political power at stake. Science itself is our best source of understanding, but like all human institutions it can be perverted into a form that's less than the ideal. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The products of scientific inquiry have to be acknowledged as the output of potentially-faulty human beings and should be treated as skeptically as we treat politics, news, and the latest diet fads. "Treated skeptically"' doesn't mean to just discard it, it means to subject it to rigorous and independent verification.
The makers of Miracle Whip once sued some guy who produced a product he called Yogurt Whip, asserting a claim to all uses of 'whip' in food products. After a court battle, they lost, with the court agreeing that you can't trademark a generic food term like 'whip'. The downside: it cost the guy $250k (this was a long time ago and that was even more significant a sum at the time) and years to "win".
I use Citi Mastercard for online purchases. Citi offers a "virtual account number" feature that can be used to generate a one-time-use number for a specific purchase. I've not had anyone yet attempt to use a number a second time, but if it happens they won't be successful, or so Citi claims.
What idiots. Any time you use a piece of scientific equipment regularly, you have to be sure you're calibrating it. Even better if you're checking your calibrations multiple different ways.
We had a case locally where a guy ticketed for speeding demanded the calibration and maintenance records for the speed gun used. The cops couldn't produce them and the case was dismissed. If I'm ever hauled in for something that an instrument claims I did, the first thing I'll do is subpoena everything related to it that exists or should exist. People get lazy and complacent and there's a good chance they didn't follow procedure.
More than fraud, it's evidence tampering and knowingly submitting false evidence. I wouldn't be surprised to see the wrongly-convicted sue the city over this. The DA should also be prosecuting the cops who falsified the paperwork.
So a republican wishing to jab Obama does the right thing by posting a secret treaty online. And he's a California republican as well - land of the Entertainment Industry. Does this count as a good thing or a bad thing? I'm thinking it's both but it works out for the citizens so it's a net good despite potential partisan motivations.
To butcher a quotation that I'm unable to find online right now: you don't want to have to depend on having good people in order to get a good outcome, you'd like to set things up so that the system produces good results even when the people operating it aren't necessarily good themselves. Maybe you suspect Issa's motives (personally I don't, but your mileage may vary), but if the outcome heads toward a desirable goal, then I'd say things are working as they should. Bad motives, good result, I'll take it over the reverse any time.
-STATUTE- A person who, while engaged in a professional capacity or activity described in subsection (b) of section 226 of the Victims of Child Abuse Act of 1990 on Federal land or in a federally operated (or contracted) facility, learns of facts that give reason to suspect that a child has suffered an incident of child abuse, as defined in subsection (c) of that section, and fails to make a timely report as required by subsection (a) of that section, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 1 year or both.
So if you're working on a machine, see CP and don't report it, you are on the hook.
The Los Angeles School District will be a good test of this statute. It's coming out that numerous parents of children in the Miramonte Elementary School reported highly questionable behavior on the part of some teachers and were waved off with no investigation being conducted. Then it turns out years later that those teachers are pervy child abusers. Whoever ignored those reports SHOULD be going to prison. Let's see if that happens.
I'm in 100% agreement. I got through calculus in engineering school mainly by rote learning, and my understanding was seriously lacking. Years later I picked up Calculus Made Easy and it presented the material in a form I could follow. Suddenly I could understand what I was doing and why. I later went back to my college calculus books to see why I had had such trouble, and found they were still nearly incomprehensible. Either I have a learning style that those books didn't address or they just plain sucked. Given that Calculus Made Easy was written in 1910, and the modern publishers have had over a hundred years and couldn't do as effective a job as CME, I'm going with the "sucks" theory.
I've wondered why I haven't seen a movement toward an open-source model for textbooks whose subject matter doesn't change that rapidly such as history, math, physics, art, etc. Given budget constraints, I'd think schools would welcome such a development with open arms. Not to mention that for those who want particular emphasis on certain areas, customization would be easy. I watched a news show on the textbook industry and was surprised at the amount of ass-kissing it had to do for the largest school districts, with the result being that their products reflected those inputs and nobody else's. Make open-source versions and districts can opt out of Big Schoolbook if they want, and leave the rest to pay the exorbitant prices for what is frequently a dumbed-down, inferior product.
A while back a business here wanted to use Pacific water to cool its equipment. They got turned down because discharging Pacific water back into the Pacific was deemed "contaminating" it because of the contaminants already present in the water that was going to be drawn from the ocean. I think they ended up going to a saner state.
I'm giving him steroids for inflammation and barbiturates for seizures, both of which get all over my hands cuz he doesn't exactly cooperate. I don't have a personal prescription for either, so I guess I'd be flagged as a drug abuser if my fingerprints were scanned.
I create unique email addresses for every company I do business with. A surprising number (I estimate @ 15%) end up getting spammed. In every case I write to the company and let them know that their email database has somehow been compromised. I have yet to get a reply to even one of those emails. That tells me that either it was deliberate or they don't give a crap. I'd say go ahead and refer your case to whatever law enforcement agency you think appropriate, but don't expect much.
I wrote them last week and told them that the email account I set up specifically for their company was getting spammed, and that their customer email list must have been compromised. They wrote back the following:
Hello XXXXX and thank you for contacting Carbonite Customer Support.
We have received your email regarding your account. We would be happy to assist you.
Carbonite will not sell your personal information to third parties. Carbonite may, from time to time, share with you information about other products and services that we think you may find to be of interest. If you wish to change the types of communications you receive from us, you may do so by clicking on the appropriate "Manage Communications" link in Carbonite's email communications to you or by emailing your request to Carbonite at customersupport@carbonite.com. Please note that opting-out of receiving promotional email will not affect receipt of service-related, transactional, or legal communication via email in accordance with the Terms. We would not send spam- type emails to customers. We do sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.
Please let us know if you need additional assistance.
Sincerely,
Carbonite Customer Support www.carbonite.com Back it up. Get it back.
Great, they didn't sell it, they gave it away free to untrustworthy dirtbags. Makes me feel much better to know that the company I'm entrusting with my backups doesn't bother to vet its business associates. I'm moving to crashplan.
Tell the police that you connected to the machine to try to track him down and found that he had downloaded child porn with it. Then, when they bust him and take the computer, you can file a claim with them. Kind of the nuclear option, but I bet it would work.
Nah, just log onto the stolen machine remotely and start tweetng the local PD, threatening some prominent person's life. That ought to get some results.
FTFA: Optimists like Florida are undoubtedly right about something: This country doesn’t make things anymore and never will.
Beware of the word, "never". There's an article in the Wall Street Journal today about the costs of manufacturing in China rising so much, (due to the Yuan's strengthening, increasing affluence, higher wages and transportation and material costs, etc.) that manufacturers are beginning to repatriate these jobs to the US. It cites a furniture manufacturer who is opening a new factory in South Carolina, Ford announcing that it will manufacture some auto parts in the US now, and the seven industries where advantages of manufacturing will likely tip back to the US over the next four years. In the same issue there's an article about a German tire manufacturer opening a new $500 million plant in South Carolina. We have a tendency to think that because things are a certain way now that they'll be that way forever. If history tells us anything, it's that change is continual and nothing is permanent, and where manufacturing is done is no different.
Slashdot Mirror
a rent seeking parasite will talk about capitalism a lot, but what they really want's is their monopoly or oligopoly preserved. so any government regulation or taxation is evil and anti-capitalist
That's nonsense. Rent-seekers ADORE government regulation. It puts smaller competitors at a disadvantage, erects barriers to entry, and if the rent-seeker is politically well-connected, lets the rent-seeker employ regulators as its personal enforcement arm against interlopers in its markets.
I had to go go Google to look it up. Would it KILL people to not assume that everyone knows every damned acronym in the universe when they submit articles?
I've long thought that voting ought to be at least somewhat difficult in order to cull out the people who don't bother to acquaint themselves with the issues before they vote. Chances are if you're motivated enough to overcome a few obstacles in order to vote, then you're more likely to have informed yourself as to what you're voting on and why. I'm not saying make it like walking on broken glass, but having to get yourself physically to a poll, drive to the registrar's office and vote early (because you'll be out of town on election day, which is something I've done) or have the foresight to request a mail ballot seem like small enough barriers to put in somebody's path.
To fix our schools, you need to keep congress's nose out of the process, return responsibility to the individual states and local boards of education.
Would you also eliminate federal funding and let states and localities pay for their own schools? Unless you do, the feds are going to put conditions on what they're paying for, and justifiably so. Personally I'd like to see the feds out of many areas, including education, since their participation comes with a lot of strings.
Ah, there's someone still reading Slashdot who actually remembers this stuff, even used it. These young folks speak of the Zenith tuning fork remote as if it were a relic unearthed in an archaeological dig, and are as unaware of why we call it the "clicker" as they are wondering why we say "dial" the phone.
And what's funny is that same guy is sitting here tinkering with his Perl script that reads radio show RSS feeds, downloads the shows, resamples the audio, combines the show hourly fragments into a single MP3 file, then automatically loads them into iTunes. I feel like my early drafting teacher who would tell us he was born before the Wright Brothers had flown and was now headed out on a jet for a vacation.
My folks were in the TV sales business and I never encountered a remote like the article describes. The first remotes I saw in the 50s were wired: a big box with the channel and volume controls was connected by a thick cable to the TV. The channel tuning was mechanical (a cylinder in the set had a separate tuned circuit for each channel and channel changing required rotating the cylinder to switch in the correct one), so when you changed the channel, the tuner in the set would go *clunk* clunk* *clunk* until it got to the right one. The next ones I remember were Zenith wireless. The remote consisted of several metal cylinders that emitted a tone when struck by a mechanical pushbutton on the remote. Trouble with those was other household sounds would trigger the TV, like the metal tags on a pet's collar.
And I'll bet almost no one here has ever encountered a vertical or horizontal "hold" control. In those days, we had to establish picture sync ourselves, AND WE LIKED IT!
I thought Amazon folded rather abruptly on the CA sales tax issue after having put up a big fight for years. Now I know why. Look for this deal to be cut in other states as well.
Sadly this seems to work and they are resisting scandals that would normally fall a government (eg giving false information to the public is typically certain death for a government in Canada). These people don't respect our democracy or the need for free information from the government, they don't deserve to run our country, but we are stuck with them for the foreseeable future, and it is unlikely any future government will dismantle all this information control infrastructure. :(
If giving false info to the public is certain death to a government then "controlling the message" sounds like a rational response and the panicked flurry of emails in TFA is explained. I'd love it if US bureaucrats were as afraid of lying to the public as Canadian ones apparently are.
Assuming for the sake of argument that global war ... uh, climate change is happening and it's entirely caused by human activity, the solutions the CC evangelizers (I get to call them that because other posters are using the equally loaded term, 'deniers') are proposing are more onerous and liberty-infringing than necessary. There are a number of proposals that would use technology to cool the earth, and cheaply, rather than demand such a drastic change in lifestyle and consumption that third-worlders would never attain the state of developed nations. The fact that CC enthusiasts dismiss that type of solution out of hand in favor of transforming and controlling essentially all human activity tells me that this is about more than climate change. It's about power and the shaping of society into the form the CC hypers want.
And if you want to see some "denying" in action, watch this get modded down.
Maybe I've gotten cynical as I've gotten older, but it seems to me that a lot science is being politically weaponized these days. Perhaps it was always so, but it's become particularly noticeable to me in recent years. A good case in point is the climate change (nee global warming) debate. I don't get the sense that anyone involved has the attitude of, "Let's see what the evidence really is, what it means, and what we should do about it if anything". The science has become tainted by the money and political power at stake. Science itself is our best source of understanding, but like all human institutions it can be perverted into a form that's less than the ideal. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The products of scientific inquiry have to be acknowledged as the output of potentially-faulty human beings and should be treated as skeptically as we treat politics, news, and the latest diet fads. "Treated skeptically"' doesn't mean to just discard it, it means to subject it to rigorous and independent verification.
The makers of Miracle Whip once sued some guy who produced a product he called Yogurt Whip, asserting a claim to all uses of 'whip' in food products. After a court battle, they lost, with the court agreeing that you can't trademark a generic food term like 'whip'. The downside: it cost the guy $250k (this was a long time ago and that was even more significant a sum at the time) and years to "win".
I use Citi Mastercard for online purchases. Citi offers a "virtual account number" feature that can be used to generate a one-time-use number for a specific purchase. I've not had anyone yet attempt to use a number a second time, but if it happens they won't be successful, or so Citi claims.
What idiots. Any time you use a piece of scientific equipment regularly, you have to be sure you're calibrating it. Even better if you're checking your calibrations multiple different ways.
We had a case locally where a guy ticketed for speeding demanded the calibration and maintenance records for the speed gun used. The cops couldn't produce them and the case was dismissed. If I'm ever hauled in for something that an instrument claims I did, the first thing I'll do is subpoena everything related to it that exists or should exist. People get lazy and complacent and there's a good chance they didn't follow procedure.
More than fraud, it's evidence tampering and knowingly submitting false evidence. I wouldn't be surprised to see the wrongly-convicted sue the city over this. The DA should also be prosecuting the cops who falsified the paperwork.
So a republican wishing to jab Obama does the right thing by posting a secret treaty online. And he's a California republican as well - land of the Entertainment Industry. Does this count as a good thing or a bad thing? I'm thinking it's both but it works out for the citizens so it's a net good despite potential partisan motivations.
To butcher a quotation that I'm unable to find online right now: you don't want to have to depend on having good people in order to get a good outcome, you'd like to set things up so that the system produces good results even when the people operating it aren't necessarily good themselves. Maybe you suspect Issa's motives (personally I don't, but your mileage may vary), but if the outcome heads toward a desirable goal, then I'd say things are working as they should. Bad motives, good result, I'll take it over the reverse any time.
Be careful.
From: http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/18C110.txt
-HEAD-
Sec. 2258. Failure to report child abuse
-STATUTE-
A person who, while engaged in a professional capacity or activity described in subsection (b) of section 226 of the Victims of Child Abuse Act of 1990 on Federal land or in a federally operated (or contracted) facility, learns of facts that give reason to suspect that a child has suffered an incident of child abuse, as defined in subsection (c) of that section, and fails to make a timely report as required by subsection (a) of that section, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 1 year or both.
So if you're working on a machine, see CP and don't report it, you are on the hook.
The Los Angeles School District will be a good test of this statute. It's coming out that numerous parents of children in the Miramonte Elementary School reported highly questionable behavior on the part of some teachers and were waved off with no investigation being conducted. Then it turns out years later that those teachers are pervy child abusers. Whoever ignored those reports SHOULD be going to prison. Let's see if that happens.
I'm in 100% agreement. I got through calculus in engineering school mainly by rote learning, and my understanding was seriously lacking. Years later I picked up Calculus Made Easy and it presented the material in a form I could follow. Suddenly I could understand what I was doing and why. I later went back to my college calculus books to see why I had had such trouble, and found they were still nearly incomprehensible. Either I have a learning style that those books didn't address or they just plain sucked. Given that Calculus Made Easy was written in 1910, and the modern publishers have had over a hundred years and couldn't do as effective a job as CME, I'm going with the "sucks" theory.
I've wondered why I haven't seen a movement toward an open-source model for textbooks whose subject matter doesn't change that rapidly such as history, math, physics, art, etc. Given budget constraints, I'd think schools would welcome such a development with open arms. Not to mention that for those who want particular emphasis on certain areas, customization would be easy. I watched a news show on the textbook industry and was surprised at the amount of ass-kissing it had to do for the largest school districts, with the result being that their products reflected those inputs and nobody else's. Make open-source versions and districts can opt out of Big Schoolbook if they want, and leave the rest to pay the exorbitant prices for what is frequently a dumbed-down, inferior product.
A while back a business here wanted to use Pacific water to cool its equipment. They got turned down because discharging Pacific water back into the Pacific was deemed "contaminating" it because of the contaminants already present in the water that was going to be drawn from the ocean. I think they ended up going to a saner state.
I'm giving him steroids for inflammation and barbiturates for seizures, both of which get all over my hands cuz he doesn't exactly cooperate. I don't have a personal prescription for either, so I guess I'd be flagged as a drug abuser if my fingerprints were scanned.
How difficult is it getting supplies like fuel/rocket motors, which apparently are considered explosives by some in government these days?
I create unique email addresses for every company I do business with. A surprising number (I estimate @ 15%) end up getting spammed. In every case I write to the company and let them know that their email database has somehow been compromised. I have yet to get a reply to even one of those emails. That tells me that either it was deliberate or they don't give a crap. I'd say go ahead and refer your case to whatever law enforcement agency you think appropriate, but don't expect much.
I wrote them last week and told them that the email account I set up specifically for their company was getting spammed, and that their customer email list must have been compromised. They wrote back the following:
Great, they didn't sell it, they gave it away free to untrustworthy dirtbags. Makes me feel much better to know that the company I'm entrusting with my backups doesn't bother to vet its business associates. I'm moving to crashplan.
Tell the police that you connected to the machine to try to track him down and found that he had downloaded child porn with it. Then, when they bust him and take the computer, you can file a claim with them. Kind of the nuclear option, but I bet it would work.
Nah, just log onto the stolen machine remotely and start tweetng the local PD, threatening some prominent person's life. That ought to get some results.
FTFA: Optimists like Florida are undoubtedly right about something: This country doesn’t make things anymore and never will.
Beware of the word, "never". There's an article in the Wall Street Journal today about the costs of manufacturing in China rising so much, (due to the Yuan's strengthening, increasing affluence, higher wages and transportation and material costs, etc.) that manufacturers are beginning to repatriate these jobs to the US. It cites a furniture manufacturer who is opening a new factory in South Carolina, Ford announcing that it will manufacture some auto parts in the US now, and the seven industries where advantages of manufacturing will likely tip back to the US over the next four years. In the same issue there's an article about a German tire manufacturer opening a new $500 million plant in South Carolina. We have a tendency to think that because things are a certain way now that they'll be that way forever. If history tells us anything, it's that change is continual and nothing is permanent, and where manufacturing is done is no different.