If you support unions, then you support violence against those who own the means of production. Where do you think unions came from? How do you think they gained power? Why do you think they were allowed to persist? Violence and the threat of violence.
Now, I'm not saying it's WRONG to support unions; violence, in the end, is the ultimate form of persuasion. If oppressors will not listen to peace, then you either accept oppression for yourself, your children, and your grandchildren, or you fight back.
RIGHT.....in the same wat that there is NO privacy issue in answering the Census Bureau's questions. Combining census data with commercial data in many cases permits your census answers to be connected to you.
Are you a teacher? Are you an elected official or some other public servant? Are you a member of a church? Did you recently turn 21 and have friends who are under 21? Do you own a car for which you must purchase insurance?
We don't want drunks in our schools. Or in our government. Or in our church. You are likely to be providing alcohol with minors. Please come down to the station for some questioning. You're more likely than a teetotaller to be a drunk driver so we're raising your rates.
And even if YOU don't fit in any of those categories, surely you're not so devoid of the milk of human kindness that you'd wish ill on those who ARE in thos categories.
To answer your question directly: The worst thing that can result from data about you being made publicly available is that the government will feed that public data into their anti-terrorist algorithms and determine that you may be a terrorist. Until false positives are eliminated, the only cure is total privacy protection.
Someday I hope we will be free of this religous yoke that is holding us down and we can be free.
Indeed. Perhaps someday we will be free to force people to watch a ten-year-old child being violated by a dog.
I hope that offends you. If so, then we can take as a given that there are certain behaviors you think should NOT be broadcast during the Superbowl Half Time Show without warning viewers. Once you've agreed to that, then it's merely a question of determining where the line should be drawn. Decent people can honestly disagree about where the line should be drawn, but I believe that decent, honest people know that a line must be drawn somewhere. People should not be forced to watch behaviors unacceptable to them.
Do you think that there are any decency standards that, say, an atheist would/could support?
I suspect they oppose the presentation of illegal material; child pornography comes to mind. Considering that decency standards exist to protect children, I suspect that they would oppose any material they believed potentially harmful to children. It's hard to generalize about what that would be; there is no core system of beliefs and values in atheism, merely a denial of the divine.
1. No one provides services free of charge. You pay for them somewhere. When Gateway unbundled their free lifetime tech support, the price of their systems dropped by over $100.
2. As I said, if Dell DID NOT pass their savings on to customers, they'd be out of business when someone else started undercutting them. This may be changing as they become a de facto monopoly in the business PC market. (I haven't been involved in purchasing PCs for about two years so will not push this point too strongly.)
3. If I REALLY want to feel cheated I can look at the biggest kleptocracy in the world (the US government) but I digress.
And in more, shall we say, "entrepeneurial" towns, the unsubscribed would receive occasional visits by firefighters who would wander around the outside of the residence saying things like "Beautiful home...but a fire trap. One little spark and the whole thing would go up. It would be a real shame if this house burned down. Would everyone be able to get out if the house caught fire?"
1. As stated, corporate customers DON'T WANT first tier support. They employee people who are more knowledgeable than first tier support.
2. The fee comes out of the IT department's training budget because Dell requires "training" before permitting you to order your own parts.
3. You troubleshoot PC problems as a matter of course; often they're fixable. Even hardware problems can be fixed by using spare parts lying around.
4. Dell passes the savings on to their customers. It's called "competition" and whoever submits the lowest bids to the big companies gets the contract.
------------
If I ever want to feel like I've been cheated, I look at my company's financials and then look at my paycheck.
The US has had 17 deaths in US spacecraft (3 in the launch pad fire, 7 on Challenger, 7 on Columbia), and 280 people have flown in US spacecraft. (seeAmerican Astronauts ) Death rate for those flying in US spacecraft: 6.0%
6% is an EXTREMELY high death rate for any "safe" activity. Sure, when something breaks, NASA tells us that space travel is still unsafe and experimental, but their actions belie their words: they think it's safe enough to fly three senators and a teacher.
By comparison, I did some checking on US wars back to the Civil War; the killed-in-action rate for the war is lower than 6% in every case. That's right, boys and girls, you're more likely to be killed in a US spacecraft than by an enemy bullet in a war. In the US civil war, if you consider deaths from disease, and if you consider the Confederate army also, the death rate is a whopping 19%, so war is not all fun and games.
On the other hand, since a failure generally kills everyone aboard and doesn't leave you wounded, we could look at the percentage of "dead" missions. I'm not sure exactly what to count as dead; would Apollo 13 count, for example? A quick and dirty calculation for the shuttle program is 2 (number of destroyed shuttles / 107 (number of shuttle missions). This is less than 2% and is comparable to the KIA rate in the Viet Nam war.
On the other hand, pointing a gun at someone's head and pulling the trigger reduces the probability that they will harm you or anyone else in the future to ZERO.
I don't argue your basic premise, though, that the act of reaching for a weapon makes you appear to be a threat and gets you killed, if for no other reason than that natural selection eliminates thugs who don't shoot people who might be reaching for a gun.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. My platoon of Marines are here to make sure you can't reach me with your sticks and your stones.
So...your opinion is that making MORE enemies while permitting FEWER enemies to attack is better than having FEWER enemies but permitting MORE of them to attack?
Nice bit of sarcasm. I live about five miles from a the site of a defense contractor that was believed to be the target of 2-4 Soviet nukes. It no longer is.
Granted, the world is a more chaotic place without a superpower in the Eastern hemisphere, but the probability of nuclear annihilation has diminished. Of course, there is no such thing as zero risk; we can never eliminate it, only reduce it, or trade one risk for another.
Let me offer an imperfect analogy. I would be immensely relieved if a mafia enforcer stopped pointing his gun at my head even if it was because he had to run down the street to join a gang war.
I suspect that the science in question here, though, isn't traditional science at all; it's computer simulations. We can't predict how much rain there'll be one week from now, but we can predict the temperature to within one degree a century from now? Get real.
Consider also the poem below, written in the company of Percy Shelley on the same evening that Shelley wrote his more famous poem. (Guy Davenport commented in the New York Times "Genius may also be knowing how to title a poem.")
On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows. "I am great Ozymandias," saith the stone, "The King of kings: this mighty city shows The wonders of my hand." The city's gone! Naught but the leg remaining to disclose The sight of that forgotten Babylon. We wonder, and some hunter may express Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What wonderful, but unrecorded, race Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
-- Horace Smith (1779 - 1849)
Both poems were inspired by the writings of Diodorus Siculus.
Anarchy means no government. Peaceful anarchy is probably the only form possible, as violent anarchy leads rapidly to rule by the strongest man with the biggest stick. An organized peaceful anarchy would be one in which there was no government but much coordination. I'd see the organization as having a more economic than political role, though. Without some organization, you might wind up with everyone growing grapes and no one growing hops, and that would be a tragedy.
I'll grant that organized peaceful anarchy is unstable (tending toward violent disorganized anarchy) and it probably wouldn't last for a real long time, but then, in the scale of human history, neither does democracy.
Years ago, I asked a co-worker how he would remove some duplicates in a Microsoft Access database that we were working on for a client. The owner overheard me and spent about 15 minutes explaining what kind of query he'd write. Problem is, he didn't know Access; he knew some sort of proprietary COBOL database format. He was a bright and talented guy, but his skills were about 15 years out of date. I listened patiently, nodded when he paused and looked enlightened when he was done. I thanked him and went back to my desk, where I opened different tables and views until the boss went back to his office. Then I phoned my co-worker and said "Seriously, how would you do this?"
In that light, I think showing up for more than a quarter of the votes sounds pretty hardworking, if not heroic.
No.
We're not talking about making cars or writing code or building houses or playing baseball. We're talking democracy.
Being elected Senator means it's your job to represent the people by voting. Yes, senators do a lot more than vote, but those are not the focus of the job. If Senator Kerry was unable to perform his duties because of cancer, I am certainly sympathetic and would wish him the best (not that he needs my wishes, since he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars). HOWEVER...he should have resigned.
Certainly, a resignation would have made it harder for him to advance his political career. It's clear to me that he chose personal advancement over representation of the voters.
I appreciate your input on this issue; I know who I'll be voting against.
Yup. From your tone, I suspect this bothers you. If you are a US citizen, I suggest you avoid reading the Constitution, since it enshrines the notion that inventors MUST eventually give their inventions to everyone.
Amendments AMEND or ALTER the original document. If any part of the original document contradicts the amendment, then the amendment is right and the original document is wrong.
Science is, in a nutshell, verifiable and falsifiable knowledge. In other words, "Here's what I know. Here's how you can have an experience to know what I know. If this, this, and this happen, then I am wrong." THAT is science. Not having read the book, I will make no judgements as to whether he presents repeatable experiments or proposes methods for disproving his results. If he doesn't, though, it's philosophy, not science. There's nothing wrong with loving knowledge, but the love of knowledge is not knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
If you support unions, then you support violence against those who own the means of production. Where do you think unions came from? How do you think they gained power? Why do you think they were allowed to persist? Violence and the threat of violence.
Now, I'm not saying it's WRONG to support unions; violence, in the end, is the ultimate form of persuasion. If oppressors will not listen to peace, then you either accept oppression for yourself, your children, and your grandchildren, or you fight back.
RIGHT.....in the same wat that there is NO privacy issue in answering the Census Bureau's questions. Combining census data with commercial data in many cases permits your census answers to be connected to you.
Are you a teacher? Are you an elected official or some other public servant? Are you a member of a church? Did you recently turn 21 and have friends who are under 21? Do you own a car for which you must purchase insurance?
We don't want drunks in our schools. Or in our government. Or in our church. You are likely to be providing alcohol with minors. Please come down to the station for some questioning. You're more likely than a teetotaller to be a drunk driver so we're raising your rates.
And even if YOU don't fit in any of those categories, surely you're not so devoid of the milk of human kindness that you'd wish ill on those who ARE in thos categories.
To answer your question directly:
The worst thing that can result from data about you being made publicly available is that the government will feed that public data into their anti-terrorist algorithms and determine that you may be a terrorist. Until false positives are eliminated, the only cure is total privacy protection.
Someday I hope we will be free of this religous yoke that is holding us down and we can be free.
Indeed. Perhaps someday we will be free to force people to watch a ten-year-old child being violated by a dog.
I hope that offends you. If so, then we can take as a given that there are certain behaviors you think should NOT be broadcast during the Superbowl Half Time Show without warning viewers. Once you've agreed to that, then it's merely a question of determining where the line should be drawn. Decent people can honestly disagree about where the line should be drawn, but I believe that decent, honest people know that a line must be drawn somewhere. People should not be forced to watch behaviors unacceptable to them.
Do you think that there are any decency standards that, say, an atheist would/could support?
I suspect they oppose the presentation of illegal material; child pornography comes to mind. Considering that decency standards exist to protect children, I suspect that they would oppose any material they believed potentially harmful to children. It's hard to generalize about what that would be; there is no core system of beliefs and values in atheism, merely a denial of the divine.
That's the Ayatollah of Rock and Roll-ah to you, pal.
1. No one provides services free of charge. You pay for them somewhere. When Gateway unbundled their free lifetime tech support, the price of their systems dropped by over $100.
2. As I said, if Dell DID NOT pass their savings on to customers, they'd be out of business when someone else started undercutting them. This may be changing as they become a de facto monopoly in the business PC market. (I haven't been involved in purchasing PCs for about two years so will not push this point too strongly.)
3. If I REALLY want to feel cheated I can look at the biggest kleptocracy in the world (the US government) but I digress.
Indeed.
And in more, shall we say, "entrepeneurial" towns, the unsubscribed would receive occasional visits by firefighters who would wander around the outside of the residence saying things like "Beautiful home...but a fire trap. One little spark and the whole thing would go up. It would be a real shame if this house burned down. Would everyone be able to get out if the house caught fire?"
1. As stated, corporate customers DON'T WANT first tier support. They employee people who are more knowledgeable than first tier support.
2. The fee comes out of the IT department's training budget because Dell requires "training" before permitting you to order your own parts.
3. You troubleshoot PC problems as a matter of course; often they're fixable. Even hardware problems can be fixed by using spare parts lying around.
4. Dell passes the savings on to their customers. It's called "competition" and whoever submits the lowest bids to the big companies gets the contract.
------------
If I ever want to feel like I've been cheated, I look at my company's financials and then look at my paycheck.
The US has had 17 deaths in US spacecraft (3 in the launch pad fire, 7 on Challenger, 7 on Columbia), and 280 people have flown in US spacecraft. (seeAmerican Astronauts )
Death rate for those flying in US spacecraft:
6.0%
6% is an EXTREMELY high death rate for any "safe" activity. Sure, when something breaks, NASA tells us that space travel is still unsafe and experimental, but their actions belie their words: they think it's safe enough to fly three senators and a teacher.
By comparison, I did some checking on US wars back to the Civil War; the killed-in-action rate for the war is lower than 6% in every case. That's right, boys and girls, you're more likely to be killed in a US spacecraft than by an enemy bullet in a war. In the US civil war, if you consider deaths from disease, and if you consider the Confederate army also, the death rate is a whopping 19%, so war is not all fun and games.
On the other hand, since a failure generally kills everyone aboard and doesn't leave you wounded, we could look at the percentage of "dead" missions. I'm not sure exactly what to count as dead; would Apollo 13 count, for example? A quick and dirty calculation for the shuttle program is 2 (number of destroyed shuttles / 107 (number of shuttle missions). This is less than 2% and is comparable to the KIA rate in the Viet Nam war.
On the other hand, pointing a gun at someone's head and pulling the trigger reduces the probability that they will harm you or anyone else in the future to ZERO.
I don't argue your basic premise, though, that the act of reaching for a weapon makes you appear to be a threat and gets you killed, if for no other reason than that natural selection eliminates thugs who don't shoot people who might be reaching for a gun.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. My platoon of Marines are here to make sure you can't reach me with your sticks and your stones.
So...your opinion is that making MORE enemies while permitting FEWER enemies to attack is better than having FEWER enemies but permitting MORE of them to attack?
Nice bit of sarcasm. I live about five miles from a the site of a defense contractor that was believed to be the target of 2-4 Soviet nukes. It no longer is.
Granted, the world is a more chaotic place without a superpower in the Eastern hemisphere, but the probability of nuclear annihilation has diminished. Of course, there is no such thing as zero risk; we can never eliminate it, only reduce it, or trade one risk for another.
Let me offer an imperfect analogy. I would be immensely relieved if a mafia enforcer stopped pointing his gun at my head even if it was because he had to run down the street to join a gang war.
I suspect that the science in question here, though, isn't traditional science at all; it's computer simulations. We can't predict how much rain there'll be one week from now, but we can predict the temperature to within one degree a century from now? Get real.
3) Her lawyers are well-informed and know they can't win but will take her money anyway.
Consider also the poem below, written in the company of Percy Shelley on the same evening that Shelley wrote his more famous poem. (Guy Davenport commented in the New York Times "Genius may also be knowing how to title a poem.")
On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows.
"I am great Ozymandias," saith the stone,
"The King of kings: this mighty city shows
The wonders of my hand." The city's gone!
Naught but the leg remaining to disclose
The sight of that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
-- Horace Smith (1779 - 1849)
Both poems were inspired by the writings of Diodorus Siculus.
Organised Peaceful Anarcy makes perfect sense.
Anarchy means no government. Peaceful anarchy is probably the only form possible, as violent anarchy leads rapidly to rule by the strongest man with the biggest stick. An organized peaceful anarchy would be one in which there was no government but much coordination. I'd see the organization as having a more economic than political role, though. Without some organization, you might wind up with everyone growing grapes and no one growing hops, and that would be a tragedy.
I'll grant that organized peaceful anarchy is unstable (tending toward violent disorganized anarchy) and it probably wouldn't last for a real long time, but then, in the scale of human history, neither does democracy.
400 pages of random acronyms
All science is either physics or stamp collecting. I forget who said that but 'tis true, 'tis true.
+2 Funny Troll
Years ago, I asked a co-worker how he would remove some duplicates in a Microsoft Access database that we were working on for a client. The owner overheard me and spent about 15 minutes explaining what kind of query he'd write. Problem is, he didn't know Access; he knew some sort of proprietary COBOL database format. He was a bright and talented guy, but his skills were about 15 years out of date. I listened patiently, nodded when he paused and looked enlightened when he was done. I thanked him and went back to my desk, where I opened different tables and views until the boss went back to his office. Then I phoned my co-worker and said "Seriously, how would you do this?"
In that light, I think showing up for more than a quarter of the votes sounds pretty hardworking, if not heroic.
No.
We're not talking about making cars or writing code or building houses or playing baseball. We're talking democracy.
Being elected Senator means it's your job to represent the people by voting. Yes, senators do a lot more than vote, but those are not the focus of the job. If Senator Kerry was unable to perform his duties because of cancer, I am certainly sympathetic and would wish him the best (not that he needs my wishes, since he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars). HOWEVER...he should have resigned.
Certainly, a resignation would have made it harder for him to advance his political career. It's clear to me that he chose personal advancement over representation of the voters.
I appreciate your input on this issue; I know who I'll be voting against.
Yup. From your tone, I suspect this bothers you. If you are a US citizen, I suggest you avoid reading the Constitution, since it enshrines the notion that inventors MUST eventually give their inventions to everyone.
You need to sue your school for malpractice.
Amendments AMEND or ALTER the original document. If any part of the original document contradicts the amendment, then the amendment is right and the original document is wrong.
their approach restores control to the recipient, halts spam, and creates a marketplace for valuable information exchange.
It also cures herpes and includes an implementation of Common Lisp!
Science is, in a nutshell, verifiable and falsifiable knowledge. In other words, "Here's what I know. Here's how you can have an experience to know what I know. If this, this, and this happen, then I am wrong." THAT is science. Not having read the book, I will make no judgements as to whether he presents repeatable experiments or proposes methods for disproving his results. If he doesn't, though, it's philosophy, not science. There's nothing wrong with loving knowledge, but the love of knowledge is not knowledge.