The reason was that small businesses would use cheap consumer internet service, and the ISPs wanted commercial users to pay the greater rates for a business service. They put a 'no commercial use' clause in the contract, but it's difficult to enforce, so they just crippled the home service just enough that businesses couldn't easily use it.
It's just price discrimination - a little underhanded, but a perfectly legitimate business tool. It's equivalent to, for example, Microsoft disabling domain features in Windows home edition to make sure businesses pay the higher price that businesses can afford rather than simply using the OEM windows that almost every PC and laptop comes with.
The objective of home security is not to render your home burglarproof. The objective of homo security is to render your home marginally less appealing to burglars than the one next door.
I found a little box module on ebay - it's just a board with four relays on, and a matching radio remote. A little wiring work to install it above my ceiling and I can now turn my lights on and off from bed.
It can be done cheaply, but that's only if you don't include the time to set it up as part of the price. Home automation without a prepackaged cloud solution is going to mean getting in there with a soldering iron and at least a bit of scripting.
I've read enough of their columns to understand it. I don't agree, but I can understand it well enough to explain it.
A lot of the opposition is based in the basic 'icky' element, but the more rigorous justifications turn to natural law. The concept that there is a 'rightness' ordained to society. Some see this order as divine, a plan by God himself, others as simply a part of human nature which cannot be opposed without creating conflict and chaos. This natural law says how things should be. Among other things it says that men and women are not the same and cannot be treated the same, because trying to treat men as women or vice versa denies their different nature and the roles created for them. Men were created to work and to fight, women to care for the children. Boys seek out the toy guns and policeman uniforms and dream of becoming an astronaut, while girls seek the dolls and nurse uniforms because that is how they are created. Men and women partner up and raise a family because that is the natural order - the way things should be.
Then along comes this new-fangled equality thing, and all hell breaks loose. Men in relationships with men? That violates the natural order, and down that path lies madness. Letting boys play with dolls? You are trying to make them into something that goes against what boys are. Women in the military? But that is not where women belong! Their role has always been in the home, and now you are trying to put the square female peg into the round male hole of warfare. And then to acknowledge these 'trans' people is a step beyond that, because it destroys the very distinction of male and female that is central to society. It denies nature itsself. If men can be women then black can be white and north can be south and truth becomes meaningless.
There's a huge glaring hole in all this, though: It's bullshit. There is no natural moral law, or natural lawbook, or any objective measure of how things should be - only how they are, and how they came to be. Every shift in society has been blocked by those who claimed it violated the natural law - the abolishment of slavery, the end of segregation, interracial marriage, the introduction of contraception, universal education. I expect ten thousand years ago there were hunter-gatherers refusing to plant the first crops because it seemed unnatural. Certainly there were those more recently who said it was in the nature of some races to rule and others to serve, and that was as it should be. Every time people have looked at the status quo and declared 'it has always been thus, it is natural that it be thus, and so any change would be in violation of what is natural.' Because natural law does not exist - all it can do is reflect the beliefs of the person who invokes it, and allow them to claim natural or even divine backing for whatever views they wish to defend.
But it'd also harm impulse purchases. Right now when someone needs CSC services they have to also look at all the cool new iStuff. That's taking lots of people who already have at least one Apple product and giving them a presentation on more Apple products they could buy right there. Go in to fix your Mac - leave with a fixed Mac and an iPad to go with it.
The protection from perverts thing is mostly a cover story. The real reason is just enforcing social norms: Men are men, women are women, and those who do not conform are a threat to society.
I didn't disagree with the poster above. My intended point was the symmetry: Liberals and conservatives, and most political factions, agree that freedom is a good thing... they just want to make a few exceptions. The exact extent of these exceptions varies greatly. All sides insist that their restrictions are absolutely necessary for a healthy and peaceful society, and the other sides are oppressive tyrants who will take your freedom away for their own ends.
Severity of punishment multiplied by chance of capture.
If the prospect of life or most of their life in prison doesn't deter someone, it's because they either do not care about the rest of their life at the time (crime of passion) or they are confident they will escape capture. Either way, the threat of execution is not going to be any more effective a deterrent.
Legal costs. The process for execution always involves lots of appeals - the defendant has nothing to lose, so they'll turn to every trick in the book and delay the process for as long as is possible. The prosecution can't risk losing because there is major and unacceptable political fallout to condemning a person to execution who is late found to be innocent, so they pull out all the stops and commit however much money and manpower it takes. The resulting legal fight can run for a decade and cost millions.
So you are arguing that allowing them to read novels and watch movies is wrong?
Then this is about revenge, because inflicting additional suffering upon them achieves absolutely nothing to protect the public or to rehabilitate the offender, and it's not even an effective deterrent. You just want to see bad people made to suffer because it lets you feel a little bit better.
Which Hippocatic oath? It's been revised so many times that some variants no longer have any recognisable connection to the original. Really should take his name off it.
This is one reason why advocates of the death penalty tend to reject the use of nitrogen. They want to see the condemned suffer at least a little - if the condemned dies happily, then people will feel justice has not been done.
Remember, people are basically bastards. Often 'justice' is just a polite veneer for 'collective revenge.' This person has made the group suffer, so the books can not be set straight until the same has been done to him.
The movie based on Battleship was... acceptable. So sometimes a movie taking inspiration from a simple game can work.
The strangest thing about that movie is that Michael Bay had nothing to do with it, yet it copies his style so exactly people tend to assume it was one of his.
To be fair, I don't think most organises of disruptive protests offline think about that in great detail. The standard chain of reasoning seems to be rather simpler: 1. A problem exists. 2. The government is unable/unwilling to help. 3. So lets break stuff and make lots of noise until we force someone to take action.
Plenty of protesters accept that they may go to jail for their cause, but few actually seek that end.
Anonymous is not a unified group. It doesn't really pick a cause, instead using a form of the same algorithm used by bees to select a nest site: Any bee can suggest a site. If they say it's good, other bees go to check it out. They assess the site and return to the meeting, and if they liked it they show their seconding with an appropriate level of enthusiasm. This in turn encourages more bees to look, until by a rough consensus every bee is dancing about the same place - then they all move off together. Unified action without a leader.
(Yes, this is what honey bees do, encoding location vectors in body movements and site evaluation in duration of display. Bees are cool.)
I don't know where the expression originates, but it holds true: "The market is a game all must be required to play, but none may be permitted to win." Or something like that. Every company strives to gain market share, but the system only works so long as no-one actually achieves dominance.
"King County Prosecutors said in January, adding that the women, who were forced into prostitution to pay off debts to organized crime bosses in Asia, are not being charged."
That means they *could* be charged. If prosecutors wanted. They aren't going to do so because it's really bad PR to charge someone for a crime they were forced to commit, but for an ordinary non-trafficked prostitute there is no guarantee the decision will be the same. The prostitute can report her violent customer, the police arrest him for assault - then they may well turn around and arrest her as well.
You still get those cases, but how commonplace are they as a percentage of prostitutes? Is it a common enough crime to be seriously concerned with, or just a handful of cases that have been plastered all over the media and created the false impression that it happens all the time?
The UK runs the same approach. It's supposed to be a shift in thinking to stop regarding prostitutes as criminals and start regarding them as victims. Well intentioned, but in practice it's still 'criminal enough' to keep the industry underground and prostitutes on the fringes. Yes, they can go to the police if they are abused... but they won't. It's bad for business if the police start investigating an incident and arresting their customers, and there's not much the police can do anyway when customers are understandably unwilling to supply proof of identity or payment.
It's not legal in France any more, exactly. They criminalised paying for sex just this year. The prostitution itsself doesn't isn't illegal for the prostitute, just the customer, but there are also a lot of prostitution-related prohibited acts that effectively keep prostitutes underground anyway - it's illegal for them to ask for money, to advertise as a prostitute or to operate any premises for the purpose of prostitution. It's also illegal for to receive payment from a prostitute in relation to their services, so it's effectively impossible to organise - any manager in a structured group would be considered a pimp, so they can only operate in isolation. It's impossible to be a prostitute without operating outside the law, so for all practical purposes it's illegal.
Prostitution is still legal in Germany though, and regulated, and it isn't forced underground like in France. They still get exploited, but only in the conventional business manner: Supply is plentiful so pay is a pittance, and brothel owners quickly realised that they can skirt around all the expenses of labor law and employee rights like health-and-safety law, health insurance and pension contributions if they don't actually hire any prostitutes - instead the prostitutes are freelancers and pay brothels a fixed daily fee in return for being permitted to ply their trade on the premises. This situation may change though, as there is substantial pressure from the EU for all member states to adopt the same model as France.
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That was never the reason. That was the excuse.
The reason was that small businesses would use cheap consumer internet service, and the ISPs wanted commercial users to pay the greater rates for a business service. They put a 'no commercial use' clause in the contract, but it's difficult to enforce, so they just crippled the home service just enough that businesses couldn't easily use it.
It's just price discrimination - a little underhanded, but a perfectly legitimate business tool. It's equivalent to, for example, Microsoft disabling domain features in Windows home edition to make sure businesses pay the higher price that businesses can afford rather than simply using the OEM windows that almost every PC and laptop comes with.
The objective of home security is not to render your home burglarproof. The objective of homo security is to render your home marginally less appealing to burglars than the one next door.
I found a little box module on ebay - it's just a board with four relays on, and a matching radio remote. A little wiring work to install it above my ceiling and I can now turn my lights on and off from bed.
It can be done cheaply, but that's only if you don't include the time to set it up as part of the price. Home automation without a prepackaged cloud solution is going to mean getting in there with a soldering iron and at least a bit of scripting.
I've read enough of their columns to understand it. I don't agree, but I can understand it well enough to explain it.
A lot of the opposition is based in the basic 'icky' element, but the more rigorous justifications turn to natural law. The concept that there is a 'rightness' ordained to society. Some see this order as divine, a plan by God himself, others as simply a part of human nature which cannot be opposed without creating conflict and chaos. This natural law says how things should be. Among other things it says that men and women are not the same and cannot be treated the same, because trying to treat men as women or vice versa denies their different nature and the roles created for them. Men were created to work and to fight, women to care for the children. Boys seek out the toy guns and policeman uniforms and dream of becoming an astronaut, while girls seek the dolls and nurse uniforms because that is how they are created. Men and women partner up and raise a family because that is the natural order - the way things should be.
Then along comes this new-fangled equality thing, and all hell breaks loose. Men in relationships with men? That violates the natural order, and down that path lies madness. Letting boys play with dolls? You are trying to make them into something that goes against what boys are. Women in the military? But that is not where women belong! Their role has always been in the home, and now you are trying to put the square female peg into the round male hole of warfare. And then to acknowledge these 'trans' people is a step beyond that, because it destroys the very distinction of male and female that is central to society. It denies nature itsself. If men can be women then black can be white and north can be south and truth becomes meaningless.
There's a huge glaring hole in all this, though: It's bullshit. There is no natural moral law, or natural lawbook, or any objective measure of how things should be - only how they are, and how they came to be. Every shift in society has been blocked by those who claimed it violated the natural law - the abolishment of slavery, the end of segregation, interracial marriage, the introduction of contraception, universal education. I expect ten thousand years ago there were hunter-gatherers refusing to plant the first crops because it seemed unnatural. Certainly there were those more recently who said it was in the nature of some races to rule and others to serve, and that was as it should be. Every time people have looked at the status quo and declared 'it has always been thus, it is natural that it be thus, and so any change would be in violation of what is natural.' Because natural law does not exist - all it can do is reflect the beliefs of the person who invokes it, and allow them to claim natural or even divine backing for whatever views they wish to defend.
But it'd also harm impulse purchases. Right now when someone needs CSC services they have to also look at all the cool new iStuff. That's taking lots of people who already have at least one Apple product and giving them a presentation on more Apple products they could buy right there. Go in to fix your Mac - leave with a fixed Mac and an iPad to go with it.
You give them an Apple portable and a screwdriver and see how long it takes for someone to break a product trying to open it?
The protection from perverts thing is mostly a cover story. The real reason is just enforcing social norms: Men are men, women are women, and those who do not conform are a threat to society.
I didn't disagree with the poster above. My intended point was the symmetry: Liberals and conservatives, and most political factions, agree that freedom is a good thing... they just want to make a few exceptions. The exact extent of these exceptions varies greatly. All sides insist that their restrictions are absolutely necessary for a healthy and peaceful society, and the other sides are oppressive tyrants who will take your freedom away for their own ends.
Vs the conservatives, who support freedom to own a gun but want the government policing the media to stop people saying dirty words?
"Freedom" is a concept so abstract that it's impossible to even agree on a definition.
Severity of punishment multiplied by chance of capture.
If the prospect of life or most of their life in prison doesn't deter someone, it's because they either do not care about the rest of their life at the time (crime of passion) or they are confident they will escape capture. Either way, the threat of execution is not going to be any more effective a deterrent.
Legal costs. The process for execution always involves lots of appeals - the defendant has nothing to lose, so they'll turn to every trick in the book and delay the process for as long as is possible. The prosecution can't risk losing because there is major and unacceptable political fallout to condemning a person to execution who is late found to be innocent, so they pull out all the stops and commit however much money and manpower it takes. The resulting legal fight can run for a decade and cost millions.
That sounds like the actions of someone with serious mental illness. Sane people may commit murder, but generally not for fun.
So you are arguing that allowing them to read novels and watch movies is wrong?
Then this is about revenge, because inflicting additional suffering upon them achieves absolutely nothing to protect the public or to rehabilitate the offender, and it's not even an effective deterrent. You just want to see bad people made to suffer because it lets you feel a little bit better.
Which Hippocatic oath? It's been revised so many times that some variants no longer have any recognisable connection to the original. Really should take his name off it.
This is one reason why advocates of the death penalty tend to reject the use of nitrogen. They want to see the condemned suffer at least a little - if the condemned dies happily, then people will feel justice has not been done.
Remember, people are basically bastards. Often 'justice' is just a polite veneer for 'collective revenge.' This person has made the group suffer, so the books can not be set straight until the same has been done to him.
The movie based on Battleship was... acceptable. So sometimes a movie taking inspiration from a simple game can work.
The strangest thing about that movie is that Michael Bay had nothing to do with it, yet it copies his style so exactly people tend to assume it was one of his.
How is another competitor supposed to compete when Amazon already has economy of scale? It's very hard to displace an incumbent market leader.
To be fair, I don't think most organises of disruptive protests offline think about that in great detail. The standard chain of reasoning seems to be rather simpler:
1. A problem exists.
2. The government is unable/unwilling to help.
3. So lets break stuff and make lots of noise until we force someone to take action.
Plenty of protesters accept that they may go to jail for their cause, but few actually seek that end.
Anonymous is not a unified group. It doesn't really pick a cause, instead using a form of the same algorithm used by bees to select a nest site: Any bee can suggest a site. If they say it's good, other bees go to check it out. They assess the site and return to the meeting, and if they liked it they show their seconding with an appropriate level of enthusiasm. This in turn encourages more bees to look, until by a rough consensus every bee is dancing about the same place - then they all move off together. Unified action without a leader.
(Yes, this is what honey bees do, encoding location vectors in body movements and site evaluation in duration of display. Bees are cool.)
I don't know where the expression originates, but it holds true: "The market is a game all must be required to play, but none may be permitted to win." Or something like that. Every company strives to gain market share, but the system only works so long as no-one actually achieves dominance.
"King County Prosecutors said in January, adding that the women, who were forced into prostitution to pay off debts to organized crime bosses in Asia, are not being charged."
That means they *could* be charged. If prosecutors wanted. They aren't going to do so because it's really bad PR to charge someone for a crime they were forced to commit, but for an ordinary non-trafficked prostitute there is no guarantee the decision will be the same. The prostitute can report her violent customer, the police arrest him for assault - then they may well turn around and arrest her as well.
You still get those cases, but how commonplace are they as a percentage of prostitutes? Is it a common enough crime to be seriously concerned with, or just a handful of cases that have been plastered all over the media and created the false impression that it happens all the time?
The UK runs the same approach. It's supposed to be a shift in thinking to stop regarding prostitutes as criminals and start regarding them as victims. Well intentioned, but in practice it's still 'criminal enough' to keep the industry underground and prostitutes on the fringes. Yes, they can go to the police if they are abused... but they won't. It's bad for business if the police start investigating an incident and arresting their customers, and there's not much the police can do anyway when customers are understandably unwilling to supply proof of identity or payment.
It's not legal in France any more, exactly. They criminalised paying for sex just this year. The prostitution itsself doesn't isn't illegal for the prostitute, just the customer, but there are also a lot of prostitution-related prohibited acts that effectively keep prostitutes underground anyway - it's illegal for them to ask for money, to advertise as a prostitute or to operate any premises for the purpose of prostitution. It's also illegal for to receive payment from a prostitute in relation to their services, so it's effectively impossible to organise - any manager in a structured group would be considered a pimp, so they can only operate in isolation. It's impossible to be a prostitute without operating outside the law, so for all practical purposes it's illegal.
Prostitution is still legal in Germany though, and regulated, and it isn't forced underground like in France. They still get exploited, but only in the conventional business manner: Supply is plentiful so pay is a pittance, and brothel owners quickly realised that they can skirt around all the expenses of labor law and employee rights like health-and-safety law, health insurance and pension contributions if they don't actually hire any prostitutes - instead the prostitutes are freelancers and pay brothels a fixed daily fee in return for being permitted to ply their trade on the premises. This situation may change though, as there is substantial pressure from the EU for all member states to adopt the same model as France.