I'm envisioning a new version of the Terminator movies, but instead of a future ravaged by Arnold Schwarzenegger killbots, It's ravaged by Lawyerbots dressed in nice suits and ties. Quick, send a person back in time to get the killbots back!
I'd add one more item to that: Don't go by the real estate agent's recommended lawyer. We did when we bought our house. When we sat down for the closing, we were floored to hear that our lawyer would be representing both us AND the real estate company. Guess which interest he looked out for more? Us - a one time client - or the real estate company - who did repeat business with him and paid him a lot more? Yup. Many things that we needed were swept under the rug because a successful closing was in the real estate company's (and thus his) best interest.
The problem is that non-class action lawsuits are prone to the big business working the system to get out of liability. For example, the big company, with lawyers on retainer, can file endless legal tactics to run out the customers' time/money. If the customer gets through the junket, they can settle for an undisclosed token amount with settlement language forbidding the customer from talking about the company or settlement ever again.
Yes, class action lawsuits don't result in big paydays for the customers affected, but they are also harder for companies to squirm their way out of. Like many things in our legal system, they serve a good purpose, but could definitely use improvement.
There are also a lot of "Dark Side" folks who have no real talent of their own. They can run scripts written by talented people and can cause a lot of damage, but if given the chance to break into a system without their pre-written scripts, wouldn't get very far.
Well, you've also got to remember that there were a ton of rabbis on the fringe of Judaism at that time. There were probably dozens of "Jesuses" who attracted followers, got the attention of the Romans (who were okay with Judaism being practiced as long as nobody got too noisy), and were executed only for their followers to disperse. If a historical Jesus did exist, he was like all these other rabbis except, after his death, his followers kept "following" him until this Judaism fringe group spawned its own religion entirely.
Honestly, I'm not looking to make a ton of money off my books. If I make back what I paid in the publishing process (around $300 - mostly for a bunch of copies to give away), then I'll consider the book successful. Anything more than that is just icing on the cake.
I published my first novel almost a year ago and sales have been extremely low. Then again, when I should have been focusing on promoting the book, I was focused on writing the sequel. I can't help it, I love writing and hate trying to promote myself.
High energy music works for me too, but not because it raises my stress levels. First of all, I'll often be tired and high energy music helps stave this off. Secondly, I find my mind will often want a distraction. Instead of visiting web sites or playing games, the music gives my brain something it can shift focus to for a second or two before going back to the task at hand - without running the risk that a simple Wikipedia lookup will turn into hours of wasting time.
In college, I took a "History of Religions" course which the professor started with telling us that we'd most likely be offended at some point, but he was giving us a historical perspective, not a religious one. One of the interesting things I picked up in that course was that the historical Jesus actually advocated for stricter laws. He was a rabbi (teacher) among many, many of the time and thought that sin was incurred not only if you DID an action, but if you thought about doing it. For example, there's a Jewish prohibition of eating milk and meat together. So if I eat a cheeseburger, I violate this rule. Jesus would have said I violate the rule if I even think of eating a cheeseburger. The other rabbis of the time disagreed - rightly saying that you can't hold people accountable for thoughts if they take no actions on them.
Ironically, if this is actually true (I've never independently verified this), Jesus would be appalled at Christianity today since they've ditched most of the Jewish laws. If he magically came back to life today, he'd probably feel most at home in an ultra-orthodox Jewish temple. Definitely more-so than a church.
The problem is that it is impossible to enforce all of the laws all of the time. ICE can't possibly round up, process, and deport every illegal alien. If they do mass roundups/deportations without any checks, it's only a matter of time before they deport a legal immigrant or even a US citizen. (I wouldn't be surprised if this has already happened.) An ICE who is deporting US citizens as "collateral damage" because they are trying desperately to enforce the laws 100% isn't a good federal law enforcement agency. On the flip side, they can't simply ignore all of the illegal immigrants either. If they did, there'd be no point to the agency at all.
So we need to prioritize who ICE goes after. Obviously, dangerous criminals should be at the top of their list. If they have the resources to deport one illegal immigrant and the three potential illegal immigrants are a dangerous criminal, a migrant worker, and a teen who was brought to America by his parents when he was a year old, the criminal should be kicked out first.
DACA was a policy dictating that - if illegal immigrants who were brought here as kids registered - ICE would use their resources on other illegal immigrants. I agree that DACA should be written into law - perhaps with a path to citizenship if the person is law abiding and contributing to society, but I'd argue that DACA should have been kept in place as a temporary measure until Congress could replace it.
He gave a ton of money to Iran without Congress even knowing about it let alone approving it.
Congress appropriated the money for the Executive branch to use for foreign policy as they saw fit. If Congress didn't want the money to be used that way, they needed to put strings on the appropriation. And then we can have a nice battle over the constitutionality of Congress enacting foreign policy.
It wasn't even that. The "money we gave to Iran" was actually Iran's money that we had seized to get them to stop their nuclear programs. Part of the Iran deal (for better or worse) was "hit these metrics proving you've ended your nuclear program and we'll give you this money back." They agreed to it, hit the metrics, and so we gave them their money back. Still, some people like spinning this to make it seem as though Obama was sending taxpayer money to Iran.
The "give money to Iran" incident was actually Iran's money that we had put a freeze on. One of the terms of the Iran deal was that we'd release that money if they hit some metrics. They hit the metric so we released the money. This wasn't just giving Iran US taxpayer money (like some try to describe it). It was us following through on a deal. Whether you like the Iran deal or not, once the deal is made you either need to follow through on it or it's worthless. We were following through on it by releasing funds that belonged to Iran but that we had frozen/seized.
Thanks. I did that and ran it last night. It's still saying 20+ days. The problem, I think, is less with BackBlaze and more with my setup and Internet connection. The way I have my laptop set up, I only run backups at night. This means I'm backing up for about 8 hours every day instead of 24/7. I also have a slower Internet connection: 15mbps down and 1mbps up. Obviously, I can only cram so much data through that small pipe every night. It would be nice if I had fiber connection, but sadly, where I live, I only have Charter (formally Time Warner Cable). My most important data has already been backed up to BackBlaze, so I'm not that worried at this point. I'll keep this service running every night until everything is backed up.
As an aside, I almost had to use the restore function when my son fried my laptop. (Weird accident where he plugged the power cord into the USB slot and fried the motherboard.) Luckily, the hard drive was undamaged, but I was glad that all of my data was backed up to BackBlaze. I even was able to grab some needed files from BackBlaze before I was able to salvage the fried laptop's hard drive. BackBlaze is definitely worth the annual fee.
That assumes you'll do this regularly. For a long time, my backup procedure was to back up all of our laptops onto one external hard drive. Then copy that drive to another drive. One external hard drive stayed in the house for easy access. The other was hidden away in a second location. In theory, this worked well. In practice, I would either not update the "off-site" backup often enough such that loss of my primary backup would be devastating or I would forget to bring the off-site backup off-site, defeating the purpose of it entirely.
I'll admit that the cloud options are painfully slow (I'm currently backing up 210GB and the estimate is 21 days), but it's much more reliable. I don't need to make the effort to backup or remember to bring a second backup offsite - it happens automatically. For restores, BackBlaze will ship me an encrypted hard drive for me to copy my data off of. Then, I can either keep the drive (for a fee) or send it back (making the restore essentially free).
Just to add to this, when you get the backup drive/thumbdrive, you can either keep it or send it back. If you send it back, they refund you what they charged you for the drive/thumbdrive. So you can essentially restore your data for free.
When we were planning our cord cutting, I listed all the shows we watched. Then, I narrowed those down to the ones we cared about. If we only watch X for background noise, then losing it isn't a big deal. Next, I looked to see what streaming services carried those shows and what delays they had. (Hulu has many of the broadcast shows on the next day.) After factoring all this in, I realized we could save over $50 a month by cutting the cord. When our cable provider tried raising our rates by $30 (for no additional features), we cut the cord and began saving $80 a month.
That's what happened when we cut cable two years ago. Time Warner Cable wanted to raise our cable TV+Internet rate from $87 a month to $115. When I asked for a better deal, they claimed this WAS the deal. Mind you, they weren't giving us anything extra - in fact, we'd have had less features. The nearly $30 price increase led us to cut the cord. Our Internet cost went to $35 a month. The rest was savings.
Now, we were already subscribed to Netflix and Amazon Prime. (The latter mostly for shipping, but music and movies were a good perk.) Those were a wash. We'd have remained subscribed regardless of the cable situation. We signed up for Hulu and bought some antennas. Even with some other equipment/DVD purchases, we're up over $2,100 since cutting the cord.
Are we getting EVERYTHING we'd have if we still had cable? Of course not, but 99.999% of what's on cable we either didn't care about at all or was "background noise" shows. Since cutting the cord, we've found shows on Netflix/Amazon/Hulu to watch. We've also found some good local stations (LAFF shows Night Court, Rosanne, etc.) and we borrowed DVDs from our local library. My kids were first upset about the loss of Disney Channel and Cartoon Network, but have since learned to love shows from streaming services as well as YouTube videos. (My 14 year old son loves Minecraft videos on YouTube and will watch them all day if given the chance.)
No, common carrier means that they're not automatically responsible for things passing through their systems. Imagine if Google had to filter every e-mail, video, and other piece of information for threats/mentions of illegal activity/copyright violations/etc. You couldn't run a system like that without a team of lawyers looking at everything uploaded. Even posting a simple cat video to YouTube would result in a months long delay while it worked through the system.
When Google is notified of something illegal or against their TOS, they can then examine the content in question, determine if it really deserves to be taken down, and then act accordingly. So they can take down offensive or illegal content and still maintain their common carrier status the same way a phone company would not lose common carrier status if they cancel the account of a repeat phone scammer.
The telecoms have been for a "Network Neutrality" law passed by Congress. The catch was that the law was written by the telecoms and would be so full of loopholes that it would be useless. This way, the telecoms could claim to be observing Net Neutrality, Congress could say they voted for Net Neutrality, and people who didn't know better would think Net Neutrality won. It's like when they get legislators to count a town as "wired for high speed Internet" when one house in the town is wired. Then, they just wire the bare minimum (perhaps a rich section of town), call the job done, and pocket the rest of the funds they were given to wire the town.
The problem is that, in many areas, you can either do business with the big cable company or go without Internet. If you're lucky, you might get to choose between the big cable company or the big telecom company.
Where I live, I have Charter (formally Time Warner Cable) Internet. That's it. Verizon doesn't have FIOS here. There aren't small providers here offering broadband. It's Charter or nobody. (No, mobile broadband isn't an option because of the low caps. We stream videos and typically use 500GB a month. Mobile won't work with that level of usage.)
The Marvel Netflix originals certainly are dark, but there are other shows that are much more varied in tone. There's a Voltron series that has some fun callbacks to the original while being a very nice recreation. There's the sitcom-ish (but in the best possible way) Kimmy Schmidt. My boys even love the Croods animated series and The Worst Witch - both of which are much lighter in tone. (The latter is sort of like a female Harry Potter without the death that Voldemort brings. There's still conflict, but in a you'll-get-expelled-from-school sort of way, not in a dementors-will-suck-out-your-life sort of way.)
I've been in two anti-Trump protests. Both were large (several thousand people) and both were peaceful. They didn't include acts of violence at all. Both were part of a series of national protests, most of which were peaceful as well. The news showed a couple clips of the protests and that was it. Had there been violence, though, the news coverage of it would have stretched for days. "A bunch of people peacefully protest" isn't very newsworthy. "A group of people rioted" is newsworthy. You could have a thousand anti-Trump protests run peacefully, but the one that has a small group of people rioting will get the news coverage - and thus will paint many people's views of the whole anti-Trump movement as a bunch of violent rioters.
Very good analogy. "Why do I need a firewall and anti-virus software? It just slows my system down and annoys me. I'll just turn it off and I'll be fine." Perhaps this user will be fine. Or, maybe, they'll open an e-mail from "TheIRS@GonnaScamU.com" and be infected without ever really knowing. (Comparable to passing on measles to everyone while not knowing you're coming down with it.)
Slashdot Mirror
The politicians will make money the old fashioned way. By selling themselves as human targets for tossed rotten fruit.
Sure there is. The lobbyists will just pay the Chatbot developers to tweak the code to favor their group in any votes.
I'm envisioning a new version of the Terminator movies, but instead of a future ravaged by Arnold Schwarzenegger killbots, It's ravaged by Lawyerbots dressed in nice suits and ties. Quick, send a person back in time to get the killbots back!
I'd add one more item to that: Don't go by the real estate agent's recommended lawyer. We did when we bought our house. When we sat down for the closing, we were floored to hear that our lawyer would be representing both us AND the real estate company. Guess which interest he looked out for more? Us - a one time client - or the real estate company - who did repeat business with him and paid him a lot more? Yup. Many things that we needed were swept under the rug because a successful closing was in the real estate company's (and thus his) best interest.
The problem is that non-class action lawsuits are prone to the big business working the system to get out of liability. For example, the big company, with lawyers on retainer, can file endless legal tactics to run out the customers' time/money. If the customer gets through the junket, they can settle for an undisclosed token amount with settlement language forbidding the customer from talking about the company or settlement ever again.
Yes, class action lawsuits don't result in big paydays for the customers affected, but they are also harder for companies to squirm their way out of. Like many things in our legal system, they serve a good purpose, but could definitely use improvement.
There are also a lot of "Dark Side" folks who have no real talent of their own. They can run scripts written by talented people and can cause a lot of damage, but if given the chance to break into a system without their pre-written scripts, wouldn't get very far.
Well, you've also got to remember that there were a ton of rabbis on the fringe of Judaism at that time. There were probably dozens of "Jesuses" who attracted followers, got the attention of the Romans (who were okay with Judaism being practiced as long as nobody got too noisy), and were executed only for their followers to disperse. If a historical Jesus did exist, he was like all these other rabbis except, after his death, his followers kept "following" him until this Judaism fringe group spawned its own religion entirely.
Honestly, I'm not looking to make a ton of money off my books. If I make back what I paid in the publishing process (around $300 - mostly for a bunch of copies to give away), then I'll consider the book successful. Anything more than that is just icing on the cake.
I published my first novel almost a year ago and sales have been extremely low. Then again, when I should have been focusing on promoting the book, I was focused on writing the sequel. I can't help it, I love writing and hate trying to promote myself.
High energy music works for me too, but not because it raises my stress levels. First of all, I'll often be tired and high energy music helps stave this off. Secondly, I find my mind will often want a distraction. Instead of visiting web sites or playing games, the music gives my brain something it can shift focus to for a second or two before going back to the task at hand - without running the risk that a simple Wikipedia lookup will turn into hours of wasting time.
In college, I took a "History of Religions" course which the professor started with telling us that we'd most likely be offended at some point, but he was giving us a historical perspective, not a religious one. One of the interesting things I picked up in that course was that the historical Jesus actually advocated for stricter laws. He was a rabbi (teacher) among many, many of the time and thought that sin was incurred not only if you DID an action, but if you thought about doing it. For example, there's a Jewish prohibition of eating milk and meat together. So if I eat a cheeseburger, I violate this rule. Jesus would have said I violate the rule if I even think of eating a cheeseburger. The other rabbis of the time disagreed - rightly saying that you can't hold people accountable for thoughts if they take no actions on them.
Ironically, if this is actually true (I've never independently verified this), Jesus would be appalled at Christianity today since they've ditched most of the Jewish laws. If he magically came back to life today, he'd probably feel most at home in an ultra-orthodox Jewish temple. Definitely more-so than a church.
The problem is that it is impossible to enforce all of the laws all of the time. ICE can't possibly round up, process, and deport every illegal alien. If they do mass roundups/deportations without any checks, it's only a matter of time before they deport a legal immigrant or even a US citizen. (I wouldn't be surprised if this has already happened.) An ICE who is deporting US citizens as "collateral damage" because they are trying desperately to enforce the laws 100% isn't a good federal law enforcement agency. On the flip side, they can't simply ignore all of the illegal immigrants either. If they did, there'd be no point to the agency at all.
So we need to prioritize who ICE goes after. Obviously, dangerous criminals should be at the top of their list. If they have the resources to deport one illegal immigrant and the three potential illegal immigrants are a dangerous criminal, a migrant worker, and a teen who was brought to America by his parents when he was a year old, the criminal should be kicked out first.
DACA was a policy dictating that - if illegal immigrants who were brought here as kids registered - ICE would use their resources on other illegal immigrants. I agree that DACA should be written into law - perhaps with a path to citizenship if the person is law abiding and contributing to society, but I'd argue that DACA should have been kept in place as a temporary measure until Congress could replace it.
It wasn't even that. The "money we gave to Iran" was actually Iran's money that we had seized to get them to stop their nuclear programs. Part of the Iran deal (for better or worse) was "hit these metrics proving you've ended your nuclear program and we'll give you this money back." They agreed to it, hit the metrics, and so we gave them their money back. Still, some people like spinning this to make it seem as though Obama was sending taxpayer money to Iran.
The "give money to Iran" incident was actually Iran's money that we had put a freeze on. One of the terms of the Iran deal was that we'd release that money if they hit some metrics. They hit the metric so we released the money. This wasn't just giving Iran US taxpayer money (like some try to describe it). It was us following through on a deal. Whether you like the Iran deal or not, once the deal is made you either need to follow through on it or it's worthless. We were following through on it by releasing funds that belonged to Iran but that we had frozen/seized.
Thanks. I did that and ran it last night. It's still saying 20+ days. The problem, I think, is less with BackBlaze and more with my setup and Internet connection. The way I have my laptop set up, I only run backups at night. This means I'm backing up for about 8 hours every day instead of 24/7. I also have a slower Internet connection: 15mbps down and 1mbps up. Obviously, I can only cram so much data through that small pipe every night. It would be nice if I had fiber connection, but sadly, where I live, I only have Charter (formally Time Warner Cable). My most important data has already been backed up to BackBlaze, so I'm not that worried at this point. I'll keep this service running every night until everything is backed up.
As an aside, I almost had to use the restore function when my son fried my laptop. (Weird accident where he plugged the power cord into the USB slot and fried the motherboard.) Luckily, the hard drive was undamaged, but I was glad that all of my data was backed up to BackBlaze. I even was able to grab some needed files from BackBlaze before I was able to salvage the fried laptop's hard drive. BackBlaze is definitely worth the annual fee.
That assumes you'll do this regularly. For a long time, my backup procedure was to back up all of our laptops onto one external hard drive. Then copy that drive to another drive. One external hard drive stayed in the house for easy access. The other was hidden away in a second location. In theory, this worked well. In practice, I would either not update the "off-site" backup often enough such that loss of my primary backup would be devastating or I would forget to bring the off-site backup off-site, defeating the purpose of it entirely.
I'll admit that the cloud options are painfully slow (I'm currently backing up 210GB and the estimate is 21 days), but it's much more reliable. I don't need to make the effort to backup or remember to bring a second backup offsite - it happens automatically. For restores, BackBlaze will ship me an encrypted hard drive for me to copy my data off of. Then, I can either keep the drive (for a fee) or send it back (making the restore essentially free).
Just to add to this, when you get the backup drive/thumbdrive, you can either keep it or send it back. If you send it back, they refund you what they charged you for the drive/thumbdrive. So you can essentially restore your data for free.
When we were planning our cord cutting, I listed all the shows we watched. Then, I narrowed those down to the ones we cared about. If we only watch X for background noise, then losing it isn't a big deal. Next, I looked to see what streaming services carried those shows and what delays they had. (Hulu has many of the broadcast shows on the next day.) After factoring all this in, I realized we could save over $50 a month by cutting the cord. When our cable provider tried raising our rates by $30 (for no additional features), we cut the cord and began saving $80 a month.
That's what happened when we cut cable two years ago. Time Warner Cable wanted to raise our cable TV+Internet rate from $87 a month to $115. When I asked for a better deal, they claimed this WAS the deal. Mind you, they weren't giving us anything extra - in fact, we'd have had less features. The nearly $30 price increase led us to cut the cord. Our Internet cost went to $35 a month. The rest was savings.
Now, we were already subscribed to Netflix and Amazon Prime. (The latter mostly for shipping, but music and movies were a good perk.) Those were a wash. We'd have remained subscribed regardless of the cable situation. We signed up for Hulu and bought some antennas. Even with some other equipment/DVD purchases, we're up over $2,100 since cutting the cord.
Are we getting EVERYTHING we'd have if we still had cable? Of course not, but 99.999% of what's on cable we either didn't care about at all or was "background noise" shows. Since cutting the cord, we've found shows on Netflix/Amazon/Hulu to watch. We've also found some good local stations (LAFF shows Night Court, Rosanne, etc.) and we borrowed DVDs from our local library. My kids were first upset about the loss of Disney Channel and Cartoon Network, but have since learned to love shows from streaming services as well as YouTube videos. (My 14 year old son loves Minecraft videos on YouTube and will watch them all day if given the chance.)
No, common carrier means that they're not automatically responsible for things passing through their systems. Imagine if Google had to filter every e-mail, video, and other piece of information for threats/mentions of illegal activity/copyright violations/etc. You couldn't run a system like that without a team of lawyers looking at everything uploaded. Even posting a simple cat video to YouTube would result in a months long delay while it worked through the system.
When Google is notified of something illegal or against their TOS, they can then examine the content in question, determine if it really deserves to be taken down, and then act accordingly. So they can take down offensive or illegal content and still maintain their common carrier status the same way a phone company would not lose common carrier status if they cancel the account of a repeat phone scammer.
The telecoms have been for a "Network Neutrality" law passed by Congress. The catch was that the law was written by the telecoms and would be so full of loopholes that it would be useless. This way, the telecoms could claim to be observing Net Neutrality, Congress could say they voted for Net Neutrality, and people who didn't know better would think Net Neutrality won. It's like when they get legislators to count a town as "wired for high speed Internet" when one house in the town is wired. Then, they just wire the bare minimum (perhaps a rich section of town), call the job done, and pocket the rest of the funds they were given to wire the town.
The problem is that, in many areas, you can either do business with the big cable company or go without Internet. If you're lucky, you might get to choose between the big cable company or the big telecom company.
Where I live, I have Charter (formally Time Warner Cable) Internet. That's it. Verizon doesn't have FIOS here. There aren't small providers here offering broadband. It's Charter or nobody. (No, mobile broadband isn't an option because of the low caps. We stream videos and typically use 500GB a month. Mobile won't work with that level of usage.)
The Marvel Netflix originals certainly are dark, but there are other shows that are much more varied in tone. There's a Voltron series that has some fun callbacks to the original while being a very nice recreation. There's the sitcom-ish (but in the best possible way) Kimmy Schmidt. My boys even love the Croods animated series and The Worst Witch - both of which are much lighter in tone. (The latter is sort of like a female Harry Potter without the death that Voldemort brings. There's still conflict, but in a you'll-get-expelled-from-school sort of way, not in a dementors-will-suck-out-your-life sort of way.)
I've been in two anti-Trump protests. Both were large (several thousand people) and both were peaceful. They didn't include acts of violence at all. Both were part of a series of national protests, most of which were peaceful as well. The news showed a couple clips of the protests and that was it. Had there been violence, though, the news coverage of it would have stretched for days. "A bunch of people peacefully protest" isn't very newsworthy. "A group of people rioted" is newsworthy. You could have a thousand anti-Trump protests run peacefully, but the one that has a small group of people rioting will get the news coverage - and thus will paint many people's views of the whole anti-Trump movement as a bunch of violent rioters.
Very good analogy. "Why do I need a firewall and anti-virus software? It just slows my system down and annoys me. I'll just turn it off and I'll be fine." Perhaps this user will be fine. Or, maybe, they'll open an e-mail from "TheIRS@GonnaScamU.com" and be infected without ever really knowing. (Comparable to passing on measles to everyone while not knowing you're coming down with it.)