A very similar Supreme Court decision was made decades ago striking down bans on interracial marriage. At the time, very similar arguments were being made in favor of the interracial marriage bans (it's not God's way, states should decide, etc). In both instances, the reason the bans are struck down are the same. States don't get to say "We declare discrimination against Group X legal because Bigger Group Y says so."
You might learn that our Constitution was written to LIMIT the powers of our GOVERNMENT. It was NOT written as a list of the "fundamental rights" of the citizens.
And thank goodness is was written in this way or every technological progression would come with more and more limitations. "Yes, I know you have a Constitutional right to free speech in face to face communications and in hand-written letters, but the Founders never addressed the telephone and Internet so you have no free speech rights there!"
For thousands of years, marriage was defined as "Parents of a girl gave her to some guy in an exchange of property in order to win some sort of social or political favor." So obviously, we can't ever change the errors of the past and must continue to treat women like property instead of equals in marriage!
I was shaking my head with his dissent. It basically read "How dare the Supreme Court decide whether a law is constitutional or not!" Um... that's the Supreme Court's primary function! They were asked to rule on a gay marriage ban and they said such bans are unconstitutional. Way to read your job description, Scalia!
If Scalia had his way, it would still be legal for a state to declare interracial marriage illegal.
I'm still hoping the Republican party will tear itself in two. The kooks will become the "Tea Party GOP" and will slowly spiral into oblivion as we all laugh while munching popcorn. The actual sane Republicans (yes, there are some of those left) will form the "We're Sane Again GOP" and will field actually viable candidates that don't see their primary demographic as ultra-religious, old white guys.
Here's why this is a big deal for everyone: because excluding people from getting married based on sexual orientation means that the Government, at its own discretion, can create arbitrary groups that it can discriminate against based on any number of grounds, for any reason, so long as enough people or deep enough pockets can lobby for it.
Exactly this. Let's say we allowed the gay marriage bans which are primarily based on "Christian values" (as expressed by some Christians). What's to stop those same people from saying "the only legal marriage is a Christian marriage"? So if you want to get married in the Jewish tradition, or Muslim, or even without any clergy but just a Justice of the Peace, that's not valid. After all, if you're not accepting Jesus (where Jesus = their particular interpretation of Jesus) then your marriage isn't approved. You can't legislate based on "my holy book says X is wrong so X should be illegal for everyone whether or not other people follow my holy book."
A lot of these "failing schools" are located in poor neighborhoods and the poor performance can be directly traced back to kids worried about issues like whether they'll have a home to go back to, whether mom/dad will keep their job, whether they'll have dinner tonight, etc. When kids are worried about basic life issues like this, their grades suffer
As far as attracting students goes, right now we tend to place students in schools based on neighborhoods. It sounds like you're advocating more of a private school philosophy of "you apply to school X and hope you get in." The problem with this is that schools in poor neighborhoods aren't going to attract anybody. So they will get the people that the other schools don't want - the kids with the most issues and problems. Meanwhile, the wealthier neighborhood schools will be able to pick and choose who they accept which means they'll get the higher performing students. So the rich schools do better and the poor schools do worse.
Look, the Confederate flag means slavery, hatred, bigotry and treason against the USA. It has no business being flown by any US government authority. But that is not sufficient reason to stop selling it to civilians. This is a country founded on the idea of Free Speech.
Exactly this. A government agency (state, local, or federal) has no business flying a Confederate flag any more than they can fly the US flag upside down while lit on fire. Citizens, however, have free speech and can use that to express themselves in almost any way they want so long as that way doesn't hurt someone else. If you want to paint a big Confederate flag on your truck while wearing a Confederate flag jacket and a "The South Shall Rise Again" pin (with Confederate Flag), go ahead. Of course, the rest of us have our rights to form opinions of you based on your Confederate flag obsession.
All in all, I think the flag issue is a side track. Yes, it's partially related to the church shooting, but it's not the whole problem. You could ban and burn every single last Confederate flag in existence and it wouldn't solve the problem. So by all means take it off of government buildings, but then let the issue rest and move on to more important issues related to what happened.
Actually, from what I've read, the real force behind the "no anonymous domains" push is the MPAA. If you set up PiratedMovies.com and make your WHOIS information private, it makes it harder for the MPAA to sue you. Not impossible, mind you. They can do it, but it takes a court order and the domain registrar giving the information to the court. The MPAA just wants to look up WHOIS to find who to threaten to sue.
They know they'll lose right now if they push to have all private WHOIS information banned, so they're trying to claim that a website with an ad on it is a commercial business. (Even if said ad only covers hosting costs.) If they're successful with this, look for the definition of "commercial" to expand even more until every website is a "commercial" site and private WHOIS information is done away with.
They are claiming that running ads on your website turns it into a commercial domain. So if you have a private blog but run an ad or two to cover hosting costs, congratulations! You would need to give your real address in the WHOIS information.
It's happened to me so this is definitely not a non-issue for me. I had someone harass me online making all sorts of accusations of "crimes" I've committed and threatening to report me to the police. She claims god talks to her - so no use arguing with her. Do I actually think the police would do anything based on "Hi I'm RANDOM PERSON and god told me this guy's evil?" Of course not. She could make my life a living hell, though if she knew my real name and address. (She was harassing me on a site where I use a pseudonym.)
In case you think she couldn't do this, she was harassing someone else (one of many people she's targeted) and knew his real name and place of employment. She called his job (he's a teacher) and claimed he is a pedophile (a serious accusation in any case, but needless to say, a career killer if you're a teacher). Luckily, he notified his employer beforehand of her and they brushed her off. She also used Facebook to track down all of his relatives (and people with similar last names) and tell all of them that he's a criminal.
Luckily, this person isn't the "travel to your home and take matters into her own hands" type, but who knows when she might get frustrated that the police aren't following up on her "god told me" claims? At one point, she might decide that showing up at my front door is god's will. I definitely wouldn't want to be broadcasting my home address to her and every other sicko online.
It can go across any terrain! Of course, the enemy will hear you coming from twenty miles away and your troops will need to wear constant ear protection since we essentially had to strap jet engines to the thing. This also means they won't be able to hear anything including incoming fire or communications with other troops. But it HOVERS!!!!
More like: If you commit a crime, we'll imprison you and let your clone take over your life. If your clone commits crime, a clone of your clone will take over your life while your clone is imprisoned. And so on.
Cue criminal being released from prison after his sentence is finished and finding that everyone likes Clone better than Original. Original kills Clone, is convicted of murder, put in prison, and Clone 2 is created to take over Original's life. (Someone needs to write this sci-fi story now!)
Can you identify as being from another planet, declare yourself that planet's ambassador, and get diplomatic immunity? And what if you do something that would normally result in the ambassador being kicked out of the country? What are they going to do, send you back to the planet you claim to be from?
Exactly this. And just like with the anti-vaccine folks, if you debunk one claim "Electrosensitive" people make, they will deny your evidence to the contrary, claim it's part of a conspiracy, and/or give new reasons why EM Sensitivity exists/vaccines are bad. In the latter case, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole where NOT disproving their latest theory PROVES (to them) that they are correct. It doesn't matter if this is Theory #7,453 - you must prove it wrong or else they are right!
This isn't a "get rid of pervy teachers" move (though that is certainly a justification that is given). If it was, there would be measures put in place to make sure they were only targeting the pervy teachers. Instead, this is all focused on test scores. Test scores (and whether students improve on them past a set mark) don't correlate to whether a teacher is a perv.
Instead, the real reason behind this attack is two-fold. First of all, the teachers' union didn't support Andrew Cuomo in his re-election campaign. So this is political retaliation. Secondly, Cuomo is a big fan of business-run Charter schools and has said that he would love to replace public schools with charter schools. In fact, part of his recent "reforms package" was that a school deemed under-performing would be placed into receivership. The third party receiver could turn the school into a charter school and fire all of the teachers/administrators regardless of any tenure. (This is happening in my son's school.)
Most of this is tied to the high stakes tests which Cuomo said students shouldn't feel anxious over because the tests don't matter for the students. How much incentive do you think kids will have to do well on a test that doesn't affect them directly?
The whole system has been designed to punish public school teachers for the sole reason of punishing public school teachers. If Cuomo has his way, don't be surprised if - in 5 years - we have no more public schools and only have business-run, for-profit charter schools.
In New York, our governor is trying to undo any form of tenure that public teachers have by using high stakes tests rigged to have students fail. These tests count for half of a teacher's evaluation. If a teacher fails their evaluation two years in a row, they can be fired within 90 days. If a teacher fails their evaluation three years in a row, they MUST be fired (for incompetence) in 30 days. There is no defense they are allowed to give for this except for fraud. In short, our governor has ensured that many of our public school teachers will be gone in 3 years even if they are great teachers but just have kids who don't perform up to state-mandated par.
If you are promoting a link, it's always best to use your own domain. Even if it just redirects to another URL. Suppose you post videos under the name "VideoGuy." You could register the domain name "VideoGuy.com" and promote "YouTube.VideoGuy.com" which redirects to "youtube.com/VideoGuy". Then, if Google decides to give your URL to someone else and you need to change to "youtube.com/VideoGuy2", you can change your redirect but keep promoting your "YouTube.VideoGuy.com" URL. This would also work if you decide to move off of YouTube to go to another service. You could do the same for Twitter, Facebook, etc. This way, you are constantly putting your main website ("VideoGuy.com") in front of users instead of other services' sites.
I find it oddly funny that China doesn't want to buy our "contaminated" garbage, but is perfectly happy to ship us products contaminated with lead and other toxic stuff.
Reading the comments, I've gone back and forth as to whether this would be effective and I think this about sums it up. There is demand for rhino horn and even if we flooded the market with fakes, people would know there are fakes and would demand the real thing. What would likely happen would be that any poorer folks would buy "cheap rhino horn" which is really the fake stuff being passed off as real. They might even know it is fake but wouldn't care as they wouldn't be able to afford the real stuff.
Meanwhile, the rich would pay more for verified real rhino horn. Perhaps this would mean that some of the rhino flesh is attached to the horn. Perhaps this means that the rhino's entire head is cut off. (Bonus: They get a rhino skull to hang in their homes along with their "horn pills".) Either way, authenticity is proven in some way while still keeping the entire trade black market.
We can make some efforts to save the rhinos, but one of the most effective measures would be for the Chinese people to stop using rhino horn. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
We initially had a land line and then moved it to a less expensive mobile line (add-on to our main plan). Finally, we moved that number to an existing Google Voice account. The total cost for this last move was $40. $20 to keep our existing Google Voice number and $20 to port our number to Google Voice. This was a one-time fee, mind you, not a recurring fee. This was over three years ago, so we've saved hundreds of dollars so far.
I use Google Voice also. I especially like the "blacklist" feature where you can mark a caller as "spam." The next time they call, they will hear "This number is no longer in service." Scammer will remove you from their list (no point in calling a "disconnected" line) and you don't need to deal with them. Often, Google will block scammers without the phone even ringing or me marking them as spam. (In the same manner that they will send a spam e-mail to your spam box without any intervention on your part.)
Backups might keep records around slightly longer, but chances are you reuse your backup tapes and so you'd eventually overwrite them with a "doesn't contain the old data" backup. I highly doubt that they are backing up, putting the backup into storage, and never using that backup tape again unless they need it to restore from.
Slashdot Mirror
A very similar Supreme Court decision was made decades ago striking down bans on interracial marriage. At the time, very similar arguments were being made in favor of the interracial marriage bans (it's not God's way, states should decide, etc). In both instances, the reason the bans are struck down are the same. States don't get to say "We declare discrimination against Group X legal because Bigger Group Y says so."
And thank goodness is was written in this way or every technological progression would come with more and more limitations. "Yes, I know you have a Constitutional right to free speech in face to face communications and in hand-written letters, but the Founders never addressed the telephone and Internet so you have no free speech rights there!"
For thousands of years, marriage was defined as "Parents of a girl gave her to some guy in an exchange of property in order to win some sort of social or political favor." So obviously, we can't ever change the errors of the past and must continue to treat women like property instead of equals in marriage!
I was shaking my head with his dissent. It basically read "How dare the Supreme Court decide whether a law is constitutional or not!" Um... that's the Supreme Court's primary function! They were asked to rule on a gay marriage ban and they said such bans are unconstitutional. Way to read your job description, Scalia!
If Scalia had his way, it would still be legal for a state to declare interracial marriage illegal.
I'm still hoping the Republican party will tear itself in two. The kooks will become the "Tea Party GOP" and will slowly spiral into oblivion as we all laugh while munching popcorn. The actual sane Republicans (yes, there are some of those left) will form the "We're Sane Again GOP" and will field actually viable candidates that don't see their primary demographic as ultra-religious, old white guys.
Exactly this. Let's say we allowed the gay marriage bans which are primarily based on "Christian values" (as expressed by some Christians). What's to stop those same people from saying "the only legal marriage is a Christian marriage"? So if you want to get married in the Jewish tradition, or Muslim, or even without any clergy but just a Justice of the Peace, that's not valid. After all, if you're not accepting Jesus (where Jesus = their particular interpretation of Jesus) then your marriage isn't approved. You can't legislate based on "my holy book says X is wrong so X should be illegal for everyone whether or not other people follow my holy book."
A lot of these "failing schools" are located in poor neighborhoods and the poor performance can be directly traced back to kids worried about issues like whether they'll have a home to go back to, whether mom/dad will keep their job, whether they'll have dinner tonight, etc. When kids are worried about basic life issues like this, their grades suffer
As far as attracting students goes, right now we tend to place students in schools based on neighborhoods. It sounds like you're advocating more of a private school philosophy of "you apply to school X and hope you get in." The problem with this is that schools in poor neighborhoods aren't going to attract anybody. So they will get the people that the other schools don't want - the kids with the most issues and problems. Meanwhile, the wealthier neighborhood schools will be able to pick and choose who they accept which means they'll get the higher performing students. So the rich schools do better and the poor schools do worse.
Exactly this. A government agency (state, local, or federal) has no business flying a Confederate flag any more than they can fly the US flag upside down while lit on fire. Citizens, however, have free speech and can use that to express themselves in almost any way they want so long as that way doesn't hurt someone else. If you want to paint a big Confederate flag on your truck while wearing a Confederate flag jacket and a "The South Shall Rise Again" pin (with Confederate Flag), go ahead. Of course, the rest of us have our rights to form opinions of you based on your Confederate flag obsession.
All in all, I think the flag issue is a side track. Yes, it's partially related to the church shooting, but it's not the whole problem. You could ban and burn every single last Confederate flag in existence and it wouldn't solve the problem. So by all means take it off of government buildings, but then let the issue rest and move on to more important issues related to what happened.
Actually, from what I've read, the real force behind the "no anonymous domains" push is the MPAA. If you set up PiratedMovies.com and make your WHOIS information private, it makes it harder for the MPAA to sue you. Not impossible, mind you. They can do it, but it takes a court order and the domain registrar giving the information to the court. The MPAA just wants to look up WHOIS to find who to threaten to sue.
They know they'll lose right now if they push to have all private WHOIS information banned, so they're trying to claim that a website with an ad on it is a commercial business. (Even if said ad only covers hosting costs.) If they're successful with this, look for the definition of "commercial" to expand even more until every website is a "commercial" site and private WHOIS information is done away with.
They are claiming that running ads on your website turns it into a commercial domain. So if you have a private blog but run an ad or two to cover hosting costs, congratulations! You would need to give your real address in the WHOIS information.
It's happened to me so this is definitely not a non-issue for me. I had someone harass me online making all sorts of accusations of "crimes" I've committed and threatening to report me to the police. She claims god talks to her - so no use arguing with her. Do I actually think the police would do anything based on "Hi I'm RANDOM PERSON and god told me this guy's evil?" Of course not. She could make my life a living hell, though if she knew my real name and address. (She was harassing me on a site where I use a pseudonym.)
In case you think she couldn't do this, she was harassing someone else (one of many people she's targeted) and knew his real name and place of employment. She called his job (he's a teacher) and claimed he is a pedophile (a serious accusation in any case, but needless to say, a career killer if you're a teacher). Luckily, he notified his employer beforehand of her and they brushed her off. She also used Facebook to track down all of his relatives (and people with similar last names) and tell all of them that he's a criminal.
Luckily, this person isn't the "travel to your home and take matters into her own hands" type, but who knows when she might get frustrated that the police aren't following up on her "god told me" claims? At one point, she might decide that showing up at my front door is god's will. I definitely wouldn't want to be broadcasting my home address to her and every other sicko online.
*writes "built-in smoke screen" on the features list*
It can go across any terrain! Of course, the enemy will hear you coming from twenty miles away and your troops will need to wear constant ear protection since we essentially had to strap jet engines to the thing. This also means they won't be able to hear anything including incoming fire or communications with other troops. But it HOVERS!!!!
More like: If you commit a crime, we'll imprison you and let your clone take over your life. If your clone commits crime, a clone of your clone will take over your life while your clone is imprisoned. And so on.
Cue criminal being released from prison after his sentence is finished and finding that everyone likes Clone better than Original. Original kills Clone, is convicted of murder, put in prison, and Clone 2 is created to take over Original's life. (Someone needs to write this sci-fi story now!)
Can you identify as being from another planet, declare yourself that planet's ambassador, and get diplomatic immunity? And what if you do something that would normally result in the ambassador being kicked out of the country? What are they going to do, send you back to the planet you claim to be from?
Exactly this. And just like with the anti-vaccine folks, if you debunk one claim "Electrosensitive" people make, they will deny your evidence to the contrary, claim it's part of a conspiracy, and/or give new reasons why EM Sensitivity exists/vaccines are bad. In the latter case, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole where NOT disproving their latest theory PROVES (to them) that they are correct. It doesn't matter if this is Theory #7,453 - you must prove it wrong or else they are right!
This isn't a "get rid of pervy teachers" move (though that is certainly a justification that is given). If it was, there would be measures put in place to make sure they were only targeting the pervy teachers. Instead, this is all focused on test scores. Test scores (and whether students improve on them past a set mark) don't correlate to whether a teacher is a perv.
Instead, the real reason behind this attack is two-fold. First of all, the teachers' union didn't support Andrew Cuomo in his re-election campaign. So this is political retaliation. Secondly, Cuomo is a big fan of business-run Charter schools and has said that he would love to replace public schools with charter schools. In fact, part of his recent "reforms package" was that a school deemed under-performing would be placed into receivership. The third party receiver could turn the school into a charter school and fire all of the teachers/administrators regardless of any tenure. (This is happening in my son's school.)
Most of this is tied to the high stakes tests which Cuomo said students shouldn't feel anxious over because the tests don't matter for the students. How much incentive do you think kids will have to do well on a test that doesn't affect them directly?
The whole system has been designed to punish public school teachers for the sole reason of punishing public school teachers. If Cuomo has his way, don't be surprised if - in 5 years - we have no more public schools and only have business-run, for-profit charter schools.
In New York, our governor is trying to undo any form of tenure that public teachers have by using high stakes tests rigged to have students fail. These tests count for half of a teacher's evaluation. If a teacher fails their evaluation two years in a row, they can be fired within 90 days. If a teacher fails their evaluation three years in a row, they MUST be fired (for incompetence) in 30 days. There is no defense they are allowed to give for this except for fraud. In short, our governor has ensured that many of our public school teachers will be gone in 3 years even if they are great teachers but just have kids who don't perform up to state-mandated par.
If you are promoting a link, it's always best to use your own domain. Even if it just redirects to another URL. Suppose you post videos under the name "VideoGuy." You could register the domain name "VideoGuy.com" and promote "YouTube.VideoGuy.com" which redirects to "youtube.com/VideoGuy". Then, if Google decides to give your URL to someone else and you need to change to "youtube.com/VideoGuy2", you can change your redirect but keep promoting your "YouTube.VideoGuy.com" URL. This would also work if you decide to move off of YouTube to go to another service. You could do the same for Twitter, Facebook, etc. This way, you are constantly putting your main website ("VideoGuy.com") in front of users instead of other services' sites.
I find it oddly funny that China doesn't want to buy our "contaminated" garbage, but is perfectly happy to ship us products contaminated with lead and other toxic stuff.
Reading the comments, I've gone back and forth as to whether this would be effective and I think this about sums it up. There is demand for rhino horn and even if we flooded the market with fakes, people would know there are fakes and would demand the real thing. What would likely happen would be that any poorer folks would buy "cheap rhino horn" which is really the fake stuff being passed off as real. They might even know it is fake but wouldn't care as they wouldn't be able to afford the real stuff.
Meanwhile, the rich would pay more for verified real rhino horn. Perhaps this would mean that some of the rhino flesh is attached to the horn. Perhaps this means that the rhino's entire head is cut off. (Bonus: They get a rhino skull to hang in their homes along with their "horn pills".) Either way, authenticity is proven in some way while still keeping the entire trade black market.
We can make some efforts to save the rhinos, but one of the most effective measures would be for the Chinese people to stop using rhino horn. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
We initially had a land line and then moved it to a less expensive mobile line (add-on to our main plan). Finally, we moved that number to an existing Google Voice account. The total cost for this last move was $40. $20 to keep our existing Google Voice number and $20 to port our number to Google Voice. This was a one-time fee, mind you, not a recurring fee. This was over three years ago, so we've saved hundreds of dollars so far.
I use Google Voice also. I especially like the "blacklist" feature where you can mark a caller as "spam." The next time they call, they will hear "This number is no longer in service." Scammer will remove you from their list (no point in calling a "disconnected" line) and you don't need to deal with them. Often, Google will block scammers without the phone even ringing or me marking them as spam. (In the same manner that they will send a spam e-mail to your spam box without any intervention on your part.)
Backups might keep records around slightly longer, but chances are you reuse your backup tapes and so you'd eventually overwrite them with a "doesn't contain the old data" backup. I highly doubt that they are backing up, putting the backup into storage, and never using that backup tape again unless they need it to restore from.
They lost the footage because it clearly shows a TARDIS in the background. Can't have everyone knowing The Doctor is real, now can they?