The "We need our guns to keep the government in check" is one of many red herrings that various political groups, manufacturers, and other 'thought leaders' put out to keep the population squabbling over stupid arguments instead of actually addressing gun violence. There are many countries with high gun ownership and next to zero gun violence.... but no one seems to be talking about that fact.
"my rights first, fuck everybody else's rights"
Some small, vocal, ercent of the populace developed that idea (in various forms) much, much later, than the earlier notions of 'rugged individualism'. For much of America's history, small groups and families were pushing west, settling land, living on their own, free from much government intervention. You lived or died based on your ability to farm and live off the land.
The descendants of those families make up most of our 'Red States'. The red conservative center of the country, surrounded by a ring of blue liberals on the coasts.
The problem with these gun debates is that people seem to only focus on 1 or 2 things. They make the issues black and white, when it is very grey and filled with tons of variables. America has a gun violence problem not only because of various factors in our past, but now mainly due to lots of factors in our present.
1. Income inequality: major problem. We are the richest country on the planet, and we have ghettos. Yeah.... actually ghettos in almost every major city in our country, complete with gang wars. Look at this: http://stateofred.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/detroit-ghetto2-765618.jpg Looks like some place you'd expect in India right? Nope, Detroit. 2. Poor social safety nets: if people have no where to fall back and get help when they need it, violence is an option. And income inequality, ghettos, and weak social safety nets means a cycle of poverty is created that is very hard for generations of families to get out of. 3. Mainly due to the above two items, people are self-segregating. We have high levels of racism, distrust, and poor communication between communities. Which leads to great things like major riots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots 4. The war on drugs. It has created a mega complex of both gangs, prisons, and military style police units. All sides of the 'war' have increased their level of armament over time. etc... etc...
There are a ton of issues that contribute to high gun violence rates in America. Yeah... stricter gun laws would help in some situations, as would more background checks, but those are just 1-2 factors among dozens. And the dozens of remaining factors are ones that most 'red states' do not want to touch with a 10 foot pole.
Add in the additional legal and accounting costs for having to track at least 50 different taxing jurisdictions and up to potentially almost 10k and be up on all the changes to tax law and try to figure out what items are taxable where....it's a nightmare. No only that but it's a legal minefield.
Are you implying that each individual business is going to have to track all tax rates in 50 states?? There are services that maintain a tax database and keep track of all the changes. It is no different than outsourcing your credit card processing.
There are a ton of those funny transcripts from courts. Just as way of explanation, then end up being funny like that because the attorney is trying to get certain things on the record. It isn't very funny in context, but it very funny out of context:)
Once done (my opinion's mostly based on SF reading I've done), what's the point? All those far-flung human colonies are going to immediately differentiate from each other, leading to "us vs. them" on a galactic scale, so what really is the point of this exercise? Preservation of homo sapiens' DNA regardless? What for?
That is a "what's the purpose of life" type question. There is no one right answer. If you as an individual have reasons to continue to live, apply some of those to society. To love, to live, to learn, to explore, to maybe some day find answers to some of our deepest philosophical questions? Take your pick.
You wouldn't want to attempt to store pure hydrogen in some sort of compressed tank. Rather I think people are working on fuel cells to store hydrogen in more dense formats. http://www.hydrogenics.com/fuel/
Well, even not getting into the idea of "electricity can be created by anyone", in reality there are very normal situations where people will be without internet. For example, I bring my xbox on family vacations to beach side cabins. Very rarely do we have internet in those cabins. But electricity always.
Electricity is much, much more prevalent than fast internet connections.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
If you want education to be taken seriously we have to change our whole culture.
Basketball players make more money than people who cure cancer, kids know this. People who make sex tapes get on TV, people who educate are mocked on TV.
And is that different than any other country? Nope. Entertainers and cultural 'stars' are always going to make more money than scientists. However that doesn't mean that a society can't fund education better, or even make higher education free like many European countries have done.
What the US seems to fail at, is looking at real facts and evidence, and making proper policy decisions based on that evidence. There are a ton of studies showing that education basically pays for itself when all those educated people start working and paying taxes. Yet each recession we seem to cut state and federal education funding.
It isn't that different than win 7 imo. I just stay in desktop mode, and largely ignore the other new tablet oriented features. I haven't missed the start menu much either. Windows key + first few letters of the app I want, hit enter, done.
Some things are annoying though. For example, It takes too many clicks to reboot, but I rarely do that anyways. And the control panel navigation is confusing until you get used to it.
Incidentally, why do we need more women in programming?
Over the years I've grown to see the value in having a diverse workplace. That not only includes a balance of male/female, but other races, ethnic groups, etc..
You are right, in that you don't have to have more women just for the sake of it alone, but I think products and decisions that come from a group representing a wide array of backgrounds usually results in a better outcome.
Especially if your product is meant for a large audience. It helps to have large number of perspectives used to construct it.
Feminism definition: "the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. "
How is promoting equality sexist? I understand that some groups and some women may misuse the idea of feminism to push beyond the boundary of equality, but that doesn't make the notion of feminism itself a sexiest doctrine.
Today seems worse than the biased news of the past.
For example, there wasn't one news agency seriously investigating the WMD claims of the Bush administration before the lead up to the Iraq war. And as more and more newspapers go under given the pressure of the Internet, there are fewer and fewer actual investigative journalists left.
I don't have high hopes of the current News agencies actually uncovering any real deep government scandals anymore. Unless the Government wants the story released, or someone pulls a Bradly Manning.
I read that to cover imports/exports, not sales. Like when I mailed a friend in another country a sweater, she had to pay a import fee in order to get the sweater.
"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State." - Article 1, US Constitution, I think was designed so that just shipping your goods from state X, through states A,B,C, and arriving in state E, would disallow states A,B and C from imposing import fees on the shipment.
Dropping some of your goods off in A,B, and C along the way, and then selling them in those states, would still be subject to a state sales tax though.
That is why news provided over public airways should be profit-free. No advertising allowed, and networks who are given the public airwaves should be required to provide news as a service to the public.
If the goal of a news agency is to get as many views as possible, of course entertainment will always win out over news. That isn't unique to Americans.
I don't understand why not being allowed to use bedroom or bathroom jokes in a professional or public setting is such a major issue for the slashdot crowd. Isn't this stuff we learned in kindergarten?
Ditto with hot button social issues. It just seems like common sense to me... and I don't feel like my rights are being trampled on.
Obviously political correctness can go too far somethings, but bedroom/bathroom humor, at least in my experience, has been a no no in most professional workplaces for a very long time. Isn't that what most parents teach their kids at around 3-4.... no boob/butt/etc... jokes in the supermarket (but you might let it slide, or even laugh at the joke when in the privacy of your own home). Everyone I know was raised that way.
If any time a system that is intended to display X is manipulated in a way not envisioned by the owner/creator to display Y, and the person doing the manipulating is not punished, I could see that leading to some serious issues.
Like the owner/creator being responsible for every successful hack on their system, no matter how complex or creative.
They guy ran a looping program that was guessing ID numbers in a brute force fashion. The system only returned email addresses when he guessed correctly. That isn't quite the same as just looking through a window. It is more like punching security codes on a number pad until you get one right, with the result being someone's curtain opens and you see something that was intended to be private.
Once deployed, the Account Slurper utilized a process known as a "brute force" attack
- an iterative process used to obtain information from a computer system
against AT&T's servers.
Specifically, the Account Slurper randomly guessed at ranges of ICC-IDs.
An incorrect guess was met with no additional information,
while a correct guess was rewarded with an ICC-IDle-mail pairing for a specific,
identifiable iPad 30 user.
Very sloppy on AT&T's part, but it wasn't like they intentional created some API that would hand out emails to the public.
It seems like what a company believes should be allowed is the driving force behind these type of charges. If I owned a server, and thought I had set it up correctly to only allow X access, but some creative person found out that they could access Y, they'd get in trouble if they attempted to access Y and were caught.
He didn't "break in". He sent requests to a publicly-accessible web server, and AT&T sent back private information. This wasn't hacking, or even a DOS attack. AT&T is at fault here.
I'm not seeing how that is different than if someone leaves their curtains open, and I video record them. I can get in trouble for video recording them. Stalking charges, and doubly so if I then start uploading all the video of them to youbube or another public site, etc.. Despite the window being open, we know it is wrong to be a peeping tom.
He should have known it was wrong to violate so many people's personal data, despite the door being open to it. Just like I might be polite and tell my neighbor, "hey.. ahh... you should close your curtains at night, lots of houses can see through your windows", he should have been polite and just kept telling AT&T about the open window. He could have increased the pressure by posting blog articles or other means that would have made the fact that door is open public, but without walking through the door and removing stuff.
Are you sure that it is fear that motivates liberals to want those things?
From my perspective: a segment of society will never adequately prepare for emergencies. And because of that, what is the outcome, and what is the most efficient way to do deal with it, given our society's morals.
So on something like healthcare, my thoughts are something along the lines of: because society has mandated free emergency care even if you can't pay due to our society's morals, what is the cheapest way to take care of those people? As it turns out, providing free preventative care is a much more efficient use of tax payer dollars. You either pay for that person in terms of your own healthcare costs going up, because the hospital passes it on to you, or you pay for it as preventative care in the form of taxes. No fear involved.
On something like AGW, part of that is fear. But the fear doesn't come first. The 99% of scientists saying "we don't have all the details, but this is a problem, and we need to do something about it" comes first. Further, because a progressive is by definition progressive-minded, they are less likely to balk at the thought of some of the future solutions: wind, solar, electric cars, phasing out oil, etc..
Put another way, conservative brains are all like, "Well, I would never let myself get into that position. Even if I did, I'd get myself out of it. I don't see why they deserve help." and liberal brains are all like, "Even if that person didn't make the best choices at every juncture in their life (or even made lots of bad ones), I can totally understand how they made the choices they did. At some less wise point in my life, I might have made the same decisions. They deserve our help."
I'm not sure that 'unwise' or 'bad choices' are the proper words to use when describing the average outcome of exploration and seeking novelty. (Although those are possible outcomes). Other outcomes that could result from pushing yourself to seek novelty or exploring include: meeting more people and learning to see through others eyes, experiencing truly different cultures where you learn to value differing ways of achieving similar goals, discovering new and better ways to do "X" rather than relying on the tried and true, hearing history told from another viewpoint, really internalizing another person's description of struggle, etc...
Those sort of outcomes can also lead a person to conclude that we need stronger social safety nets. For example, based on my experiences (not direct, but as a result of learning, talking to people, taking an interest in the 'inside story'), I think that inner city poverty cycles are real, hard to get out of, and that society should help people get out of the cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/northamerica/
None of the professional services companies above have good 24/7 support for Postgres?
The "We need our guns to keep the government in check" is one of many red herrings that various political groups, manufacturers, and other 'thought leaders' put out to keep the population squabbling over stupid arguments instead of actually addressing gun violence. There are many countries with high gun ownership and next to zero gun violence.... but no one seems to be talking about that fact.
"my rights first, fuck everybody else's rights"
Some small, vocal, ercent of the populace developed that idea (in various forms) much, much later, than the earlier notions of 'rugged individualism'. For much of America's history, small groups and families were pushing west, settling land, living on their own, free from much government intervention. You lived or died based on your ability to farm and live off the land.
The descendants of those families make up most of our 'Red States'. The red conservative center of the country, surrounded by a ring of blue liberals on the coasts.
The problem with these gun debates is that people seem to only focus on 1 or 2 things. They make the issues black and white, when it is very grey and filled with tons of variables. America has a gun violence problem not only because of various factors in our past, but now mainly due to lots of factors in our present.
1. Income inequality: major problem. We are the richest country on the planet, and we have ghettos. Yeah.... actually ghettos in almost every major city in our country, complete with gang wars. Look at this: http://stateofred.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/detroit-ghetto2-765618.jpg Looks like some place you'd expect in India right? Nope, Detroit.
2. Poor social safety nets: if people have no where to fall back and get help when they need it, violence is an option. And income inequality, ghettos, and weak social safety nets means a cycle of poverty is created that is very hard for generations of families to get out of.
3. Mainly due to the above two items, people are self-segregating. We have high levels of racism, distrust, and poor communication between communities. Which leads to great things like major riots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots
4. The war on drugs. It has created a mega complex of both gangs, prisons, and military style police units. All sides of the 'war' have increased their level of armament over time.
etc...
etc...
There are a ton of issues that contribute to high gun violence rates in America. Yeah... stricter gun laws would help in some situations, as would more background checks, but those are just 1-2 factors among dozens. And the dozens of remaining factors are ones that most 'red states' do not want to touch with a 10 foot pole.
Add in the additional legal and accounting costs for having to track at least 50 different taxing jurisdictions and up to potentially almost 10k and be up on all the changes to tax law and try to figure out what items are taxable where....it's a nightmare. No only that but it's a legal minefield.
Are you implying that each individual business is going to have to track all tax rates in 50 states?? There are services that maintain a tax database and keep track of all the changes. It is no different than outsourcing your credit card processing.
There are a ton of those funny transcripts from courts. Just as way of explanation, then end up being funny like that because the attorney is trying to get certain things on the record. It isn't very funny in context, but it very funny out of context:)
I would think hops would be a better choice.
Once done (my opinion's mostly based on SF reading I've done), what's the point? All those far-flung human colonies are going to immediately differentiate from each other, leading to "us vs. them" on a galactic scale, so what really is the point of this exercise? Preservation of homo sapiens' DNA regardless? What for?
That is a "what's the purpose of life" type question. There is no one right answer. If you as an individual have reasons to continue to live, apply some of those to society. To love, to live, to learn, to explore, to maybe some day find answers to some of our deepest philosophical questions? Take your pick.
You wouldn't want to attempt to store pure hydrogen in some sort of compressed tank. Rather I think people are working on fuel cells to store hydrogen in more dense formats. http://www.hydrogenics.com/fuel/
Well, even not getting into the idea of "electricity can be created by anyone", in reality there are very normal situations where people will be without internet. For example, I bring my xbox on family vacations to beach side cabins. Very rarely do we have internet in those cabins. But electricity always.
Electricity is much, much more prevalent than fast internet connections.
If you want education to be taken seriously we have to change our whole culture.
Basketball players make more money than people who cure cancer, kids know this. People who make sex tapes get on TV, people who educate are mocked on TV.
And is that different than any other country? Nope. Entertainers and cultural 'stars' are always going to make more money than scientists. However that doesn't mean that a society can't fund education better, or even make higher education free like many European countries have done.
What the US seems to fail at, is looking at real facts and evidence, and making proper policy decisions based on that evidence. There are a ton of studies showing that education basically pays for itself when all those educated people start working and paying taxes. Yet each recession we seem to cut state and federal education funding.
It isn't that different than win 7 imo. I just stay in desktop mode, and largely ignore the other new tablet oriented features. I haven't missed the start menu much either. Windows key + first few letters of the app I want, hit enter, done.
Some things are annoying though. For example, It takes too many clicks to reboot, but I rarely do that anyways. And the control panel navigation is confusing until you get used to it.
There are sales tax service providers. They manage the database of the 50 states and all the counties. I have no idea how much they cost though.
Incidentally, why do we need more women in programming?
Over the years I've grown to see the value in having a diverse workplace. That not only includes a balance of male/female, but other races, ethnic groups, etc..
You are right, in that you don't have to have more women just for the sake of it alone, but I think products and decisions that come from a group representing a wide array of backgrounds usually results in a better outcome.
Especially if your product is meant for a large audience. It helps to have large number of perspectives used to construct it.
I'm not sure why you think feminism is sexism.
Feminism definition: "the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. "
How is promoting equality sexist? I understand that some groups and some women may misuse the idea of feminism to push beyond the boundary of equality, but that doesn't make the notion of feminism itself a sexiest doctrine.
Today seems worse than the biased news of the past.
For example, there wasn't one news agency seriously investigating the WMD claims of the Bush administration before the lead up to the Iraq war. And as more and more newspapers go under given the pressure of the Internet, there are fewer and fewer actual investigative journalists left.
I don't have high hopes of the current News agencies actually uncovering any real deep government scandals anymore. Unless the Government wants the story released, or someone pulls a Bradly Manning.
That doesn't mean that all reporting has equal amounts of bias though. Nor equal amounts of political agenda.
I read that to cover imports/exports, not sales. Like when I mailed a friend in another country a sweater, she had to pay a import fee in order to get the sweater.
"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State." - Article 1, US Constitution, I think was designed so that just shipping your goods from state X, through states A,B,C, and arriving in state E, would disallow states A,B and C from imposing import fees on the shipment.
Dropping some of your goods off in A,B, and C along the way, and then selling them in those states, would still be subject to a state sales tax though.
That is why news provided over public airways should be profit-free. No advertising allowed, and networks who are given the public airwaves should be required to provide news as a service to the public.
If the goal of a news agency is to get as many views as possible, of course entertainment will always win out over news. That isn't unique to Americans.
I don't understand why not being allowed to use bedroom or bathroom jokes in a professional or public setting is such a major issue for the slashdot crowd. Isn't this stuff we learned in kindergarten?
Ditto with hot button social issues. It just seems like common sense to me... and I don't feel like my rights are being trampled on.
Obviously political correctness can go too far somethings, but bedroom/bathroom humor, at least in my experience, has been a no no in most professional workplaces for a very long time. Isn't that what most parents teach their kids at around 3-4.... no boob/butt/etc... jokes in the supermarket (but you might let it slide, or even laugh at the joke when in the privacy of your own home). Everyone I know was raised that way.
If any time a system that is intended to display X is manipulated in a way not envisioned by the owner/creator to display Y, and the person doing the manipulating is not punished, I could see that leading to some serious issues.
Like the owner/creator being responsible for every successful hack on their system, no matter how complex or creative.
They guy ran a looping program that was guessing ID numbers in a brute force fashion. The system only returned email addresses when he guessed correctly. That isn't quite the same as just looking through a window. It is more like punching security codes on a number pad until you get one right, with the result being someone's curtain opens and you see something that was intended to be private.
Seems a bit different than a simple GET.
Once deployed, the Account Slurper utilized a process known as a "brute force" attack
- an iterative process used to obtain information from a computer system
against AT&T's servers.
Specifically, the Account Slurper randomly guessed at ranges of ICC-IDs.
An incorrect guess was met with no additional information,
while a correct guess was rewarded with an ICC-IDle-mail pairing for a specific,
identifiable iPad 30 user.
Very sloppy on AT&T's part, but it wasn't like they intentional created some API that would hand out emails to the public.
It seems like what a company believes should be allowed is the driving force behind these type of charges. If I owned a server, and thought I had set it up correctly to only allow X access, but some creative person found out that they could access Y, they'd get in trouble if they attempted to access Y and were caught.
He didn't "break in". He sent requests to a publicly-accessible web server, and AT&T sent back private information. This wasn't hacking, or even a DOS attack. AT&T is at fault here.
I'm not seeing how that is different than if someone leaves their curtains open, and I video record them. I can get in trouble for video recording them. Stalking charges, and doubly so if I then start uploading all the video of them to youbube or another public site, etc.. Despite the window being open, we know it is wrong to be a peeping tom.
He should have known it was wrong to violate so many people's personal data, despite the door being open to it. Just like I might be polite and tell my neighbor, "hey.. ahh... you should close your curtains at night, lots of houses can see through your windows", he should have been polite and just kept telling AT&T about the open window. He could have increased the pressure by posting blog articles or other means that would have made the fact that door is open public, but without walking through the door and removing stuff.
Unfortunately, the negatives far outweigh the positives. http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives-intermediate.htm
The person you replied to should have added, "and with the BBC's budget". BBC receives billions whereas PBS receives something like 30 million.
Are you sure that it is fear that motivates liberals to want those things?
From my perspective: a segment of society will never adequately prepare for emergencies. And because of that, what is the outcome, and what is the most efficient way to do deal with it, given our society's morals.
So on something like healthcare, my thoughts are something along the lines of: because society has mandated free emergency care even if you can't pay due to our society's morals, what is the cheapest way to take care of those people? As it turns out, providing free preventative care is a much more efficient use of tax payer dollars. You either pay for that person in terms of your own healthcare costs going up, because the hospital passes it on to you, or you pay for it as preventative care in the form of taxes. No fear involved.
On something like AGW, part of that is fear. But the fear doesn't come first. The 99% of scientists saying "we don't have all the details, but this is a problem, and we need to do something about it" comes first. Further, because a progressive is by definition progressive-minded, they are less likely to balk at the thought of some of the future solutions: wind, solar, electric cars, phasing out oil, etc..
Put another way, conservative brains are all like, "Well, I would never let myself get into that position. Even if I did, I'd get myself out of it. I don't see why they deserve help." and liberal brains are all like, "Even if that person didn't make the best choices at every juncture in their life (or even made lots of bad ones), I can totally understand how they made the choices they did. At some less wise point in my life, I might have made the same decisions. They deserve our help."
I'm not sure that 'unwise' or 'bad choices' are the proper words to use when describing the average outcome of exploration and seeking novelty. (Although those are possible outcomes). Other outcomes that could result from pushing yourself to seek novelty or exploring include: meeting more people and learning to see through others eyes, experiencing truly different cultures where you learn to value differing ways of achieving similar goals, discovering new and better ways to do "X" rather than relying on the tried and true, hearing history told from another viewpoint, really internalizing another person's description of struggle, etc...
Those sort of outcomes can also lead a person to conclude that we need stronger social safety nets. For example, based on my experiences (not direct, but as a result of learning, talking to people, taking an interest in the 'inside story'), I think that inner city poverty cycles are real, hard to get out of, and that society should help people get out of the cycle.