First off, posting anonymously still erases all your mods, it just doesn't warn you that you're going to do it (LOL SLASHDOT). On the bright side, it does allow you to keep modding after you've posted.
Secondly, the law will almost certainly be written so that the "little people" can't use the law themselves, after all, someone might use it against an Important Corporation (like an RIAA member) when they infringe copyrights yet again.
and that a single GFCI outlet can protect all outlets wired in series after it..... right?
Well now I know HOW using the outlet outside my house for the electric weed-eater trips the GFCI in the upstairs bathroom on the other side of the house.
Now all I want to know is WHY the hell they're on the same circuit.
It looks like his arch-nemesis, reality, did a Man in the Middle attack
FTFY. The instant you take the company to court to demand that it pay for the damage to your lawn you're going to have to deal with miles of lies and bullshit. "Our plants don't leak, that runoff must have come from our competitor's plant" "Oh, that poison gas didn't come out of our smokestack, and you can't prove it. No, we won't let you capture any gas samples from our stack for analysis, at least not until next Tuesday." "BPA is perfectly harmless. OK, sure, 25 years after we started putting BPA in little boys' sippy cups men started getting pedicures and demanding gay marriage rights and 50 years before that scientists showed that BPA was an estrogen mimic... but you can't prove that pumping kids full of estrogen is bad for them!" "It's got what plants crave!" "You have studies claiming this is a carcinogen? Well, OUR studies show that this chemical extends life by an average of 3 years!" "No, there isn't any toxic waste buried under the houses, it's called Love Canal, not Love Landfill!"
I'm sure the directors will crunch the numbers and decide that paying some flunky a bonus to "take one for the team" if he gets caught out on perjury is worth the chances of dodging having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a cleanup (or millions to buy out the entire city and sit on it. Or turn it into the next Love Canal).
In my mind taxpayers = consumers and so there is no real difference.
Your mind is wrong. If Company A poisons thousands of people while producing their product and has to raise their prices in order to pay for the damage done and Company B manages to produce their product without poisoning anyone, who is going to win the marketplace?
As long as Company A can convince everyone else to pay to clean up their own shit, Company A can continue to pollute and pretend nothing is wrong.
The only problem is that, as others have pointed out, Company A will do everything it can (including, for example, lying about it to a court) to prevent having to pay for cleaning up its pollution. This means that under a real unregulated system things would get worse before they get better.
I've been using the betas at work as well (layout, etc, who moved my cheese, git off my lawn) and the only thing that ever crashed any of the betas (fixed now) for me was navigating away from a site with a java applet. Of course, this is my work computer, so it's not like I went to any weird websites or anything.
Actually, this situation would be ripe for tax incentives. Congresscritters can stand around and get a photo-op for Doing Something. Republicans can write home about their tax breaks, Democrats can write home about reducing pollution and carbon footprints, and companies can just ignore it and keep doing exactly what they're doing.
Personally, I never "got" downtown: it's more expensive, harder to get around, has no parking... if I'm looking for a company that I need to visit in person, the one that's downtown would have to be awesome in order to convince me that it's worth the hassle over just visiting the company off the side of the interstate.
Because people have posted a bunch of fear-laden scenarios about what might happen, but have not actually come to pass?
What, like blocking users who download too much then refusing to admit it even after tools are produced to show that Comcast was generating spoofed RST packets? Oh no, that would never come to pass.
Anytime a major ISP has tried something fishy they have been slapped down hard by customers.
Last I heard, Sandvine is doing pretty good... oh wait, the people whose applications stop working aren't Sandvine's customers.
The reason this is going to happen is the same reason that health reform is happening: no matter how much FUD the opponents throw out there, their FUD can't hold a candle to the reality of how it is now. "Oh no, nobody will invest in teh terabitz intarwebs!" but hey, at least Comcast won't be able to block me from using Lotus Notes.
Sure, there are good reasons not to change the regulation on either, but the industries are trying their damnedest to make sure that everyone knows the reasons why we should. You'd think that with health care reform breathing down their necks, insurers would take a timeout on refusing coverage due to unrelated issues, but no, as far as I can tell, they're fanning the flames to ensure that they'll have the hottest funeral pyres around.
What scares Wall Street more than anything is the prospect of heavy regulation that will stifle investment opportunities.
You're right. Wall Street is going to have to choose between investment opportunities at AT&T and investment opportunities in content-producing corporations. Given the utter inability of the majority of Wall Street to think beyond next quarter's earning reports, I have full faith that they will choose to invest in AT&T, and once the steams, youtubes and itunes of the world close down and nobody bothers to pay for broadband anymore because there's nothing to download on it, these investors will be screaming and crying at the government for my tax money.
It used to be that establishing barriers to entry required either natural law or the participation of the government. The FCC should be promoting a healthy competition environment, but the only thing that would get the regulators assassinated faster than network neutrality regulations would be invalidating local franchise contracts and actually doing something about the monopolies.
Even with all of that, it's going to take more than some "healthy investment" to rout AT&T. It's going to take several waves of suicidal nutcases investing billions of dollars in "alternate" internet infrastructure, each round wearing down AT&T's monopoly war chest until AT&T can no longer deny the competition.
What "unregulated banks"? The ones not making the loans?
Thanks to catchy commercials, the most well known one is GMAC which GM nearly killed itself (oh wait) to raise the money to convert it to a bank and qualify it for a bailout.
You might know it better as Ditech.com.
Some people have also heard of a lender called Countrywide Home Mortgages, Inc., which wasn't a bank, either.
"Should calls to the emergency call center be of the same priority as calls from telemarketers?"
"Should AT&T upgrade their network so that calls to the emergency call center can go through even if there are a ton of telemarketers on the phone?"
AT&T's answer is no. They would rather take the telemarketer's money and then spend considerable effort (that could have gone into upgrading the network) to mess with their calls.
"We don't want to invest in speeding up the network, so if the government blocks us from investing in slowing down the network, no investment will get done!"
Hey now, the scientists get to have explosions and lasers and other fun stuff. The guy watching porn every day was some poor executive schmuck whose high point of the week was improving his golf score by a point.
If farmer A's crop is sterile, how can it mate with farmer B's crop and produce more sterile in his field the next year?
I take it you're going to be REALLY surprised when your mistress shows up pregnant after your wife's tubes are tied. After all, her surgery keeps you from impregnating anyone, right? Same difference here, except (most) plants have both boy parts and girl parts.
Terminator genes prevent crops from producing viable seeds, but do nothing to prevent production of pollen. If there was no pollen, there'd be no seeds in the first place.
There's two lines on the contract, one for me to sign, one for the representative of the company. If ISPs can't provide the agreed upon service at the agreed upon price, well, then they shouldn't have signed the contract.
God forbid a corporation be held to their own contract, that's just for the little people. You know, the little jack-booted consumers who are paying the company for a service they contractually expect to receive.
Sorry, the source can't come to the prison right now, he's enjoying a margarita with a young dancer in a country with no extradition treaty. The stockholders don't give a damn either, the major ones sold off their shares just before the company went bankrupt, leaving everyone who thought they could game the market holding the bag... except that the government protects the owners of stock from the people who were bit by the rabid dogs they own because the whole capitalism thing is awesome right up until it's time to pay for the broken eggs that went into the omelette.
I guess that leaves the Superfund. Ah, your tax dollars at work.
The specific: a fourteen year old is unable to make an uncoerced decision to have sex with a 40 year old. Hundreds of years ago society did not agree with the specific rule
Hundreds of years ago, 14 year olds would have been raised to be responsible for themselves and their families, to support their communities and nations, to hunt or raise their own food, and to make major decisions on their own.
Now, 14 year olds are raised to take tests and play videogames.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, posting anonymously still erases all your mods, it just doesn't warn you that you're going to do it (LOL SLASHDOT). On the bright side, it does allow you to keep modding after you've posted.
Secondly, the law will almost certainly be written so that the "little people" can't use the law themselves, after all, someone might use it against an Important Corporation (like an RIAA member) when they infringe copyrights yet again.
I always forget that Slashdot kills newlines unless you do them twice
Slashdot kills newlines unless you set your posting type to Plain Old Text. Otherwise it assumes you have HTML and you know how to use it.
and that a single GFCI outlet can protect all outlets wired in series after it..... right?
Well now I know HOW using the outlet outside my house for the electric weed-eater trips the GFCI in the upstairs bathroom on the other side of the house.
Now all I want to know is WHY the hell they're on the same circuit.
What they did wasn't illegal at the time.
I'm fairly certain that poisoning people has been illegal for centuries.
Hooray, now thanks to a new law passed in my area, I'm allowed to assassinate my competitors to increase profits!
Actually, that would require a repeal of the murder law, not necessarily an additional law.
FTFY. The instant you take the company to court to demand that it pay for the damage to your lawn you're going to have to deal with miles of lies and bullshit.
"Our plants don't leak, that runoff must have come from our competitor's plant"
"Oh, that poison gas didn't come out of our smokestack, and you can't prove it. No, we won't let you capture any gas samples from our stack for analysis, at least not until next Tuesday."
"BPA is perfectly harmless. OK, sure, 25 years after we started putting BPA in little boys' sippy cups men started getting pedicures and demanding gay marriage rights and 50 years before that scientists showed that BPA was an estrogen mimic... but you can't prove that pumping kids full of estrogen is bad for them!"
"It's got what plants crave!"
"You have studies claiming this is a carcinogen? Well, OUR studies show that this chemical extends life by an average of 3 years!"
"No, there isn't any toxic waste buried under the houses, it's called Love Canal, not Love Landfill!"
I'm sure the directors will crunch the numbers and decide that paying some flunky a bonus to "take one for the team" if he gets caught out on perjury is worth the chances of dodging having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a cleanup (or millions to buy out the entire city and sit on it. Or turn it into the next Love Canal).
Damn, who cares about modding posts anyway...
In my mind taxpayers = consumers and so there is no real difference.
Your mind is wrong. If Company A poisons thousands of people while producing their product and has to raise their prices in order to pay for the damage done and Company B manages to produce their product without poisoning anyone, who is going to win the marketplace?
As long as Company A can convince everyone else to pay to clean up their own shit, Company A can continue to pollute and pretend nothing is wrong.
The only problem is that, as others have pointed out, Company A will do everything it can (including, for example, lying about it to a court) to prevent having to pay for cleaning up its pollution. This means that under a real unregulated system things would get worse before they get better.
I've been using the betas at work as well (layout, etc, who moved my cheese, git off my lawn) and the only thing that ever crashed any of the betas (fixed now) for me was navigating away from a site with a java applet. Of course, this is my work computer, so it's not like I went to any weird websites or anything.
Maybe tax incentives would be pushing it too far
Actually, this situation would be ripe for tax incentives. Congresscritters can stand around and get a photo-op for Doing Something. Republicans can write home about their tax breaks, Democrats can write home about reducing pollution and carbon footprints, and companies can just ignore it and keep doing exactly what they're doing.
Personally, I never "got" downtown: it's more expensive, harder to get around, has no parking... if I'm looking for a company that I need to visit in person, the one that's downtown would have to be awesome in order to convince me that it's worth the hassle over just visiting the company off the side of the interstate.
Actually, an intelligent, reasonably educated "normal" person would be able to do a fine job in balancing a national budget, with some help of course.
And that caveat at the end is where these intelligent, reasonably educated "normal" people go wrong when they get to government.
They have all the help they'll ever want, in the form of lobbyists.
Continuing with more evidence that all this and more has "come to pass":
Vonage and other VoIP providers had more than one ISP prevent customers from receiving the services they were paying for until the government stepped in.
BT replacing charities' web advertisements with their own. Charities! Why don't they just eat warm puppies fresh from the oven while they're at it? The least they could have done was replace those "punch the monkey" ads or seizure inducing "you've won!" ads.
Because people have posted a bunch of fear-laden scenarios about what might happen, but have not actually come to pass?
What, like blocking users who download too much then refusing to admit it even after tools are produced to show that Comcast was generating spoofed RST packets? Oh no, that would never come to pass.
Anytime a major ISP has tried something fishy they have been slapped down hard by customers.
Last I heard, Sandvine is doing pretty good... oh wait, the people whose applications stop working aren't Sandvine's customers.
The reason this is going to happen is the same reason that health reform is happening: no matter how much FUD the opponents throw out there, their FUD can't hold a candle to the reality of how it is now. "Oh no, nobody will invest in teh terabitz intarwebs!" but hey, at least Comcast won't be able to block me from using Lotus Notes.
Sure, there are good reasons not to change the regulation on either, but the industries are trying their damnedest to make sure that everyone knows the reasons why we should. You'd think that with health care reform breathing down their necks, insurers would take a timeout on refusing coverage due to unrelated issues, but no, as far as I can tell, they're fanning the flames to ensure that they'll have the hottest funeral pyres around.
What scares Wall Street more than anything is the prospect of heavy regulation that will stifle investment opportunities.
You're right. Wall Street is going to have to choose between investment opportunities at AT&T and investment opportunities in content-producing corporations. Given the utter inability of the majority of Wall Street to think beyond next quarter's earning reports, I have full faith that they will choose to invest in AT&T, and once the steams, youtubes and itunes of the world close down and nobody bothers to pay for broadband anymore because there's nothing to download on it, these investors will be screaming and crying at the government for my tax money.
It used to be that establishing barriers to entry required either natural law or the participation of the government. The FCC should be promoting a healthy competition environment, but the only thing that would get the regulators assassinated faster than network neutrality regulations would be invalidating local franchise contracts and actually doing something about the monopolies.
Even with all of that, it's going to take more than some "healthy investment" to rout AT&T. It's going to take several waves of suicidal nutcases investing billions of dollars in "alternate" internet infrastructure, each round wearing down AT&T's monopoly war chest until AT&T can no longer deny the competition.
What "unregulated banks"? The ones not making the loans?
Thanks to catchy commercials, the most well known one is GMAC which GM nearly killed itself (oh wait) to raise the money to convert it to a bank and qualify it for a bailout.
You might know it better as Ditech.com.
Some people have also heard of a lender called Countrywide Home Mortgages, Inc., which wasn't a bank, either.
"Should calls to the emergency call center be of the same priority as calls from telemarketers?"
"Should AT&T upgrade their network so that calls to the emergency call center can go through even if there are a ton of telemarketers on the phone?"
AT&T's answer is no. They would rather take the telemarketer's money and then spend considerable effort (that could have gone into upgrading the network) to mess with their calls.
"We don't want to invest in speeding up the network, so if the government blocks us from investing in slowing down the network, no investment will get done!"
Of course the U.S. Code has revision control
But does it have cvs blame so when we find some particularly brain-dead chunk, we can find out who committed it and revoke their access?
If the probe misses
Prayers would be the least of their worries, it would mean that NASA can't hit the broad side of a planet from 20 paces!
Wonder what they will name this one, anyone good with sequence puzzles?
D#
Hey now, the scientists get to have explosions and lasers and other fun stuff. The guy watching porn every day was some poor executive schmuck whose high point of the week was improving his golf score by a point.
If farmer A's crop is sterile, how can it mate with farmer B's crop and produce more sterile in his field the next year?
I take it you're going to be REALLY surprised when your mistress shows up pregnant after your wife's tubes are tied. After all, her surgery keeps you from impregnating anyone, right? Same difference here, except (most) plants have both boy parts and girl parts.
Terminator genes prevent crops from producing viable seeds, but do nothing to prevent production of pollen. If there was no pollen, there'd be no seeds in the first place.
Yeah, those evil contracts
There's two lines on the contract, one for me to sign, one for the representative of the company. If ISPs can't provide the agreed upon service at the agreed upon price, well, then they shouldn't have signed the contract.
God forbid a corporation be held to their own contract, that's just for the little people. You know, the little jack-booted consumers who are paying the company for a service they contractually expect to receive.
but in what other game could running out of mana kill you?
Star Ocean. Which is infuriating when you're at a low level and resurrection items are damned expensive, but not such a problem later in the game.
eventually be found and traced back to its source
Sorry, the source can't come to the prison right now, he's enjoying a margarita with a young dancer in a country with no extradition treaty. The stockholders don't give a damn either, the major ones sold off their shares just before the company went bankrupt, leaving everyone who thought they could game the market holding the bag... except that the government protects the owners of stock from the people who were bit by the rabid dogs they own because the whole capitalism thing is awesome right up until it's time to pay for the broken eggs that went into the omelette.
I guess that leaves the Superfund. Ah, your tax dollars at work.
The specific: a fourteen year old is unable to make an uncoerced decision to have sex with a 40 year old.
Hundreds of years ago society did not agree with the specific rule
Hundreds of years ago, 14 year olds would have been raised to be responsible for themselves and their families, to support their communities and nations, to hunt or raise their own food, and to make major decisions on their own.
Now, 14 year olds are raised to take tests and play videogames.
It isn't "the rule" that has changed.