Except that splitting Ma Bell didn't do a single thing about its monopoly status.
Oh, sure, if you didn't like your service, you could quit your job, sell your house, and move three or four states away so that you could buy service from a "competitor", but as far as anti-trust issues go, things like regulations forcing the phone company to let you buy and use your own phones went miles farther than the breakup.
It doesn't set a "real" precedent, but a lawyer can walk into a court in Texas and say "well, in this parallel case here, the decision was..." and the judge can either ignore it or not, at his discretion.
that if you are that paranoid, you should just use a different email address
Seems to me that if a society decides that paranoia is required in order to "earn" privacy, it should quit being surprised when it creates paranoid people.
5 seconds is more than just a blink. I'd even go so far as to say that if you're looking at something other than the road for 5 seconds, you're negligent. If it takes you more than a second to read your speedometer, you either need your eyes checked or you've had too much to drink.
everyone makes mistakes
Punishment is the process by which people learn not to. Is 10 million dollars too much punishment for deciding to fish around in your purse while approaching a red light? Maybe. Are claims for "mental anguish" total bullshit? Usually (show me some psychiatric bills). You break it, you buy it? Totally.
I have car insurance that insures me against my fuckups. If I fuckup, my insurance pays for it, and then bills me more to cover the cost of having to pay for my fuckups, or if I fuck up so often that it's simply too expensive to cover me, they drop me, requiring me to find some other insurer or stop driving. That is what I consider fair.
that you have sufficient insurance to the level of medical attention you will need.
So in other words, he should be punished for failing to predict that you'd hit him? How is that different from the other examples?
How about his insurance company, which in the real world would turn around and sue you for causing the damages they had to pay for? Should they be punished by being forced to raise the rates for their customers because you can't be bothered to keep your eyes on the road for 5 seconds? Maybe if YOU had been insured against the damage YOU did, then the insurance company would be able to take their damages out on you, but then you'd have to face the responsibility for your own failures.
responsibility
Look up the definition of mis/malfeasance, I think you'll find that your failure to properly operate a vehicle that you have been trained and licensed to operate falls in this category regardless of whether you think that insurance companies grow money on trees.
The problem is that no major corporation would set up shop in small states if this sort of policy were enforced.
The states divide up Representatives by district, regardless of where they go, the companies will have to settle for having their two Senators and a Representative.
As an example your position is tantamount to suggesting it's only murder if someone is caught and convicted.
There's a difference between getting away with it and "decriminalization". If the official position is to have no punishment for an act, then that act being "illegal" is meaningless.
All of them vote on US legislation which has a direct and immediate impact on my life
But only 3 of them represent you. Allowing people to buy additional representation is directly against what a representative democracy should be about.
FAT32 supports up to 8TB volumes in 2k and xp under certain conditions, and generally 127GB volumes will work fine on win9x. Microsoft nerfed their format tool to ensure that people used ntfs instead. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/184006/EN-US/
I have no idea if they exist yet, but after I saw them in Blade Runner as a kid I always dreamed of being able to dim and outright black out my windows with the push of a button.
and posting it on the internet tagged with your name are astronomical.
Random person posting your picture on the internet, plus random someone else tagging said picture once its on the internet with your name is less so.
Especially once you realize that we're no longer talking about people running around in public, but pictures taken at private parties and such where the people present are all likely to know each other, or know someone who knows the other's name.
Imaginary slippery slopes. Yeah. Right up there with "oh, they'll never hold American citizens without charges for years!"
So here's an "imaginary" slope for you: The DA goes up for election and wants a quick headline. He thinks "gee, we've got myspace blocking all these pedos from registering, and we've made it illegal for a pedo to sign up with myspace, therefore..." and asks for a list of names from myspace for blocked pedos, and guess who's on the list.
it seems logical that the government, and any other agency concerned, would continue to use this pre-existing list.
It also seems logical that the government, having spent a lot of money to set all this up, would want to know when a sex offender tried to use a myspace account so that they could be punished.
What they're saying is more along the lines of "Violent games can sometimes be a trigger for violence," or more frequently "Violent games can increase violent tendencies, which may have an overall effect of increasing societal violence when systematically applied to a large population."
Why should we take them seriously when their argument is that "sometimes stuff happens" or more frequently "if we get a large enough population, someone will snap"? Other than, of course, the fact that the people making these arguments are rich and powerful and have Senators as lap dogs?
How many millions of people have played first person shooters since Quake? I'm waiting for someone to demonstrate a statistically interesting fraction of video game players that go on to murder people. San Andreas alone sold 5 million units by the end of 2004. Since then how many gamers killed people? What percentage of gamers killed people compared to the percentage of murderers in the general public? Can these people even demonstrate a correlation between gaming and murdering? Can they even back up their claim that games "can" cause violence with hard facts?
(like any major catalog company like Sears has been doing for generations)
Mail order doesn't charge out-of-state users taxes either, assuming that you actually are out of state, which is pretty hard to do when there's a Sears in just about every major city.
they can hopefully only do limited damage to an individual even if they are malevolent
Hopefully? The goal isn't to limit the damage, the goal is to have zero damage to innocent people while understanding that mistakes happen. And like all other jobs people who mess up should be punished in order to minimize the mistakes. You can aim as low as you want, the rest of us will be happy to continue holding the government to the same high standards that the vast majority of other employees face, with or without you.
the rights of the state... are laid out completely and exhaustively in the Constitution. Not one line of it talks about any rights to force people to shut up about their daily lives, in fact, the government is specifically banned from forcing people to shut up.
2) Representative Democracy being a flawed system.
Until representative democracy works by allowing everyone to choose someone who represents them in ALL aspects, it's flawed. Of course, if each person gets their own representative, why not just go with raw democracy?
The flaw in your flaw is that people vote for the representative that represents their strongest views, so if the choices are one representative that is pro-choice and just happens to support cameras, and an opposing representative that is pro-life and just happens to support cameras, the majority vote will likely be decided on the majority view of abortion, not on their views on cameras.
Keeping the roads private would allow them to be managed better
Unless there is some way to create competition, I don't see how that can be claimed. Without competition, why bother managing them at all? All you have to do is make sure it's drivable enough that the people who want to get from point A to point B can, even if it means everyone will need new tires and suspensions every few thousand miles thanks to the giant potholes.
Just search. I just searched for Microsoft, and got web (default), patents, and news options. The patent search is pretty nice, they've laid out the patent in a nice, clear manner, including links to cited patents, etc.
Seems slashdot likes to get political only when it involves those evil, nasty Republicans. It's embarassing how partisan this place is.
It's more embarassing how n00bs like you show up and make sweeping statements that are blatantly wrong. Remember Echelon? The "evil, nasty Democrats" get their 15 minutes of shame when they're in power and do something we don't like too.
Slashdot Mirror
Splitting Ma Bell (a monopolist service provider)
Except that splitting Ma Bell didn't do a single thing about its monopoly status.
Oh, sure, if you didn't like your service, you could quit your job, sell your house, and move three or four states away so that you could buy service from a "competitor", but as far as anti-trust issues go, things like regulations forcing the phone company to let you buy and use your own phones went miles farther than the breakup.
It doesn't set a "real" precedent, but a lawyer can walk into a court in Texas and say "well, in this parallel case here, the decision was..." and the judge can either ignore it or not, at his discretion.
that if you are that paranoid, you should just use a different email address
Seems to me that if a society decides that paranoia is required in order to "earn" privacy, it should quit being surprised when it creates paranoid people.
Everyone blinks.
5 seconds is more than just a blink. I'd even go so far as to say that if you're looking at something other than the road for 5 seconds, you're negligent. If it takes you more than a second to read your speedometer, you either need your eyes checked or you've had too much to drink.
everyone makes mistakes
Punishment is the process by which people learn not to. Is 10 million dollars too much punishment for deciding to fish around in your purse while approaching a red light? Maybe. Are claims for "mental anguish" total bullshit? Usually (show me some psychiatric bills). You break it, you buy it? Totally.
I have car insurance that insures me against my fuckups. If I fuckup, my insurance pays for it, and then bills me more to cover the cost of having to pay for my fuckups, or if I fuck up so often that it's simply too expensive to cover me, they drop me, requiring me to find some other insurer or stop driving. That is what I consider fair.
that you have sufficient insurance to the level of medical attention you will need.
So in other words, he should be punished for failing to predict that you'd hit him? How is that different from the other examples?
How about his insurance company, which in the real world would turn around and sue you for causing the damages they had to pay for? Should they be punished by being forced to raise the rates for their customers because you can't be bothered to keep your eyes on the road for 5 seconds? Maybe if YOU had been insured against the damage YOU did, then the insurance company would be able to take their damages out on you, but then you'd have to face the responsibility for your own failures.
responsibility
Look up the definition of mis/malfeasance, I think you'll find that your failure to properly operate a vehicle that you have been trained and licensed to operate falls in this category regardless of whether you think that insurance companies grow money on trees.
The problem is that no major corporation would set up shop in small states if this sort of policy were enforced.
The states divide up Representatives by district, regardless of where they go, the companies will have to settle for having their two Senators and a Representative.
As an example your position is tantamount to suggesting it's only murder if someone is caught and convicted.
There's a difference between getting away with it and "decriminalization". If the official position is to have no punishment for an act, then that act being "illegal" is meaningless.
All of them vote on US legislation which has a direct and immediate impact on my life
But only 3 of them represent you. Allowing people to buy additional representation is directly against what a representative democracy should be about.
FAT32 supports up to 8TB volumes in 2k and xp under certain conditions, and generally 127GB volumes will work fine on win9x. Microsoft nerfed their format tool to ensure that people used ntfs instead. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/184006/EN-US/
I have no idea if they exist yet, but after I saw them in Blade Runner as a kid I always dreamed of being able to dim and outright black out my windows with the push of a button.
o ws/switchable-glazing-windows
Took me a long time to find thanks to Microsoft, but here you go http://www.toolbase.org/Technology-Inventory/Wind
http://www.sage-ec.com/ makes them and links to a number of places like http://macdonaldsystems.com/glazing.htm that sells them.
and posting it on the internet tagged with your name are astronomical.
Random person posting your picture on the internet, plus random someone else tagging said picture once its on the internet with your name is less so.
Especially once you realize that we're no longer talking about people running around in public, but pictures taken at private parties and such where the people present are all likely to know each other, or know someone who knows the other's name.
The difference is that you are apparently welcome to wave your hand at television stations assisting in the coup of a democratically elected leader.
It's only illegal if they fail.
then we'd turn into a totalitarian dictatorship where violent crime would be even worse, just like what happened Canada.
Or Britain?
imagine the slipperiest slope possible.
Imaginary slippery slopes. Yeah. Right up there with "oh, they'll never hold American citizens without charges for years!"
So here's an "imaginary" slope for you: The DA goes up for election and wants a quick headline. He thinks "gee, we've got myspace blocking all these pedos from registering, and we've made it illegal for a pedo to sign up with myspace, therefore..." and asks for a list of names from myspace for blocked pedos, and guess who's on the list.
it seems logical that the government, and any other agency concerned, would continue to use this pre-existing list.
It also seems logical that the government, having spent a lot of money to set all this up, would want to know when a sex offender tried to use a myspace account so that they could be punished.
Generally when one says "substitute A for B", they mean to remove B and add A, so substituting soda for water means to drink soda instead of water.
What they're saying is more along the lines of "Violent games can sometimes be a trigger for violence," or more frequently "Violent games can increase violent tendencies, which may have an overall effect of increasing societal violence when systematically applied to a large population."
Why should we take them seriously when their argument is that "sometimes stuff happens" or more frequently "if we get a large enough population, someone will snap"? Other than, of course, the fact that the people making these arguments are rich and powerful and have Senators as lap dogs?
How many millions of people have played first person shooters since Quake? I'm waiting for someone to demonstrate a statistically interesting fraction of video game players that go on to murder people. San Andreas alone sold 5 million units by the end of 2004. Since then how many gamers killed people? What percentage of gamers killed people compared to the percentage of murderers in the general public? Can these people even demonstrate a correlation between gaming and murdering? Can they even back up their claim that games "can" cause violence with hard facts?
(like any major catalog company like Sears has been doing for generations)
Mail order doesn't charge out-of-state users taxes either, assuming that you actually are out of state, which is pretty hard to do when there's a Sears in just about every major city.
they can hopefully only do limited damage to an individual even if they are malevolent
... are laid out completely and exhaustively in the Constitution. Not one line of it talks about any rights to force people to shut up about their daily lives, in fact, the government is specifically banned from forcing people to shut up.
Hopefully? The goal isn't to limit the damage, the goal is to have zero damage to innocent people while understanding that mistakes happen. And like all other jobs people who mess up should be punished in order to minimize the mistakes. You can aim as low as you want, the rest of us will be happy to continue holding the government to the same high standards that the vast majority of other employees face, with or without you.
the rights of the state
I'll go with
2) Representative Democracy being a flawed system.
Until representative democracy works by allowing everyone to choose someone who represents them in ALL aspects, it's flawed. Of course, if each person gets their own representative, why not just go with raw democracy?
The flaw in your flaw is that people vote for the representative that represents their strongest views, so if the choices are one representative that is pro-choice and just happens to support cameras, and an opposing representative that is pro-life and just happens to support cameras, the majority vote will likely be decided on the majority view of abortion, not on their views on cameras.
Keeping the roads private would allow them to be managed better
Unless there is some way to create competition, I don't see how that can be claimed. Without competition, why bother managing them at all? All you have to do is make sure it's drivable enough that the people who want to get from point A to point B can, even if it means everyone will need new tires and suspensions every few thousand miles thanks to the giant potholes.
Would that not be at least a workable compromise?
It would be a reasonable thing to do, and doing reasonable things seems to be anathema to most governments.
Where is this new search?
Just search. I just searched for Microsoft, and got web (default), patents, and news options. The patent search is pretty nice, they've laid out the patent in a nice, clear manner, including links to cited patents, etc.
But yeah, that's not "voting fraud".
No, it's not voting fraud, it's disenfranchisement, and even more important.
Seems slashdot likes to get political only when it involves those evil, nasty Republicans. It's embarassing how partisan this place is.
It's more embarassing how n00bs like you show up and make sweeping statements that are blatantly wrong. Remember Echelon? The "evil, nasty Democrats" get their 15 minutes of shame when they're in power and do something we don't like too.