Hm, speaking of conversation skills, I know there are conversation classes for people learning a new language, but what about "remedial" conversation classes for people who already speak English? Hm... could be a good business idea, though I'd have to hire someone else to do the training.
Hm, good suggestion, but I was trying to get more of a generic process than a specific thing to do... how did you realize that PR work interested you? Right now my life is, well, computers and books (escapist;). Its what I do at work, and what I come home to. I've come across stuff like Leisure Learning where I can shell out a bunch of money to take classes in this or that, but picking a class that looks interesting... well, I'm not too sure about the tours of chinese restaurants and wine tastings, and cooking classes might be fun and educational, but when I'm done I'm back in my house again.
Still not sure about developing conversational skills. I spent some time working tech support specifically to learn to not treat other people like idiots, and that really helped a lot in learning how to not offend the people around me, but beyond that, conversation is still something along the lines of "Nice day today" "Yeah sure is" (long uncomfortable silence) "So, got anything planned for this weekend coming up?" "Yeah" (long uncomfortable silence) etc... it never seems to get any better than that.
Perhaps excessive self-love is vanity, but I think this is self-love as opposed to the self-loathing expressed by people who have no self-esteem. If you go out thinking you're a pile of shit and hate who you are, you're pretty much screwing yourself (both in your attempts at getting a date and in bed that night).
... If you want a girl, you need to change. Introverts are not sexy
Over and over I hear this, but I've never gotten any suggestions for how to be something else when "be yourself" just can't cut it. It's not like I can just one day wake up and think "gee, I think I'll go out and be extroverted and super cool and all the women will pile up on me!"
So, anyone with suggestions? How do I participate in a conversation about something other than computers or myself? How do I find a hobby that involves socializing (I can think of millions that I can do from the comfort of my own home) that isn't "getting drunk at the bar" or "displaying my incredible lack of prowess at sports"? How do I "pick up" a girl without resorting to something cheesy and well-used like "Are you from Tennesse?"
And? Microsoft doesn't need protection from you, but I'm sure they'd love to "innovate" all the new ideas you send them that unfortunately didn't make the patentability cut.
And what the hell is up with slashdot today?
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 8 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Ah, but if you're a Muslim, it was such a happyfun place to live. Just like America now... all you need is to be a White Protestant Male, and you'll never have to worry about anything, as long as you don't get too deep of a tan.
Because they aren't. All they did was win a popularity contest, they're no more special or intelligent than the prom king. Bush Jr. graduated with a C average.
In fact, it seems that these days being stupid (or at least, not being smart, since some people call C "average") is a prerequisite for politicians. Kerry failed PoliSci his first time around, and graduated with a C as well.
some farcical future dystopia is not the way to take your analysis of how things actually are taken seriously.
You continue to pretend that there's something here to take seriously.
Come back in 1000 years and tell me how things actually are. Even then, Capitalism will still be wet behind the ears... The process by which people obtain money and goods that we now call "capitalism" is a tiny baby in the grand scheme of things compared to, say, fiefdom, or religious tithing. How many eons has the entire animal kingdom run with "the strong kills the weak and takes everything" before mankind invented civilization? How many millenia has mankind used the same excuse to force the serfs to turn over their produce to nobility based on simple birthright? Even after the creation of "employment" beyond the apprenticeship model of everyone being an apprentice to someone else before going to work for yourself, the modern form of investment capitalism has only been around a little more than 300 years. I'd say we've got at least 1000-2000 more years to go to see if we've got the Right Way or not.
Wow, I'm glad I'm living in the good ol' US of A, one of the shining examples of how the wonderous Capitalism has brought happiness to everyone. An amazing place where anyone who is willing to work can get a job, work for their money, raise a family, and retire on the money they have rightfully earned through their employment. Where everyone is paid by their employer a wage suitable for the services they perform.
Pay no attention to the fact that half the population starved to death since walmart and other Great Employers cut all the jobs where the services provided weren't worth enough pay to feed the employees, since in the past in some Shopping Districts (back then, we called them States) Wal-mart employees qualified for Communist food stamps. Or that American Employees with less than $500,000 at the age of 65 are put to death so they don't leech off of the American Employees' hard work. Those older than 65 aren't given a free pass either. When the American Employees anger the Holy Market, they are typically the first to be punished as the Holy Market cuts the value of their savings. Lines at the local anti-communist euthanasia depot grow long on those days. It seems that every day now someone is sentenced to die for treason for speaking against a Great Employer and threatening to lower it's value on the Holy Market.
Don't tell anyone but I think the whole thing is bunk... I've been keeping my Holy Tokens in my mattress, and it hasn't burst into flames like the Board of Directors of America said they would. I also think the whole Holy Market is secretly controlled by the Great Employers... I've never heard of a Great Employer being put to death when the company they control loses money, in fact, I've heard rumors that the Board of Directors has been actually paying money to these Great Employers... it's like Communism, only instead of the people receiving the Government Support, its the Great Employers... uhoh, someone's at the door. I better go before they find out abou
Alternatively, we can kiss Windows goodbye, because, hey, what's the use in running Windows if all you have to do is tell your clients to run WINE?... no, not quite the same ring to it.
That depends, did the company who makes them program them to ring the bell every four times and collect a percentage of the profits?
Reminds me of the questions raised by people in several cities when red-light-running cameras were installed on a profit-sharing plan. The photographs provided no proof that the light was even red at the time, other than the fact that it was taken, and computers never do the wrong thing, right?
5) Save the rain forest if you want to but if the price of my home goes up even one penny because we can't get cheap lumber anymore then sorry you've lost my vote.
And to think there are people out there who would form homeowners associations and evict little old ladies to make sure the cost of their houses go up!
I think you have just hit the nail on the head there!
Slashdot does not have stories! Slashdot is a content aggregator, someone writes in with "Hey cool! Look at this site!" and the "editor" says "hey thats so cool its been posted three times already and deserves to be posted a fourth time!" If you READ the text on slashdot, it says "Some idiot said: 'Hey cool! Look at this site!'"
OK, I'll accept the misspelled domain thing. I suspect a significant percentage of those are squatters who make money funneling traffic to porn sites... a glove to keep the porn site operators hands clean, so to speak.
But babes.com? All I can say is "what the hell was the guy thinking?"
Instead, they often use mis-direction to tempt the user into visiting their site.
Ok, I keep seeing this all throughout this story, but what the hell?
A bright blinking banner with boobs and "click here to cum see more!"... is that misdirection? Where are the car sites that when you click to find out about a honda you get HOT XXX NUDE ACTION!! Are we talking about misdirecting kids here? Because I saw that one that part on the Sesame Street website where you click on grover and you go straight to WET FURRY MUPPET SEXXXX!!
If someone clicks on a porn banner, its not because they were "mis-directed", its because they said "Ooooh boobies!" and whatever rational part of the brain that makes them realize that they don't need to buy smut shuts down.
If all that was done was strip a person of the ability to do evil as we currently see it, and even if we say doing nothing is evil because it wasted time that could have been doing good... then we would still have variations in the levels of goodness, which would set a new bar for what was "good". Someone could choose to do "good" or "better".
But now we're getting back to the other branch of the thread: the fact that good and evil aren't constants and aren't the same for everyone. Something that would have been heroic before the social lobotomy would now be "not good enough". You saved three kids from a burning building? Well, the goldfish died, you weren't good enough, you got in the way of the real hero who would have saved the kids and the pets and put out the fire by spitting on it. Whether people called your interference "evil" would probably depend on whether anyone there was alive back when saving whoever you could was "good enough".
It does if you intend to still have a company in 3 or 4 years. And like I said, if you've got some other source of money or you want to just do it any way and pray your costs fall below your revenue, you're welcome to do it anyway.
start to lock out others in the market.
Sounds like what they're doing with these laws. It's amazing, really... cellular packet data has been around for years now in asia and europe, and you've been able to get pretty crappy internet access on your cellphone in the US for years. But when people tell them to justify banning public wireless in regions that aren't even on their radar for service, suddenly Verizon is pushing their 3G BroadbandAccess package like they just invented it yesterday.
So when you were 3-5 years old, you said to yourself "Self! When your balls descend, you're going to find women who aren't your sister or mother (and if you aren't in Kentuky at the time, your cousin, though if you are, she really is one fine looking honey) totally hot and you'll want to bang them all night long?
Well, maybe not. Maybe you were 8-10. That cute girl in class, you see her, and you think "ok brain, feel fuzzy now. Heart, you race." Right? You made the conscious and rational decision to have a crush on her? You thought about Wooly Willie teasing you, singing the whole "k-i-s-s-i-n-g" song at you every bus trip home for the next two weeks, and then said "yeah, I can live with that as long as I get to sit next to the red-haired girl"?
Ok, maybe not even then. But you're an adult now, you're a Big Boy, you make the Big Decisions. Right?. And when that new woman in Accounting walks by (you know the one, for who casual Friday means no bra) you think to yourself "Prep for hormone release. Hormone release is go! Heartrate change is go! Erection in T minus 5! 4! 3!..."
If you do, then the souls of one hundred thousand dead poets mourn for you, for you will never know romance. And I gotta say, you must suck in bed, what with you counting down every thrust out loud before you blow your wad.
Ok, lets take a look at some terribly heinous crimes:
Sex out of wedlock. Paying for sex out of wedlock. Sex out of wedlock with someone of the same gender. Marrying someone of the same gender. Polygamy/Polyandry. Purchasing a "mail order bride". Teaching students that sex using a condom can protect against some STDs and help prevent unwanted children. Aborting a fetus that would normally survive but be crippled mentally or physically. Aborting a fetus that would not normally survive, but would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make the attempt at life, just in case it does survive. Allowing a woman to die after 15 years in a coma on life support. Refusing to allow the government to pass a law forcing said woman to not die. Aborting an unwanted fetus. Copying a song onto tape from the radio. Copying a song onto mp3 from a cd. Copying a song onto mp3 over the internet. Teaching someone else how to copy a song from a cd with copy protection. Gambling.
All of these and more are "Evil" acts that someone or another thinks is "wrong", and yet those feelings are not universally held, and/or have changed over time. As the grandparent said, some things that are evil and unspeakable to me aren't to others, and vice-versa. Common grounds are few and far between. I wonder what cannibalistic tribes think of other people's revulsion of killing and eating humans.
Vagary's statement that "only creatures capable of evil are capable of good" is itself not logically sound. If someone was born who never once thought of killing anyone, would they be incapable of learning CPR and saving a life? Maybe my CPR training in Boy Scouts was what led me to work in tech support. Driven to evil thoughts by my capability to do good?
Perhaps on a species-wide scale if humans became incapable of breaking laws, starting wars, or hurting one another, there would no longer be "heroics" or other large scale displays of "good" that everyone could point to, but even if we did somehow create a beautiful utopia, people would still be born into the world, cared for as children, and raised into this society... would this not be "good"?
The other option is the Service Provider will set prices high enough that a small number of subscribers makes the venture profitable.
Therein lies the problem. The supply and demand curves don't always meet above the breakeven point.
What if it costs $5000 a month to install and maintain wireless countries for Podunkville, pop. 2000? You do the smart thing: Market research. You go out and ask people what they'd pay for wireless access so they can check their email no matter where they are in town.
Your numbers come up like this: People who would pay $100/mo: 20. People who would pay $50/mo: 80. People who would pay $35/mo: 120 People who would pay $25/mo: 160... No matter what you charge, there just isn't enough interest to support your company. You could do it anyway at a loss and hope your costs drop quick or that you have a popular OS division raking in far more than you're losing on this plan. Or you could just not do it at all, and it sucks to be the 20 people.
For the "free market" to work, companies have to sell services. What good is your pretty little free market when all the companies decide that providing wireless to Podunkville will never turn a profit, much less break even?
Law and the bible are used because a LOT of work goes into making sure that things mean the same in the translations. The language may be a little archaic (depending on which bible translation you're talking about, really) or full of legalese, but when you've got one sentence in english that tells you that you cannot build a bus stop within ten feet of a parking meter, the spanish version of the sentence says the same thing.
Having a few highly trained armed guards in each and every flight... this isn't cheap.
Lets see, the cost of seating an officer for an airplane ride from Houston (IAH) to Baltimore (BWI) one way on July 3 is $160.73+$17.77 in taxes and fees on Continental. It is a 737-500, seating at most 132 passengers. Given that plane flights haven't been full thanks to a combination of the economy and the fact that people are still scared to fly, lets say the average flight is half full of civilians, plus the air marshal. Thats 66 paying passengers. Continental doesn't break their taxes down on their website, but from history, its usually about $7 for "fuel fees", $3 for luggage, and recently I do believe there is now a security tax. If that security tax is more than the roughly $2.50 per passenger that the air marshal's spot costs, the government could easily put salaried air marshals on every plane simply by using that fee to buy a ticket, and paying the salary out of the great big public wallet that already pays for everyone else's salaries.
In an Israeli airport, the grandmother would sail through security
This isn't exactly accurate, after all you cited the Irish woman that was saved by the extra scrutiny she earned. There are a number of weapons recovered when a kid's teddy bear goes through the detector. Perhaps giving them the third degree is a bit harsh, but the same screening process should still be used.
For what its worth, I think El Al has the right idea. Maybe they'll expand into the US.
it would be a "she" for women and a "he" for men - there, feel better?)
If you think Congress is going to divert a couple trillion dollars for something like this, you're insane.
No, I think you fail to understand the insanity of the neocons in power. They continually threaten comedians and talk show hosts for discussing things like "sending our army into iraq without armor was like sending animals to slaughter". The truth scares the shit out of them, because they have long since abandoned any pretense of honesty.
You can believe that the neocons are jizzing their pants over this tech, thinking about how they can use this to put away those annoying liberals for good instead of just making weak threats of "treason" for telling the truth about the vast waste of money their campaign has been. How many billions of dollars were spent on the war before they got around to "gee maybe we should armor our vehicles so fewer soldiers die every day"? Of course, these are also the people who attack those who want the soldiers to come home now while they're still alive as "anti-american" and "anti-soldiers", because "pro-americans" would support the death of every last soldier out there 100%
And do you know what? The system doesn't HAVE to work. All they have to do is convince 12 people that the system is perfect and cannot fail, and you can arrest whoever you damn well please, with faked evidence nobody would dispute.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm, speaking of conversation skills, I know there are conversation classes for people learning a new language, but what about "remedial" conversation classes for people who already speak English? Hm... could be a good business idea, though I'd have to hire someone else to do the training.
Hm, good suggestion, but I was trying to get more of a generic process than a specific thing to do... how did you realize that PR work interested you? Right now my life is, well, computers and books (escapist ;). Its what I do at work, and what I come home to. I've come across stuff like Leisure Learning where I can shell out a bunch of money to take classes in this or that, but picking a class that looks interesting... well, I'm not too sure about the tours of chinese restaurants and wine tastings, and cooking classes might be fun and educational, but when I'm done I'm back in my house again.
Still not sure about developing conversational skills. I spent some time working tech support specifically to learn to not treat other people like idiots, and that really helped a lot in learning how to not offend the people around me, but beyond that, conversation is still something along the lines of "Nice day today" "Yeah sure is" (long uncomfortable silence) "So, got anything planned for this weekend coming up?" "Yeah" (long uncomfortable silence) etc... it never seems to get any better than that.
self-love == vanity
Perhaps excessive self-love is vanity, but I think this is self-love as opposed to the self-loathing expressed by people who have no self-esteem. If you go out thinking you're a pile of shit and hate who you are, you're pretty much screwing yourself (both in your attempts at getting a date and in bed that night).
Too many self-'s in this post.
... If you want a girl, you need to change. Introverts are not sexy
:P
Over and over I hear this, but I've never gotten any suggestions for how to be something else when "be yourself" just can't cut it. It's not like I can just one day wake up and think "gee, I think I'll go out and be extroverted and super cool and all the women will pile up on me!"
So, anyone with suggestions? How do I participate in a conversation about something other than computers or myself? How do I find a hobby that involves socializing (I can think of millions that I can do from the comfort of my own home) that isn't "getting drunk at the bar" or "displaying my incredible lack of prowess at sports"? How do I "pick up" a girl without resorting to something cheesy and well-used like "Are you from Tennesse?"
Or am I just doomed?
And what the hell is up with slashdot today?
Ah, but if you're a Muslim, it was such a happyfun place to live. Just like America now... all you need is to be a White Protestant Male, and you'll never have to worry about anything, as long as you don't get too deep of a tan.
Why do our leaders, who are intelligent
Because they aren't. All they did was win a popularity contest, they're no more special or intelligent than the prom king. Bush Jr. graduated with a C average.
In fact, it seems that these days being stupid (or at least, not being smart, since some people call C "average") is a prerequisite for politicians. Kerry failed PoliSci his first time around, and graduated with a C as well.
some farcical future dystopia is not the way to take your analysis of how things actually are taken seriously.
You continue to pretend that there's something here to take seriously.
Come back in 1000 years and tell me how things actually are. Even then, Capitalism will still be wet behind the ears... The process by which people obtain money and goods that we now call "capitalism" is a tiny baby in the grand scheme of things compared to, say, fiefdom, or religious tithing. How many eons has the entire animal kingdom run with "the strong kills the weak and takes everything" before mankind invented civilization? How many millenia has mankind used the same excuse to force the serfs to turn over their produce to nobility based on simple birthright? Even after the creation of "employment" beyond the apprenticeship model of everyone being an apprentice to someone else before going to work for yourself, the modern form of investment capitalism has only been around a little more than 300 years. I'd say we've got at least 1000-2000 more years to go to see if we've got the Right Way or not.
Wow, I'm glad I'm living in the good ol' US of A, one of the shining examples of how the wonderous Capitalism has brought happiness to everyone. An amazing place where anyone who is willing to work can get a job, work for their money, raise a family, and retire on the money they have rightfully earned through their employment. Where everyone is paid by their employer a wage suitable for the services they perform.
Pay no attention to the fact that half the population starved to death since walmart and other Great Employers cut all the jobs where the services provided weren't worth enough pay to feed the employees, since in the past in some Shopping Districts (back then, we called them States) Wal-mart employees qualified for Communist food stamps. Or that American Employees with less than $500,000 at the age of 65 are put to death so they don't leech off of the American Employees' hard work. Those older than 65 aren't given a free pass either. When the American Employees anger the Holy Market, they are typically the first to be punished as the Holy Market cuts the value of their savings. Lines at the local anti-communist euthanasia depot grow long on those days. It seems that every day now someone is sentenced to die for treason for speaking against a Great Employer and threatening to lower it's value on the Holy Market.
Don't tell anyone but I think the whole thing is bunk... I've been keeping my Holy Tokens in my mattress, and it hasn't burst into flames like the Board of Directors of America said they would. I also think the whole Holy Market is secretly controlled by the Great Employers... I've never heard of a Great Employer being put to death when the company they control loses money, in fact, I've heard rumors that the Board of Directors has been actually paying money to these Great Employers... it's like Communism, only instead of the people receiving the Government Support, its the Great Employers... uhoh, someone's at the door. I better go before they find out abou
Alternatively, we can kiss Windows goodbye, because, hey, what's the use in running Windows if all you have to do is tell your clients to run WINE? ... no, not quite the same ring to it.
That depends, did the company who makes them program them to ring the bell every four times and collect a percentage of the profits?
Reminds me of the questions raised by people in several cities when red-light-running cameras were installed on a profit-sharing plan. The photographs provided no proof that the light was even red at the time, other than the fact that it was taken, and computers never do the wrong thing, right?
5) Save the rain forest if you want to but if the price of my home goes up even one penny because we can't get cheap lumber anymore then sorry you've lost my vote.
And to think there are people out there who would form homeowners associations and evict little old ladies to make sure the cost of their houses go up!
because they have stories
I think you have just hit the nail on the head there!
Slashdot does not have stories! Slashdot is a content aggregator, someone writes in with "Hey cool! Look at this site!" and the "editor" says "hey thats so cool its been posted three times already and deserves to be posted a fourth time!" If you READ the text on slashdot, it says "Some idiot said: 'Hey cool! Look at this site!'"
OK, I'll accept the misspelled domain thing. I suspect a significant percentage of those are squatters who make money funneling traffic to porn sites... a glove to keep the porn site operators hands clean, so to speak.
But babes.com? All I can say is "what the hell was the guy thinking?"
Instead, they often use mis-direction to tempt the user into visiting their site.
Ok, I keep seeing this all throughout this story, but what the hell?
A bright blinking banner with boobs and "click here to cum see more!"... is that misdirection? Where are the car sites that when you click to find out about a honda you get HOT XXX NUDE ACTION!! Are we talking about misdirecting kids here? Because I saw that one that part on the Sesame Street website where you click on grover and you go straight to WET FURRY MUPPET SEXXXX!!
If someone clicks on a porn banner, its not because they were "mis-directed", its because they said "Ooooh boobies!" and whatever rational part of the brain that makes them realize that they don't need to buy smut shuts down.
If all that was done was strip a person of the ability to do evil as we currently see it, and even if we say doing nothing is evil because it wasted time that could have been doing good... then we would still have variations in the levels of goodness, which would set a new bar for what was "good". Someone could choose to do "good" or "better".
But now we're getting back to the other branch of the thread: the fact that good and evil aren't constants and aren't the same for everyone. Something that would have been heroic before the social lobotomy would now be "not good enough". You saved three kids from a burning building? Well, the goldfish died, you weren't good enough, you got in the way of the real hero who would have saved the kids and the pets and put out the fire by spitting on it. Whether people called your interference "evil" would probably depend on whether anyone there was alive back when saving whoever you could was "good enough".
it has nothing to do with Breakeven.
It does if you intend to still have a company in 3 or 4 years. And like I said, if you've got some other source of money or you want to just do it any way and pray your costs fall below your revenue, you're welcome to do it anyway.
start to lock out others in the market.
Sounds like what they're doing with these laws. It's amazing, really... cellular packet data has been around for years now in asia and europe, and you've been able to get pretty crappy internet access on your cellphone in the US for years. But when people tell them to justify banning public wireless in regions that aren't even on their radar for service, suddenly Verizon is pushing their 3G BroadbandAccess package like they just invented it yesterday.
So when you were 3-5 years old, you said to yourself "Self! When your balls descend, you're going to find women who aren't your sister or mother (and if you aren't in Kentuky at the time, your cousin, though if you are, she really is one fine looking honey) totally hot and you'll want to bang them all night long?
Well, maybe not. Maybe you were 8-10. That cute girl in class, you see her, and you think "ok brain, feel fuzzy now. Heart, you race." Right? You made the conscious and rational decision to have a crush on her? You thought about Wooly Willie teasing you, singing the whole "k-i-s-s-i-n-g" song at you every bus trip home for the next two weeks, and then said "yeah, I can live with that as long as I get to sit next to the red-haired girl"?
Ok, maybe not even then. But you're an adult now, you're a Big Boy, you make the Big Decisions. Right?. And when that new woman in Accounting walks by (you know the one, for who casual Friday means no bra) you think to yourself "Prep for hormone release. Hormone release is go! Heartrate change is go! Erection in T minus 5! 4! 3!..."
If you do, then the souls of one hundred thousand dead poets mourn for you, for you will never know romance. And I gotta say, you must suck in bed, what with you counting down every thrust out loud before you blow your wad.
But if it were just one gene, you'd think it'd be identified by now...
Except that to study it you have to conclusively know if your subjects are gay or not.
Ok, lets take a look at some terribly heinous crimes:
Sex out of wedlock.
Paying for sex out of wedlock.
Sex out of wedlock with someone of the same gender.
Marrying someone of the same gender.
Polygamy/Polyandry.
Purchasing a "mail order bride".
Teaching students that sex using a condom can protect against some STDs and help prevent unwanted children.
Aborting a fetus that would normally survive but be crippled mentally or physically.
Aborting a fetus that would not normally survive, but would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make the attempt at life, just in case it does survive.
Allowing a woman to die after 15 years in a coma on life support.
Refusing to allow the government to pass a law forcing said woman to not die.
Aborting an unwanted fetus.
Copying a song onto tape from the radio.
Copying a song onto mp3 from a cd.
Copying a song onto mp3 over the internet.
Teaching someone else how to copy a song from a cd with copy protection.
Gambling.
All of these and more are "Evil" acts that someone or another thinks is "wrong", and yet those feelings are not universally held, and/or have changed over time. As the grandparent said, some things that are evil and unspeakable to me aren't to others, and vice-versa. Common grounds are few and far between. I wonder what cannibalistic tribes think of other people's revulsion of killing and eating humans.
Vagary's statement that "only creatures capable of evil are capable of good" is itself not logically sound. If someone was born who never once thought of killing anyone, would they be incapable of learning CPR and saving a life? Maybe my CPR training in Boy Scouts was what led me to work in tech support. Driven to evil thoughts by my capability to do good?
Perhaps on a species-wide scale if humans became incapable of breaking laws, starting wars, or hurting one another, there would no longer be "heroics" or other large scale displays of "good" that everyone could point to, but even if we did somehow create a beautiful utopia, people would still be born into the world, cared for as children, and raised into this society... would this not be "good"?
The other option is the Service Provider will set prices high enough that a small number of subscribers makes the venture profitable.
...
Therein lies the problem. The supply and demand curves don't always meet above the breakeven point.
What if it costs $5000 a month to install and maintain wireless countries for Podunkville, pop. 2000? You do the smart thing: Market research. You go out and ask people what they'd pay for wireless access so they can check their email no matter where they are in town.
Your numbers come up like this:
People who would pay $100/mo: 20.
People who would pay $50/mo: 80.
People who would pay $35/mo: 120
People who would pay $25/mo: 160
No matter what you charge, there just isn't enough interest to support your company. You could do it anyway at a loss and hope your costs drop quick or that you have a popular OS division raking in far more than you're losing on this plan. Or you could just not do it at all, and it sucks to be the 20 people.
For the "free market" to work, companies have to sell services. What good is your pretty little free market when all the companies decide that providing wireless to Podunkville will never turn a profit, much less break even?
Law and the bible are used because a LOT of work goes into making sure that things mean the same in the translations. The language may be a little archaic (depending on which bible translation you're talking about, really) or full of legalese, but when you've got one sentence in english that tells you that you cannot build a bus stop within ten feet of a parking meter, the spanish version of the sentence says the same thing.
Having a few highly trained armed guards in each and every flight... this isn't cheap.
Lets see, the cost of seating an officer for an airplane ride from Houston (IAH) to Baltimore (BWI) one way on July 3 is $160.73+$17.77 in taxes and fees on Continental. It is a 737-500, seating at most 132 passengers. Given that plane flights haven't been full thanks to a combination of the economy and the fact that people are still scared to fly, lets say the average flight is half full of civilians, plus the air marshal. Thats 66 paying passengers. Continental doesn't break their taxes down on their website, but from history, its usually about $7 for "fuel fees", $3 for luggage, and recently I do believe there is now a security tax. If that security tax is more than the roughly $2.50 per passenger that the air marshal's spot costs, the government could easily put salaried air marshals on every plane simply by using that fee to buy a ticket, and paying the salary out of the great big public wallet that already pays for everyone else's salaries.
In an Israeli airport, the grandmother would sail through security
This isn't exactly accurate, after all you cited the Irish woman that was saved by the extra scrutiny she earned. There are a number of weapons recovered when a kid's teddy bear goes through the detector. Perhaps giving them the third degree is a bit harsh, but the same screening process should still be used.
For what its worth, I think El Al has the right idea. Maybe they'll expand into the US.
it would be a "she" for women and a "he" for men - there, feel better?)
Don't forget the priest for screening the boys!
If you think Congress is going to divert a couple trillion dollars for something like this, you're insane.
No, I think you fail to understand the insanity of the neocons in power. They continually threaten comedians and talk show hosts for discussing things like "sending our army into iraq without armor was like sending animals to slaughter". The truth scares the shit out of them, because they have long since abandoned any pretense of honesty.
You can believe that the neocons are jizzing their pants over this tech, thinking about how they can use this to put away those annoying liberals for good instead of just making weak threats of "treason" for telling the truth about the vast waste of money their campaign has been. How many billions of dollars were spent on the war before they got around to "gee maybe we should armor our vehicles so fewer soldiers die every day"? Of course, these are also the people who attack those who want the soldiers to come home now while they're still alive as "anti-american" and "anti-soldiers", because "pro-americans" would support the death of every last soldier out there 100%
And do you know what? The system doesn't HAVE to work. All they have to do is convince 12 people that the system is perfect and cannot fail, and you can arrest whoever you damn well please, with faked evidence nobody would dispute.
The sad thing is that it's already happening. this is just the abuse of the system in the state of Texas. Thousands of cases potentially based on lies, dressed up as "indisputable" DNA evidence.