Conservatives like to insist that the income tax should be replaced entirely with sales taxes, which would make tax time "simpler", as well as discourage trade, not to mention being the type of taxation most conveniently avoidable by the wealthiest taxpayers. (Worst of all in this regard is the inheritance tax, or the "death tax", hated by the wealthy, but marketed as something that will affect most of us.)
Both the sales tax, and income tax collected from sites like Ebay, are taxes that will primarily fall on the lower and middle classes, as opposed to the upper classes. Rich people do not sell stuff on Ebay. A typical "successful" Ebay seller is typically bragging about $10K per year. Lots of Ebay sellers are just trying to clean out their garage.
The IRS does not have infinite resources available to it for enforcement, and has to carefully allocate what resources it has to different types of cases. Contempt for various segments of society has really been showing up in these enforcement allocations recently, and not just in this executive agency but others as well. Just look at the recent prosecutor firings in the DOJ.
BTW, do you really think the cameras are archived or looked at in any depth.
You're right, they're just there to scare you and the images are never archived and nobody looks at them. In fact there is no electricity going to the cameras and those in the know often climb up and bash them open to release the candy hidden inside for all the gleeful British children on the ground below.
That stuff they make gummy bears out of is great for making fake fingerprints using someone's latent print, some crazy glue, a digital camera, Photoshop, a transparency sheet, a photo-sensitive PCB, and gummy bear gelatin. You can destroy everything but the gelatin, break into a facility that uses a fingerprint reader for security, and then eat the last bit of evidence.
Have you been to the library lately? Just try to get some work done on a computer there during the first few hours after school lets out. Every computer is some punk 15 year old on MySpace.
I agree with you that it is in society's best interest to get as few people wasting their lives on myspace as possible. Just the electricity spent to power the HTTP requests is a tragic waste that we should seek to minimize. But there are more effective techniques than an Illinois state statute of dubious constitutionality. It singles out a single party- really, it makes a clumsy attempt to define a new legal class around it- and prevents public communication with anyone in that class from within what is definitely a public realm. In principle, yeah, who cares, it's myspace. But the fact that myspace is a stupid site has no legal meaning and can not possibly have any bearing on precedent. It's not like someone can point to this law later on and say "well this doesn't apply here because it was obviously intended for lame sites like myspace." Legally that means nothing, since we're entitled to equal protection under the law, and lameness has no legal meaning unless carefully (incorrectly) defined. If only "lame" sites fall under the purview of some law then you might just be running a lame site yourself. They'll have to define "social networking site" very very carefully, these Illinois politicians. Politicians are dumber than programmers. Programmers think "software is hard". So imagine how the policians are doing with the code they're writing. They'll leave this statute lying around, a court will find it, and libraries will have to block google and *.gov sites. Or the statute might not just be misinterpreted by a court- it might be overturned. It's trying to carefully punch a hole through a constitutional right. If it were overturned, myspace could gain invinciblity and we'd never be rid of it in libraries. Kids and hobos would walk in the door with a solemn right to myspace.
A law impresses voters, and unfortunately some people are only in a position to introduce laws, and cannot issue executive orders to state agencies. But a law is a horrible approach here, and there are much better ones. There is no reason Illinois couldn't simply handle this kind of thing with a directive to the state DoE- or whoever in Illinois handles this stuff- that libraries be provided with filters they can use as they see fit. If they're really itching to pass a statute, they can pass one forcing the state to allocate a certain amount of additional funds every year for libraries to use for this sort of thing. A simple filter under the control of individual librarians or library workers will do fine and has the least potential of backfiring. These people are both a) in a position to know which sites need blocking and b) also in a position to provisionally whitelist any site for anyone who asks- maybe someone really is doing a term paper on white chicks who like to screw black guys. That way, myspace mostly gets blocked, without anyone actually saying "myspace", or preventing use of myspace from public libraries, simply by virtue of the fact that myspace annoys librarians, and most library patrons won't bother if they find a site blocked and have to ask that it be unblocked.
If you're a government that wants to get myspace out of your public libraries, you don't ban it with a law. You have to be more subtle than that, or else you're fascist, you have no class. Fascists make people feel like they're being pushed around by a government. A smart government that's good at policy can sort of just set things up so that myspace slides out of their libraries without anyone being explicit or forceful about it. This is done by smart executive action. Implementing solutions to problems without resorting to fascism is the purview of the executive.
What I do not enjoy, however, is his political commentary. The same can be said for Orson Scott Card. Why is it that authors, singers, actors, etc feel the need to get political? Are we enveloped in a society where it is expected that if you have any leverage, you push your beliefs on other people?
YES. We hopefully live in a society where the ONLY limiting factor keeping you from pushing your political opinions is the leverage you accumulate by any means (not just by means that are "approved", like a position as a CNN anchor). There is no expectation that you should just remain silent even if you do find yourself with an audience- presumably so that the society's institutions may continue to dominate political discourse and control what everyone sees hears and thinks, like some other countries I could think of.
If you let individuals have a louder voice in your culture, you're going to hear from individual idiots like Michael Crichton. But let's not throw the baby away with Crichton's bathwater. I get really angry when I hear people whining about "Hollywood celebrities" spouting off their opinions. This is a country with freedom of speech, so they can't arrest you (unless duh your speech is part of some other crime like fraud, perjury, etc.). But not being arrested is no guarantee that anyone will listen to you. In reality, all the opinions most people get firsthand from TV/cable/radio/print, and secondhand from all the idiots at work and on the Internet who parrot stuff they hear word for word, are controlled by six corporations who determine the nature of political discourse in this country: which stories will be covered (or invented out of whole cloth) by its newspapers, cable outlets, and radio stations, and which stories will not be heard at all.
Now once in a while you hear an unauthorized "extraneous" individual opinion being expressed in the mainstream media by some random individual. Blogs let anyone say anything to a self-selected Internet audience. But only very rarely does a random, non-corporate, indivual opinion escape from the lips of anyone in or being covered by the mainstream media, and typically that person will be in the entertainment industry. When you have become like me a world famous rock star or porn star or Hollywood personality, you realize that you have a ready-made audience out there that pretty much stalks you from their houses, reading up on you in the entertainment press and salivating over paparazzi photos of you and fawning over your every word. You have a gaggle of idiots ready to waste their time listening to anything you have to say. So it's only natural, when you find yourself on a soap box like that, that if you notice some horrible news story that isn't being covered, you'll think "OMG why is this not all over the news" and start making noise about it yourself. (Usually it's not all over the news because it's some godawful war with massive human suffering, no natural resources, or a villian already allied with the United States.) If it IS all over the news, you wouldn't bother talking about it.
Unauthorized opinions are dealt with using an ugly meme invented for the purpose, that has been surprisingly effective in a country that brags about freedom of speech: this whole idea that you should just "shut up and sing". Even if people will listen to you, you should keep your mouth shut anyway. You got famous for singing, or acting, not for knowing what you're talking about, and you should only talk about singing and acting and stuff like that. On other matters only corporate opinions can be trusted.
Basically there is a germ of truth to these complaints: People should not be giving extra weight to the opinions of Hollywood celebrities. But they do. From there it gets ugly: the opinions are simply not valid because they are opinions of Hollywood celebrities. IOW, opinions essentially
After that whole flap happened, the only people I've ever heard use the word "niggardly" have been people tickled pink by how it sounds when they say it over and over again, and the fact that they can say it without getting into trouble.
I like Ron Paul although I usually don't agree with him; but he has written some good stuff.
Anyway it's like the thought process goes, you'd have to be stupid to let sex / skin color / etc. affect your treatment of someone. It makes no sense. Everybody should know that. "I have no problems with black people, so why should anyone else?" So these shouldn't be problems, and maybe if we stop talking about them as if they continue to be problems, they'll go away. This is vaguely supported by an underlying belief that racism, sexism, etc. continue to persist as issues not because of actual racism or sexism- those problems have been "mostly fixed" now- but because of people who can't let go and just have to stick it to everybody for the country's past mistakes. They keep making these into big issues and that's why they never go away. A corollary meme- they're into their own victimhood- often takes off from there.
This belief system works fine until you find yourself holding the muddy end of the stick on one of these things. Usually people don't acquire race or sex, but people do acquire injuries, illnesses, disabilities, or disorders. If it happens to you, when it does, that's when it dawns on you that even though it makes no sense for people to be treating you idiotically just because of a disorder or whatever, they still do, because even if society has gotten more enlightened over the centuries, most people are still in fact idiots.
Ah, Norway, that progressive place of freedom. Nope. Don't buy it. Who's in charge there? Liberals? Let's not say anything that would offend anyone.
Well, the Americans just came up with a new way to protect the children different from the Norwegian version. Your ISP will have to record all traffic they see coming in and out of your computer so that the government can simply subpoena all the information and analyze all your stuff at their leisure in their search for child porn. You want to talk about thinking of the children, this is as thinking of the children as it goes. Children simply cannot be thought of more than this. Perhaps now we can move on and think about something other than children for a while.An ISP that failed to maintain such a system for easy access by the government would incur a one-year jail term for somebody. This was proposed by Lamar Alexander (R-TX), phone number (202)225-4236. Do you live in the 21st district of Texas? Lamar Smith wants to hear from you.
Norway's system is different. It just looks like something that will get dumped once people start wondering why they need this thing that makes the Internet work different in Norway. It may cause persistent technical problems and develop a reputation as a national embarrassment. I can just imagine the stuff Norwegians are quickly going to come up with to get around this thing. (And under fear of what? Norwegian IT?) If anything, this should be a huge boon to anyone hacking the great firewall of China because you can probably mess around with it at much less personal risk to yourself than if you're caught hacking the great firewall for real. And I'm assuming the Norwegians will be openly free to collaborate on research into technological countermeasures that could in theory be used to breach any such stupid wall, which will be of interest to Chinese people. The Chinese should thank the idiot Norwegians for setting one of these up in the free world where we can all see it get knocked over.
In my opinion, this "Hillary is a woman" and "Obama is black" chatter is insulting to women and blacks.
Well, there isn't much else to talk about until we see what sort of policies they end up generating in office. It's only a few months past the last election anyway; this is news for political junkies at this point, so the topic of "electability" comes up often right now and one's opinion on a black or female candidate's electability is based on how racist and sexist you perceive everyone else to be. So these conversations aren't "insulting to women and blacks". They're vitally important for us to have. What we're really talking about is the attitudes we perceive our culture as having with regard to blacks and women, especially as politicians. People will be very revealing of their own racist attitudes if they think they're talking about how racist everyone else is. And it's interesting to see who is saying they wouldn't have a problem with a black candidate. Way more people than I would have thought. Interesting, not insulting.
Plus there's not much else to say about either of these candidates at this point, other than Hillary is still defending her pro-war vote and arguing that the war was a good idea overall. I wouldn't trust Hillary to do anything to prevent the president from again fraudulently starting another war.
Um, that may be true about EU law but the story/article talks about "falsely representing oneself as a customer". Maybe the law only applies to corporations but a "customer" can be a corporation.
Then I picked a bad example. A better one would be:
"If your immune system is not normal due to advanced HIV disease, be sure your doctor knows this to avoid a potentially fatal interaction with this pill we're selling."
Re:Before anyone says anything about free speech
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You ignore the fact that corporations are not people, and as such do not (and should not) have the inalienable rights of a human being.
I agree with the rest of what you said but this statement is completely false. Or at least, there is no distinction to make between individuals and corporations as far as political and commercial speech are concerned. One axis is independent of the other. Microsoft has a right to express a political view, even on technological matters, and individuals have a right to engage in commercial speech and sell things. The restrictions on speech are determined by the nature of the speech itself and not by who is making it.
Re:Before anyone says anything about free speech
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Free speech isn't free if it has "ifs, ands, or buts".
No it isn't. This, however, is commercial speech, fraudulently pretending to be free speech, as part of a ruse to impress people. Commercial speech identifiable as such is known to suffer the trustworthiness problems typical of commercial speech. If a corporation sends its marketing department to blogspot and creates 100 blogs talking about how cool its products are, that's fraud. The company is misrepresenting itself and concealing a conflict of interest. I mean, duh. Even in the crazy United States we have laws saying you can't make ads disguised to look like newspaper articles unless you print ADVERTISEMENT at the bottom so everyone knows you're probably full of it. Free speech is not going to last very long if we use it to excuse cheap commercial hijinks.
I sincerely hope we elected a 95-year-old African-American/Asian-American lesbian aitheist with a bum knee and poor vision.
Well we won't, which renders moot the rest of your post- a point which seems to fly over the head of people who make these silly comments. It's like saying "I can't wait until they celebrate Hannukah across the entire Moslem world so the Jewish people finally get it through their head" etc. Even George W. Bush understands that someone like Osama Bin Laden could never understand the joy of Hannukah.
Of course, only if her mother was an abusive alcoholic, her father left home when she was a baby, she was evicted, fired, beaten and shunned.
I love how these sentiments always come with a categorical tone of mockery for the unfortunate in general.
That way, I can point to her in shining example and say: "See! See! She made it. I'm not buying your excuse. Sorry."
Yes, yes, you would prove racism never existed, and show everyone up. These squabbling races will look so silly once you set them straight.
I'm not keen on Obama's stance on gun control, but I still hope he wins. If for no other reason than to lay this "black" issue to bed once and for all.
I agree, that's going to rock. I bet when it happens FOX is going to have a TV special to celebrate.
I've written here before about epileptic seizures I have that start somewhere in the right occipital lobe possibly near V1, based on the nature of the aura and a recent video EEG last month. These things started for no reason when I was a teenager and now involve these interesting post-ictal fugue states where only chunks of my brain seem to be working but I'm still able to run around and get in trouble. I've developed a talent over the years for coping with brain trauma and sort of bullshitting my way through it.
Usually I'm not forming long term memories during fugue states, but when I do, I remember some pretty interesting stuff. One thing that is typically impaired is object recognition, since this mostly seems to be handled by the right occipital lobe. I can see things but can't immediately recognize what they are, unless I use these left-brain techniques. The left occipital lobe can recognize objects too, but the approach it takes is different and more of a pain in the ass to have to rely on. It's more of a thunky symbolic recognition, as opposed to an ability to examine subtle forms, shapes, and colors. I have to basically establish a set of criteria that define what I'm looking for and then examine things in the visual field to see if they match those criteria. I'll look for a bed by trying to find things that appear flat and soft; I'll look for a door by looking for things with attributes of a doorknob such as being round and turnable; I'll find water to drink by looking closely at wet things. My wife says I make some interesting mistakes, like once confusing her desk chair for a toilet (forgetting for a moment that part of a toilet has to be wet, but at that point memory formation and retrieval is disrupted to the point where I could imagine forgetting that it's not enough to just be able to be sat on, toilets have to have water in them too). I have trouble recognizing faces, and she says I'm sometimes obviously pretending to recognize her. Recognizing a face using cold logic can be tricky even when you're not impaired. Recognizing familiar scenes and places becomes difficult. I drove home in a fugue state once, back in my twenties, and while I didn't crash into anybody or have any sort of accident, I did get lost on the way home from work. I ended up driving miles past where I lived. Even as a pedestrian, getting lost in familiar areas is still a problem.
People have been trying to come up with image processing algorithms that mimic cortical signal analysis for decades. I remember reading papers ten years ago like this. It's amazing to see they're still mistaking road signs for pedestrians. I don't think even I could make an error like that. The state of the art was totally miserable back then, too. Neuroscience has got to be one of the sciences most poorly understood by humans.
I'm a white guy (entitled to speak for all of them!) and I would vote for Obama over Hillary any time.
Hillary's dynastic candidacy bothers me for the same reason that the dynastic candidacy of George W Bush did, when I first heard about him in 1999 or 98 or whenever it was. I immediately assumed that I was only hearing about this guy, not because of any competence he had, but because of who his Daddy was. And guess what.
not because of her prospective partner's age, but because of her own age.
This is black-and-white thinking. You don't just have to base everything on one age or the other. Both their ages are important if she is younger than 18. His age is obviously not an issue if she is older than 18. But if she's younger than 18 than it should matter how much older than her he is. If the age difference is close to zero then we'd be better off with the law not getting involved.
I mean this is just common sense. Why does the law always have to be an ass? Why can't legislation be written in such a way that won't so predictably end in disaster raining down on the heads of ordinary teenage romantics trading naughty pictures of themselves? We've gotten so attached to applying blanket cold logic and stupid Boolean algebra to real world situations that we end up with these outcomes that reveal just how much we've lost our minds in our clumsy attempts to protect children and impress disinterested voters. Politicians in Florida wrote these laws that would "protect the children" by defining "producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child" as child pornography. Now their law has just backfired and labeled these children forever as sex offenders. Congratulations, morons. If I made a goof like that I'd lose my job. I wonder what it takes to get fired in politics.
I could have a billion rows in a MySQL database running on a server in my mother's basement by the end of next week.
Me and some buds of mine are setting up a centralized information infrastructure for use by the new technological dictatorships that are popping up around the world, and we're going to use LAMP for the whole thing, in a little server farm that keeps my mother's house nice and toasty in the winter. As fascism, technology, and oppression spread, lots of governments are drowning in all the information they are collecting from their population via videocameras, fingerprint readers, financial databases, etc. and they're realizing their own IT infrastructure isn't stable enough to use for effective political oppression- they have all this data, but they need to mine that data, to find people committing thought crimes. That's where we bring in our own value proposition.
Plus we tailor our strategies to handle special customer situations. For example, one of our customers has implemented a one-child-per-couple policy, and this makes several optimizations possible.
A person should be considered able (or unable) to decide upon their consent to sex regardless of the age or gender of the other person. If a 17-year-old can choose to consent (or choose not to consent) to sex with another 17-year-old, why can't they form the same consent w.r.t. a 40-year-old?
What this logic fails to appreciate is the fact that a relationship between two 17-year-olds is nowhere near as fucked up as a relationship between a 17-year-old and a 40-year-old.
If the 40-year-old is holding actual authority over their head (being a parent, guardian, teacher, law enforcement officer, etc.), that's another matter entirely.
He doesn't need to have "actual authority". He approaches the relationship from a grossly distorted position of power just by virtue of being 40 when the other person is 17.
A minority opinion argued that the laws were intended to protect children from exploitative adults, not from other children.
That's fine in a world where we don't have underage rapists and killers. But that's not our world sadly.
You mean kids under 18 are free to rape and murder anybody they choose unless we charge them with rape for having consensual sex with one another? There's no way to distinguish those two situations from each other by statute?
How do you figure, Senator?
18 years is too old to be prosecuted as a child molester if your "victim" is also 18. You can molest a 14 year old, but another 17-19 year old? I don't think so! Someone who's your age isn't approaching you from the position of power or authority that can be abused by an adult much older than you. Two kids playing doctor don't deserve to be charged as if each was ten years older than the other. This kind of molester is not your age practically by definition. And with this type of abuse, your molester cannot be abused in kind by you, also practically by definition. Child abusers abuse children, not each other.
They need to let you ripen a bit, so you have the kind of relationship to your victim that an actual abuser might have. The law should at least compare your ages, i.e. subtract them, instead of stupidly comparing each kid's age separately to 18 to determine the guilt of the other. Who wrote this law? This is a bug. Are all Florida's laws this poorly written? I'd be fired for writing code that did that. I should go into politics; it seems like a much easier coding job although you have to dress nicer and give a lot of bullshit speeches.
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Conservatives like to insist that the income tax should be replaced entirely with sales taxes, which would make tax time "simpler", as well as discourage trade, not to mention being the type of taxation most conveniently avoidable by the wealthiest taxpayers. (Worst of all in this regard is the inheritance tax, or the "death tax", hated by the wealthy, but marketed as something that will affect most of us.)
Both the sales tax, and income tax collected from sites like Ebay, are taxes that will primarily fall on the lower and middle classes, as opposed to the upper classes. Rich people do not sell stuff on Ebay. A typical "successful" Ebay seller is typically bragging about $10K per year. Lots of Ebay sellers are just trying to clean out their garage.
The IRS does not have infinite resources available to it for enforcement, and has to carefully allocate what resources it has to different types of cases. Contempt for various segments of society has really been showing up in these enforcement allocations recently, and not just in this executive agency but others as well. Just look at the recent prosecutor firings in the DOJ.
In fact there is no electricity going to the cameras and those in the know often climb up and bash them open to release the candy hidden inside for all the gleeful British children on the ground below.
That stuff they make gummy bears out of is great for making fake fingerprints using someone's latent print, some crazy glue, a digital camera, Photoshop, a transparency sheet, a photo-sensitive PCB, and gummy bear gelatin. You can destroy everything but the gelatin, break into a facility that uses a fingerprint reader for security, and then eat the last bit of evidence.
A law impresses voters, and unfortunately some people are only in a position to introduce laws, and cannot issue executive orders to state agencies. But a law is a horrible approach here, and there are much better ones. There is no reason Illinois couldn't simply handle this kind of thing with a directive to the state DoE- or whoever in Illinois handles this stuff- that libraries be provided with filters they can use as they see fit. If they're really itching to pass a statute, they can pass one forcing the state to allocate a certain amount of additional funds every year for libraries to use for this sort of thing. A simple filter under the control of individual librarians or library workers will do fine and has the least potential of backfiring. These people are both a) in a position to know which sites need blocking and b) also in a position to provisionally whitelist any site for anyone who asks- maybe someone really is doing a term paper on white chicks who like to screw black guys. That way, myspace mostly gets blocked, without anyone actually saying "myspace", or preventing use of myspace from public libraries, simply by virtue of the fact that myspace annoys librarians, and most library patrons won't bother if they find a site blocked and have to ask that it be unblocked.
If you're a government that wants to get myspace out of your public libraries, you don't ban it with a law. You have to be more subtle than that, or else you're fascist, you have no class. Fascists make people feel like they're being pushed around by a government. A smart government that's good at policy can sort of just set things up so that myspace slides out of their libraries without anyone being explicit or forceful about it. This is done by smart executive action. Implementing solutions to problems without resorting to fascism is the purview of the executive.
YES. We hopefully live in a society where the ONLY limiting factor keeping you from pushing your political opinions is the leverage you accumulate by any means (not just by means that are "approved", like a position as a CNN anchor). There is no expectation that you should just remain silent even if you do find yourself with an audience- presumably so that the society's institutions may continue to dominate political discourse and control what everyone sees hears and thinks, like some other countries I could think of.
If you let individuals have a louder voice in your culture, you're going to hear from individual idiots like Michael Crichton. But let's not throw the baby away with Crichton's bathwater. I get really angry when I hear people whining about "Hollywood celebrities" spouting off their opinions. This is a country with freedom of speech, so they can't arrest you (unless duh your speech is part of some other crime like fraud, perjury, etc.). But not being arrested is no guarantee that anyone will listen to you. In reality, all the opinions most people get firsthand from TV/cable/radio/print, and secondhand from all the idiots at work and on the Internet who parrot stuff they hear word for word, are controlled by six corporations who determine the nature of political discourse in this country: which stories will be covered (or invented out of whole cloth) by its newspapers, cable outlets, and radio stations, and which stories will not be heard at all.
Now once in a while you hear an unauthorized "extraneous" individual opinion being expressed in the mainstream media by some random individual. Blogs let anyone say anything to a self-selected Internet audience. But only very rarely does a random, non-corporate, indivual opinion escape from the lips of anyone in or being covered by the mainstream media, and typically that person will be in the entertainment industry. When you have become like me a world famous rock star or porn star or Hollywood personality, you realize that you have a ready-made audience out there that pretty much stalks you from their houses, reading up on you in the entertainment press and salivating over paparazzi photos of you and fawning over your every word. You have a gaggle of idiots ready to waste their time listening to anything you have to say. So it's only natural, when you find yourself on a soap box like that, that if you notice some horrible news story that isn't being covered, you'll think "OMG why is this not all over the news" and start making noise about it yourself. (Usually it's not all over the news because it's some godawful war with massive human suffering, no natural resources, or a villian already allied with the United States.) If it IS all over the news, you wouldn't bother talking about it.
Unauthorized opinions are dealt with using an ugly meme invented for the purpose, that has been surprisingly effective in a country that brags about freedom of speech: this whole idea that you should just "shut up and sing". Even if people will listen to you, you should keep your mouth shut anyway. You got famous for singing, or acting, not for knowing what you're talking about, and you should only talk about singing and acting and stuff like that. On other matters only corporate opinions can be trusted.
Basically there is a germ of truth to these complaints: People should not be giving extra weight to the opinions of Hollywood celebrities. But they do. From there it gets ugly: the opinions are simply not valid because they are opinions of Hollywood celebrities. IOW, opinions essentially
1048576 neurons is enough for anybody.
After that whole flap happened, the only people I've ever heard use the word "niggardly" have been people tickled pink by how it sounds when they say it over and over again, and the fact that they can say it without getting into trouble.
I like Ron Paul although I usually don't agree with him; but he has written some good stuff.
Anyway it's like the thought process goes, you'd have to be stupid to let sex / skin color / etc. affect your treatment of someone. It makes no sense. Everybody should know that. "I have no problems with black people, so why should anyone else?" So these shouldn't be problems, and maybe if we stop talking about them as if they continue to be problems, they'll go away. This is vaguely supported by an underlying belief that racism, sexism, etc. continue to persist as issues not because of actual racism or sexism- those problems have been "mostly fixed" now- but because of people who can't let go and just have to stick it to everybody for the country's past mistakes. They keep making these into big issues and that's why they never go away. A corollary meme- they're into their own victimhood- often takes off from there.
This belief system works fine until you find yourself holding the muddy end of the stick on one of these things. Usually people don't acquire race or sex, but people do acquire injuries, illnesses, disabilities, or disorders. If it happens to you, when it does, that's when it dawns on you that even though it makes no sense for people to be treating you idiotically just because of a disorder or whatever, they still do, because even if society has gotten more enlightened over the centuries, most people are still in fact idiots.
Norway's system is different. It just looks like something that will get dumped once people start wondering why they need this thing that makes the Internet work different in Norway. It may cause persistent technical problems and develop a reputation as a national embarrassment. I can just imagine the stuff Norwegians are quickly going to come up with to get around this thing. (And under fear of what? Norwegian IT?) If anything, this should be a huge boon to anyone hacking the great firewall of China because you can probably mess around with it at much less personal risk to yourself than if you're caught hacking the great firewall for real. And I'm assuming the Norwegians will be openly free to collaborate on research into technological countermeasures that could in theory be used to breach any such stupid wall, which will be of interest to Chinese people. The Chinese should thank the idiot Norwegians for setting one of these up in the free world where we can all see it get knocked over.
Eh? It just looks like a laundry list of things often said by assholes.
In my opinion, this "Hillary is a woman" and "Obama is black" chatter is insulting to women and blacks.
Well, there isn't much else to talk about until we see what sort of policies they end up generating in office. It's only a few months past the last election anyway; this is news for political junkies at this point, so the topic of "electability" comes up often right now and one's opinion on a black or female candidate's electability is based on how racist and sexist you perceive everyone else to be. So these conversations aren't "insulting to women and blacks". They're vitally important for us to have. What we're really talking about is the attitudes we perceive our culture as having with regard to blacks and women, especially as politicians. People will be very revealing of their own racist attitudes if they think they're talking about how racist everyone else is. And it's interesting to see who is saying they wouldn't have a problem with a black candidate. Way more people than I would have thought. Interesting, not insulting.
Plus there's not much else to say about either of these candidates at this point, other than Hillary is still defending her pro-war vote and arguing that the war was a good idea overall. I wouldn't trust Hillary to do anything to prevent the president from again fraudulently starting another war.
Um, that may be true about EU law but the story/article talks about "falsely representing oneself as a customer". Maybe the law only applies to corporations but a "customer" can be a corporation.
Then I picked a bad example. A better one would be:
"If your immune system is not normal due to advanced HIV disease, be sure your doctor knows this to avoid a potentially fatal interaction with this pill we're selling."
I agree with the rest of what you said but this statement is completely false. Or at least, there is no distinction to make between individuals and corporations as far as political and commercial speech are concerned. One axis is independent of the other. Microsoft has a right to express a political view, even on technological matters, and individuals have a right to engage in commercial speech and sell things. The restrictions on speech are determined by the nature of the speech itself and not by who is making it.
Free speech isn't free if it has "ifs, ands, or buts".
No it isn't. This, however, is commercial speech, fraudulently pretending to be free speech, as part of a ruse to impress people. Commercial speech identifiable as such is known to suffer the trustworthiness problems typical of commercial speech. If a corporation sends its marketing department to blogspot and creates 100 blogs talking about how cool its products are, that's fraud. The company is misrepresenting itself and concealing a conflict of interest. I mean, duh. Even in the crazy United States we have laws saying you can't make ads disguised to look like newspaper articles unless you print ADVERTISEMENT at the bottom so everyone knows you're probably full of it. Free speech is not going to last very long if we use it to excuse cheap commercial hijinks.
I've written here before about epileptic seizures I have that start somewhere in the right occipital lobe possibly near V1, based on the nature of the aura and a recent video EEG last month. These things started for no reason when I was a teenager and now involve these interesting post-ictal fugue states where only chunks of my brain seem to be working but I'm still able to run around and get in trouble. I've developed a talent over the years for coping with brain trauma and sort of bullshitting my way through it.
Usually I'm not forming long term memories during fugue states, but when I do, I remember some pretty interesting stuff. One thing that is typically impaired is object recognition, since this mostly seems to be handled by the right occipital lobe. I can see things but can't immediately recognize what they are, unless I use these left-brain techniques. The left occipital lobe can recognize objects too, but the approach it takes is different and more of a pain in the ass to have to rely on. It's more of a thunky symbolic recognition, as opposed to an ability to examine subtle forms, shapes, and colors. I have to basically establish a set of criteria that define what I'm looking for and then examine things in the visual field to see if they match those criteria. I'll look for a bed by trying to find things that appear flat and soft; I'll look for a door by looking for things with attributes of a doorknob such as being round and turnable; I'll find water to drink by looking closely at wet things. My wife says I make some interesting mistakes, like once confusing her desk chair for a toilet (forgetting for a moment that part of a toilet has to be wet, but at that point memory formation and retrieval is disrupted to the point where I could imagine forgetting that it's not enough to just be able to be sat on, toilets have to have water in them too). I have trouble recognizing faces, and she says I'm sometimes obviously pretending to recognize her. Recognizing a face using cold logic can be tricky even when you're not impaired. Recognizing familiar scenes and places becomes difficult. I drove home in a fugue state once, back in my twenties, and while I didn't crash into anybody or have any sort of accident, I did get lost on the way home from work. I ended up driving miles past where I lived. Even as a pedestrian, getting lost in familiar areas is still a problem.
People have been trying to come up with image processing algorithms that mimic cortical signal analysis for decades. I remember reading papers ten years ago like this. It's amazing to see they're still mistaking road signs for pedestrians. I don't think even I could make an error like that. The state of the art was totally miserable back then, too. Neuroscience has got to be one of the sciences most poorly understood by humans.
I'm a white guy (entitled to speak for all of them!) and I would vote for Obama over Hillary any time.
Hillary's dynastic candidacy bothers me for the same reason that the dynastic candidacy of George W Bush did, when I first heard about him in 1999 or 98 or whenever it was. I immediately assumed that I was only hearing about this guy, not because of any competence he had, but because of who his Daddy was. And guess what.
This is black-and-white thinking. You don't just have to base everything on one age or the other. Both their ages are important if she is younger than 18. His age is obviously not an issue if she is older than 18. But if she's younger than 18 than it should matter how much older than her he is. If the age difference is close to zero then we'd be better off with the law not getting involved.
I mean this is just common sense. Why does the law always have to be an ass? Why can't legislation be written in such a way that won't so predictably end in disaster raining down on the heads of ordinary teenage romantics trading naughty pictures of themselves? We've gotten so attached to applying blanket cold logic and stupid Boolean algebra to real world situations that we end up with these outcomes that reveal just how much we've lost our minds in our clumsy attempts to protect children and impress disinterested voters. Politicians in Florida wrote these laws that would "protect the children" by defining "producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child" as child pornography. Now their law has just backfired and labeled these children forever as sex offenders. Congratulations, morons. If I made a goof like that I'd lose my job. I wonder what it takes to get fired in politics.
I could have a billion rows in a MySQL database running on a server in my mother's basement by the end of next week.
Me and some buds of mine are setting up a centralized information infrastructure for use by the new technological dictatorships that are popping up around the world, and we're going to use LAMP for the whole thing, in a little server farm that keeps my mother's house nice and toasty in the winter. As fascism, technology, and oppression spread, lots of governments are drowning in all the information they are collecting from their population via videocameras, fingerprint readers, financial databases, etc. and they're realizing their own IT infrastructure isn't stable enough to use for effective political oppression- they have all this data, but they need to mine that data, to find people committing thought crimes. That's where we bring in our own value proposition.
Plus we tailor our strategies to handle special customer situations. For example, one of our customers has implemented a one-child-per-couple policy, and this makes several optimizations possible.
How do you figure, Senator?
18 years is too old to be prosecuted as a child molester if your "victim" is also 18. You can molest a 14 year old, but another 17-19 year old? I don't think so! Someone who's your age isn't approaching you from the position of power or authority that can be abused by an adult much older than you. Two kids playing doctor don't deserve to be charged as if each was ten years older than the other. This kind of molester is not your age practically by definition. And with this type of abuse, your molester cannot be abused in kind by you, also practically by definition. Child abusers abuse children, not each other.
They need to let you ripen a bit, so you have the kind of relationship to your victim that an actual abuser might have. The law should at least compare your ages, i.e. subtract them, instead of stupidly comparing each kid's age separately to 18 to determine the guilt of the other. Who wrote this law? This is a bug. Are all Florida's laws this poorly written? I'd be fired for writing code that did that. I should go into politics; it seems like a much easier coding job although you have to dress nicer and give a lot of bullshit speeches.