I don't know about this particular law, but laws regarding promotional material for elections (or defamatory material) are generally there to help prevent corruption. Same applies to campaign finance, which is essentially the same thing. If you're an American in the last few years after Citizens United, you've seen how quickly things can go south when the gloves are completely removed.
It's nice to have an absolute ideal to quote and strive for, but the absolute usually fails in the real world.
5 milligrams of mercury in each bulb which is enough to poison 6,000 gallons of water.
Where on earth are you getting your numbers? And what do you mean by poison? The EPA allows two parts per billion for mercury in water. So five milligrams would amount to 2,500 litres, or 660 gallons. That isn't poisoning levels though, that's for chronic exposure. You could drink five milligrams of mercury, straight up, with no noticeable effects (not that you should do this).
If you broke a CFL, then stuck your nose in the shards to make sure none of the gas got away, then licked the glass to make sure that you got every possible trace of mercury, you would still be fine. I don't understand where these rumors have been coming from, but there's nothing dangerous about CFLs.
but the Leftist firebombing campaign against southern baptist churches just hasn't panned out...
This isn't really addressing the point you were making, but what were you talking about here? I searched and this is the only baptist church bombing that I could find:
That isn't leftist though. There were also a few mentions of planned parenthood bombings by baptists and some mosque bombings, but no other bombings of baptist churches.
The endless arguments on Slashdot seem to go like this: "Muslims are violent because Islam is bad."
"It's no worse than other religions, look at Christianity."
"But Christians don't get all weird about iconography, no rioting over cartoons."
"Christians get weird about other things, that's just one idiosyncratic example."
Look, the problem isn't with Islam or any other single belief system. Or any other single belief for that matter, this is about people in power maintaining their power by pushing a topic with broad public support. Usually that support comes from ignorance or gullibility. Look at all the things justified "because terrorists" or "child pornography" or "pedophile rapist home invaders, who are lurking around every corner." You don't solve this problem by ranting about Islam, you solve this problem by, somehow, convincing people that they need to be less gullible. This is why you so often hear people talking about education as a long term solution to corruption and other ills, and why dismantling public education is often such a high priority among the corrupt. Iran isn't keeping women out of schools out of misogyny, they're doing it to keep people tractable.
The point is: enough with the Islam/Christian bashing. Or religion in general. It's a red herring, there to distract you from the real problem.
apparently it doesn't work out so well if you use a lot of them. I'm not sure there's a good solution for this, might just have to wait for advances in materials. Carbon fiber vacuum balloons could work maybe... Maybe. They'd have to be pretty big though.
Sure their implementation is new and Apple deserves some slack for that, but that's not the criticism here. The criticism is that they've removed the solid Google maps and replaced it with this subpar one. Apple could have easily just added their own maps to the app store and let people use it optionally until their implementation was ready for prime time. Instead they went the petty route.
No, the argument against spam is that (in the absence of filtering) it overwhelms users' inboxes with unsolicited and unwanted messages and makes it exceedingly difficult for email / Usenet / SMS / etc. to be useful.
That's not right, that isn't why people are so dead-set against spam. Consider different methods of distributing targeted advertising, they can be lumped into two groups: spam, fax ads, and telemarketing calls to your cell phone in the one group, junk mail and telemarketing to a landline in the other group. The first group is banned or restricted by law, the second group is unrestricted (at least prior to the Do Not Call Registry). All of them waste a person's time, the difference between them is that the first group also wastes a person's money while the cost of the second group is covered by the advertiser.
Non-targeted advertising, ads published in a newspaper for example (I'm not sure if I'm using the phrase "targeted advertising" in a technically correct way, but it makes sense to me) are another thing altogether. Claiming that the New Yorker was spamming your mother when she chose to visit their site is unfair - she solicited that website from their servers. Yes, apparently the website was poorly constructed but that really doesn't really change anything.
Your criticism about ads wasting the users' computing resources is more on-target, that is certainly true, but again: you don't see those ads, and your resources are not wasted, if you don't go to that website. It's your choice.
NoScript is mandatory, to stop bad behavior, I also use Ghostery and FlashBlock. AdBlockPlus is detrimental though. I suppose if you're the sort of person who only goes to websites without advertising then you could justify the use of AdBlockPlus, since those sites pay for themselves by other means, but of course if those were the only sites that you were going to then you wouldn't need it...
The argument against spam goes like this: person A maintains an email server that person B uses to send spam. Person A shoulders the cost while person B receives the benefits, this is widely acknowledged as a bad thing. Visiting an ad supported website goes like this: person A maintains a web server that person B uses to retrieve content. Person A shoulders the cost but offsets this with advertising money, person B receives the (non-monetary) benefits. I'm hope I'm not being too subtle here.
The argument that the article is making is that money from advertising would not exist without tracking and this is false, advertising and privacy are not mutually exclusive. Advertising is very important to the web as it exists right now however, this includes sites like Slashdot. What I'm saying is, and I'm trying to put it politely, people as a whole should be aspiring to a higher level of ethics than douchebag spammers.
Your link, which you use to demonstrate the existence of physical dependance, is to the American Psychiatric Association. I don't think anyone has ever questioned that cannabis is psychologically addictive, you can be psychologically addicted to literally any activity with, more or less, the withdrawal symptoms that you've given - I get irritable when someone tells me to stop biting my nails, for example.
Then again, there's no telling how many are going to just blindly mod this as a troll post.
Whenever I see something like this, or someone says "I have karma to burn," or something related, I *always* mod down if I have the points. I don't, so I'm going to respond instead:
You are replying to something that the GP did not say. Tarek Mehanna spoke briefly about why Islam was important to him, and then at length about various horrors inflicted upon various Muslims around the world, often with US support. He also spoke about the importance of resisting this sort of oppression.
Unless your claim is that Muslims deserve to have "children in hospital wards with shrapnel from American missiles sticking out of their foreheads" because Ali Sina says it's a violent religion, then your argument is a non sequiter.
If you disliked what the GP said, you could have pointed out that Mehanna perhaps over simplified some of the atrocities, and has possibly mistaken attacks on specific Muslims or predominantly Muslim countries as attacks on Islam as a whole. Instead of addressing Mehanna's argument however, you've decided to support him in a weird sort of way by attacking Islam as a whole.
Should I? (Would a letter from a British person be ignored?) If so, where to?
It's likely that all letters will be ignored, but it never hurts. If enough people write to make them believe it will cost tourism dollars it might make a difference, try the ambassador. You could also try your own government - part of the reason the US gets away with it is because other governments are going along with the whole theater experience, if the British government were to issue a travel warning against going to the United States it would get noticed at least. There have been other countries who have already done this, but none with the same standing to the US that Britain has.
Not only that, it makes for a rather strange argument to say that future advances in technology increase the current population capacity. Let's suppose that what he's saying is true, that in 1950, for example, some people did an analysis and found that the world could sustain about two billion people given 1950s technology, and four billion in 1980 and six billion in 2000. How does that fact alone make any of them wrong? Some people spend money like that, constantly overspending their income with the expectation that more will somehow fall into their laps in the future. We generally make fun of those people, call them irresponsible. I don't see how this is any different.
Yes, I'd really like the fact that this had nothing to do with Anonymous to be in the headline. Random attacks like this, credited to Anonymous, really undermine what they're doing when they target someone over a real issue - Wikileaks, Scientology, etc.
I have certainly not said that society would be better off without minimum wages, that was the point. Your implication that removing the minimum wage would eliminate unemployment is baseless.
It only raises the cost of living if you ride around in cabs all the time. You're talking about what's basically a luxury service, New York does have a rather extensive public transportation system. Even though they keep raising the rates, it's still less than $2.50 to get almost anywhere in the city on the subway.
The same argument has been made about minimum wage: unintended consequences, raises costs for everyone, etc. Most economists agree that we'd be wealthier, on average, if the minimum wage were eliminated. The question is, is an increase in average wealth really what we're looking for? Neither you nor I, with our fancy computers and internet connections, would likely suffer if the minimum wage were removed. We would probably be slightly wealthier as a result, as would the majority of people. There are a small number however, quite poor right now, who would be in a very bad situation indeed if they could no longer make even minimum wage. I think it's worthwhile for the majority to be slightly inconvenienced if it means that the small minority aren't rendered destitute.
I'd say it's more of a cartel. If it was just licensing than anyone could go to city hall fill out a form and become a taxi driver. But they keep a cap on how many taxis there are. Then they have price controls on the fares to prevent competition.
You've got it backwards - the price controls are there to keep fares from rising too high, they prevent gouging. That's a danger whenever you limit competition by restricting who can perform a service. It's like how every country in the world (except the US) which allows drug companies to patent drugs also sets limits on how much the companies can charge for those drugs. It's there to prevent abuse of their monopoly.
If they removed the state granted monopoly on taxis, then they could also remove the price controls and the fare price would likely fall. The reason they don't do this is probably mostly because of the company lobbyists, but there's some good reason to believe that this scenario wouldn't work out as well as you'd hope. Just a few years ago pedicabs (bicycle taxis) were completely unregulated in New York. There were tons of them and it was rather difficult to make a living that way, particularly if you weren't a very good salesman: the largest pedicab company in the city was (still is) run by a turkish man who would bring in people from turkey on a three month visa with the promise that they would be able to pay their way, and pay their way back home, as pedicab drivers. Since their English wasn't very good in general they had a lot of trouble getting rides, they would fall deeper and deeper into debt since there was no other way (legal way) for them to make money here and no way to get back home, etc. Just a bad scenario.
Anyway, the point is that they limit the number of cabs in order to keep rates high enough that drivers can make a living wage, and they restrict what the cabs can charge in order to keep the drivers from gouging people. It's not ideal, but a simple solution based on ideals rather than facts is not going to improve the situation.
I didn't follow this from the summary: who doesn't think that HIV causes AIDS? And why would they think that? Do they not think that the Flu virus causes the Flu, or is it only HIV that they're singling out?
For example this week another study came out that organic is not healthier than conventional, yet the anti-free market people reject that science as bogus.
There's a study that says that people who are anti-free market reject the idea that organic is not healthier than conventional? I'm calling shenanigans, I think you made that up. That sounds like the sort of non-scientific wishful thinking that a free-market engineer would concoct.
Nonsense, we don't live in a vacuum. If this works, law enforcement here will say "Hey look at this, it worked in the Netherlands. We should try it."
You were perhaps thinking of the lawyer phrase "legal precedent," which is a separate issue and also not entirely true in practice: in some cases, particularly unusual cases or cases that have some element of internationality, lawyers and judges will sometimes look to how a similar case was prosecuted in another country.
At least they did promise. When law enforcement here does the same thing and cites this case as precedent they'll neglect to consider that little condition.
I can't stop laughing at the bit about erupting in applause. Take some mundane task, add "in space" and it becomes noteworthy enough to get articles written about it.
Maybe some day we'll have a movie about replacing a power box. No, _the_ power box. Some day.
Diablo II is twelve years old, not decades, and did not require activation. Are you talking about the key needed to log in to Battle.net? I don't think there has ever been an expectation that by purchasing a copy of Diablo II you also gained ownership of Blizzard's online service. You're really stretching the meaning of a plausible interpretation here.
A better example might have been the WON authentication for Half-Life, where you needed to authenticate with valve in order to log into a third party's server. Or you could have brought up bnetd. All this online stuff, authenticating for multiplayer, is really a separate thing though - not unimportant, but not the issue at hand. We're talking about activation for a single player game.
Also, even if Diablo II was decades old and did require activation why would that have any relevance? By which I mean, what was the point that you were trying to make?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about this particular law, but laws regarding promotional material for elections (or defamatory material) are generally there to help prevent corruption. Same applies to campaign finance, which is essentially the same thing. If you're an American in the last few years after Citizens United, you've seen how quickly things can go south when the gloves are completely removed.
It's nice to have an absolute ideal to quote and strive for, but the absolute usually fails in the real world.
5 milligrams of mercury in each bulb which is enough to poison 6,000 gallons of water.
Where on earth are you getting your numbers? And what do you mean by poison? The EPA allows two parts per billion for mercury in water. So five milligrams would amount to 2,500 litres, or 660 gallons. That isn't poisoning levels though, that's for chronic exposure. You could drink five milligrams of mercury, straight up, with no noticeable effects (not that you should do this).
If you broke a CFL, then stuck your nose in the shards to make sure none of the gas got away, then licked the glass to make sure that you got every possible trace of mercury, you would still be fine. I don't understand where these rumors have been coming from, but there's nothing dangerous about CFLs.
but the Leftist firebombing campaign against southern baptist churches just hasn't panned out...
This isn't really addressing the point you were making, but what were you talking about here? I searched and this is the only baptist church bombing that I could find:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_Street_Baptist_Church_bombing
That isn't leftist though. There were also a few mentions of planned parenthood bombings by baptists and some mosque bombings, but no other bombings of baptist churches.
The endless arguments on Slashdot seem to go like this: "Muslims are violent because Islam is bad."
"It's no worse than other religions, look at Christianity."
"But Christians don't get all weird about iconography, no rioting over cartoons."
"Christians get weird about other things, that's just one idiosyncratic example."
Look, the problem isn't with Islam or any other single belief system. Or any other single belief for that matter, this is about people in power maintaining their power by pushing a topic with broad public support. Usually that support comes from ignorance or gullibility. Look at all the things justified "because terrorists" or "child pornography" or "pedophile rapist home invaders, who are lurking around every corner." You don't solve this problem by ranting about Islam, you solve this problem by, somehow, convincing people that they need to be less gullible. This is why you so often hear people talking about education as a long term solution to corruption and other ills, and why dismantling public education is often such a high priority among the corrupt. Iran isn't keeping women out of schools out of misogyny, they're doing it to keep people tractable.
The point is: enough with the Islam/Christian bashing. Or religion in general. It's a red herring, there to distract you from the real problem.
For a while I was thinking that could actually work - if something happened you'd get a little flare up, nothing too dangerous. But...
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/04/exploding-hydrogen-balloons-at-armenian-political-rally-injure-many/
apparently it doesn't work out so well if you use a lot of them. I'm not sure there's a good solution for this, might just have to wait for advances in materials. Carbon fiber vacuum balloons could work maybe... Maybe. They'd have to be pretty big though.
Sure their implementation is new and Apple deserves some slack for that, but that's not the criticism here. The criticism is that they've removed the solid Google maps and replaced it with this subpar one. Apple could have easily just added their own maps to the app store and let people use it optionally until their implementation was ready for prime time. Instead they went the petty route.
Filibuster only applies in the senate, and it's a 3/5 majority to stop a filibuster. Hasn't been 2/3 since 1975.
No, the argument against spam is that (in the absence of filtering) it overwhelms users' inboxes with unsolicited and unwanted messages and makes it exceedingly difficult for email / Usenet / SMS / etc. to be useful.
That's not right, that isn't why people are so dead-set against spam. Consider different methods of distributing targeted advertising, they can be lumped into two groups: spam, fax ads, and telemarketing calls to your cell phone in the one group, junk mail and telemarketing to a landline in the other group. The first group is banned or restricted by law, the second group is unrestricted (at least prior to the Do Not Call Registry). All of them waste a person's time, the difference between them is that the first group also wastes a person's money while the cost of the second group is covered by the advertiser.
Non-targeted advertising, ads published in a newspaper for example (I'm not sure if I'm using the phrase "targeted advertising" in a technically correct way, but it makes sense to me) are another thing altogether. Claiming that the New Yorker was spamming your mother when she chose to visit their site is unfair - she solicited that website from their servers. Yes, apparently the website was poorly constructed but that really doesn't really change anything.
Your criticism about ads wasting the users' computing resources is more on-target, that is certainly true, but again: you don't see those ads, and your resources are not wasted, if you don't go to that website. It's your choice.
NoScript is mandatory, to stop bad behavior, I also use Ghostery and FlashBlock. AdBlockPlus is detrimental though. I suppose if you're the sort of person who only goes to websites without advertising then you could justify the use of AdBlockPlus, since those sites pay for themselves by other means, but of course if those were the only sites that you were going to then you wouldn't need it...
The argument against spam goes like this: person A maintains an email server that person B uses to send spam. Person A shoulders the cost while person B receives the benefits, this is widely acknowledged as a bad thing. Visiting an ad supported website goes like this: person A maintains a web server that person B uses to retrieve content. Person A shoulders the cost but offsets this with advertising money, person B receives the (non-monetary) benefits. I'm hope I'm not being too subtle here.
The argument that the article is making is that money from advertising would not exist without tracking and this is false, advertising and privacy are not mutually exclusive. Advertising is very important to the web as it exists right now however, this includes sites like Slashdot. What I'm saying is, and I'm trying to put it politely, people as a whole should be aspiring to a higher level of ethics than douchebag spammers.
Your link, which you use to demonstrate the existence of physical dependance, is to the American Psychiatric Association. I don't think anyone has ever questioned that cannabis is psychologically addictive, you can be psychologically addicted to literally any activity with, more or less, the withdrawal symptoms that you've given - I get irritable when someone tells me to stop biting my nails, for example.
Then again, there's no telling how many are going to just blindly mod this as a troll post.
Whenever I see something like this, or someone says "I have karma to burn," or something related, I *always* mod down if I have the points. I don't, so I'm going to respond instead:
You are replying to something that the GP did not say. Tarek Mehanna spoke briefly about why Islam was important to him, and then at length about various horrors inflicted upon various Muslims around the world, often with US support. He also spoke about the importance of resisting this sort of oppression.
Unless your claim is that Muslims deserve to have "children in hospital wards with shrapnel from American missiles sticking out of their foreheads" because Ali Sina says it's a violent religion, then your argument is a non sequiter.
If you disliked what the GP said, you could have pointed out that Mehanna perhaps over simplified some of the atrocities, and has possibly mistaken attacks on specific Muslims or predominantly Muslim countries as attacks on Islam as a whole. Instead of addressing Mehanna's argument however, you've decided to support him in a weird sort of way by attacking Islam as a whole.
Thank you, people always get this wrong.
Should I? (Would a letter from a British person be ignored?) If so, where to?
It's likely that all letters will be ignored, but it never hurts. If enough people write to make them believe it will cost tourism dollars it might make a difference, try the ambassador. You could also try your own government - part of the reason the US gets away with it is because other governments are going along with the whole theater experience, if the British government were to issue a travel warning against going to the United States it would get noticed at least. There have been other countries who have already done this, but none with the same standing to the US that Britain has.
Not only that, it makes for a rather strange argument to say that future advances in technology increase the current population capacity. Let's suppose that what he's saying is true, that in 1950, for example, some people did an analysis and found that the world could sustain about two billion people given 1950s technology, and four billion in 1980 and six billion in 2000. How does that fact alone make any of them wrong? Some people spend money like that, constantly overspending their income with the expectation that more will somehow fall into their laps in the future. We generally make fun of those people, call them irresponsible. I don't see how this is any different.
Yes, I'd really like the fact that this had nothing to do with Anonymous to be in the headline. Random attacks like this, credited to Anonymous, really undermine what they're doing when they target someone over a real issue - Wikileaks, Scientology, etc.
I have certainly not said that society would be better off without minimum wages, that was the point. Your implication that removing the minimum wage would eliminate unemployment is baseless.
It only raises the cost of living if you ride around in cabs all the time. You're talking about what's basically a luxury service, New York does have a rather extensive public transportation system. Even though they keep raising the rates, it's still less than $2.50 to get almost anywhere in the city on the subway.
The same argument has been made about minimum wage: unintended consequences, raises costs for everyone, etc. Most economists agree that we'd be wealthier, on average, if the minimum wage were eliminated. The question is, is an increase in average wealth really what we're looking for? Neither you nor I, with our fancy computers and internet connections, would likely suffer if the minimum wage were removed. We would probably be slightly wealthier as a result, as would the majority of people. There are a small number however, quite poor right now, who would be in a very bad situation indeed if they could no longer make even minimum wage. I think it's worthwhile for the majority to be slightly inconvenienced if it means that the small minority aren't rendered destitute.
I'd say it's more of a cartel. If it was just licensing than anyone could go to city hall fill out a form and become a taxi driver. But they keep a cap on how many taxis there are. Then they have price controls on the fares to prevent competition.
You've got it backwards - the price controls are there to keep fares from rising too high, they prevent gouging. That's a danger whenever you limit competition by restricting who can perform a service. It's like how every country in the world (except the US) which allows drug companies to patent drugs also sets limits on how much the companies can charge for those drugs. It's there to prevent abuse of their monopoly.
If they removed the state granted monopoly on taxis, then they could also remove the price controls and the fare price would likely fall. The reason they don't do this is probably mostly because of the company lobbyists, but there's some good reason to believe that this scenario wouldn't work out as well as you'd hope. Just a few years ago pedicabs (bicycle taxis) were completely unregulated in New York. There were tons of them and it was rather difficult to make a living that way, particularly if you weren't a very good salesman: the largest pedicab company in the city was (still is) run by a turkish man who would bring in people from turkey on a three month visa with the promise that they would be able to pay their way, and pay their way back home, as pedicab drivers. Since their English wasn't very good in general they had a lot of trouble getting rides, they would fall deeper and deeper into debt since there was no other way (legal way) for them to make money here and no way to get back home, etc. Just a bad scenario.
Anyway, the point is that they limit the number of cabs in order to keep rates high enough that drivers can make a living wage, and they restrict what the cabs can charge in order to keep the drivers from gouging people. It's not ideal, but a simple solution based on ideals rather than facts is not going to improve the situation.
It would be good enough if Wikipedia was run by humans who were honest. Androids would be pretty cool too though.
I didn't follow this from the summary: who doesn't think that HIV causes AIDS? And why would they think that? Do they not think that the Flu virus causes the Flu, or is it only HIV that they're singling out?
For example this week another study came out that organic is not healthier than conventional, yet the anti-free market people reject that science as bogus.
There's a study that says that people who are anti-free market reject the idea that organic is not healthier than conventional? I'm calling shenanigans, I think you made that up. That sounds like the sort of non-scientific wishful thinking that a free-market engineer would concoct.
Nonsense, we don't live in a vacuum. If this works, law enforcement here will say "Hey look at this, it worked in the Netherlands. We should try it."
You were perhaps thinking of the lawyer phrase "legal precedent," which is a separate issue and also not entirely true in practice: in some cases, particularly unusual cases or cases that have some element of internationality, lawyers and judges will sometimes look to how a similar case was prosecuted in another country.
At least they did promise. When law enforcement here does the same thing and cites this case as precedent they'll neglect to consider that little condition.
I can't stop laughing at the bit about erupting in applause. Take some mundane task, add "in space" and it becomes noteworthy enough to get articles written about it.
Maybe some day we'll have a movie about replacing a power box. No, _the_ power box. Some day.
Diablo II is twelve years old, not decades, and did not require activation. Are you talking about the key needed to log in to Battle.net? I don't think there has ever been an expectation that by purchasing a copy of Diablo II you also gained ownership of Blizzard's online service. You're really stretching the meaning of a plausible interpretation here.
A better example might have been the WON authentication for Half-Life, where you needed to authenticate with valve in order to log into a third party's server. Or you could have brought up bnetd. All this online stuff, authenticating for multiplayer, is really a separate thing though - not unimportant, but not the issue at hand. We're talking about activation for a single player game.
Also, even if Diablo II was decades old and did require activation why would that have any relevance? By which I mean, what was the point that you were trying to make?