Many of the things you mention have been challenged on 5th amendment grounds, so there is precedent there. Many of them have lost those challenges as well, so there is another precedent. Adding an easement by eminent domain will usually require a payment in compensation for the "taking" (though not always). "Historic area" zoning is not really an easement, although it will put some pretty tough handcuffs on the use of your property.
Whether or not the actual laws allow such action by the federal government is not particularly relevant though - the real question is "what will this supreme court do?" The answer to that is: absolutely nothing. There's no way in the world this court would strike down a "net neutrality" law that was properly constructed on 5th amendment "taking" grounds. Others here have pointed out the likely legal theory for that stance (commerce clause), but the truth is that the court has very little appetite for limiting the authority and scope of the Federal government (a couple of recent minor exceptions to the contrary notwithstanding). A majority of the court believes in deference to the legislative branch for determining the "will of the people", and look to this for guidance on the limits of federal authority.
I've considered the Model S. From the prototype it is truly an amazing vehicle - but $50k after subsidies is a little steep for my budget. Even so, if it lives up to the hype, it would be well worth that price (comparable to a BMW-5 but with much more room inside).
It is the comparison to the (finally real) Volt that is stunning. The Volt plug-in hybrid is not nearly as roomy, or as nice, or as peppy. And it has much worse mileage on an average commute (in my area at least - commutes are fairly long here). But it doesn't cost all that much less. From all outward appearances it is more comparable to a Camry than a BMW 5 series. What a crappy deal that would be - pay a premium of nearly 100% over a comparable car for a little plug-in goodness? Whereas the Model S gives you a car that is priced relatively close to it's gasoline counterpart. (with that big "if they can really build it" caveat)
I managed to wrangle a test drive in the Tesla Roadster, even though I'm not interested in a $140k commuter convertible sports car. It is an absolutely amazing little car. It drives unlike anything I've ever driven before. The acceleration is giggle-inducing and instantaneous - like a Porsche 911 turbo 4 only with absolutely no lag at all. The handling is go-kart tight as well. But the real difference is in how you use the accelerator. The moment you take your foot off the gas you begin a relatively hard deceleration as the regenerative braking kicks in. It takes a minute to get used to using the gas pedal as a "go-faster, go slower" pedal instead of an "Accelerate/coast" pedal. Then there's the actual brakes. Because you've got a motor assist on the braking, you could give yourself whiplash going from full acceleration to full-on brakes. If you ever get the chance to drive one, don't pass it up.
That being said, they'll have to seriously improve their game to live up to the Model S promises. The Roadster isn't quite as finished out and perfect as you'd expect. Compare the interior and options with a Skyline GTR at little more than half the price and you see some glaring omissions in the full high-performance car package. (ok, not fair - the Skyline is kind of in a class by itself for the price, and is well known for the tricked-out dash options) Still, it gave me enough reason to hesitate putting down a $5,000 deposit on the Model S - even though I'm reasonably confident that I could sell the thing for more than I paid for it in a couple of months.
I can't agree with your conclusions at all. If a tax raises the cost of the good (which gas taxes do) then they will impact the price to the seller - either driving sales down (which is one of the intended purposes of such taxes) or by reducing the profit available to the seller (they could have charged the same price themselves and just kept the difference as profit).
Limiting the definition of "tax" to "income tax" really makes no sense whatsoever. Tariffs on trade are taxes - they are one of the most important taxes globally. But they aren't income taxes. For most people in the US, property taxes are a significant portion of their tax burden, but you'd exclude those taxes. "Usage Fees" can also be pretty large, depending on what you are doing. There are lots and lots of taxes that are not "income taxes" and ignoring these as a portion of the tax burden distorts the argument in exactly the manner you are claiming including them does.
There is a separate argument to be made about the structure of the corporate income tax and methods of evading the corporate income tax. And particularly about the inherent incentives to make use of those methods of avoiding the income tax. But that isn't the same thing as claiming that no other taxes count.
(one nitpick with my nitpick - sales taxes are not in fact paid by the seller, they are paid by the buyer and collected by the seller on behalf of the government. While this is a simple fact, the reality of the economic transaction means that the question of which party is paying the tax is moot, other than the free tax collection services being run for the government by the seller. Well, that and the fact that many buyers can claim the local sales taxes as exemptions on their federal income tax returns.)
Rereading Sycraft-fu he stipulates 1-time cost. Anyway, additional factors include geo-separated SAN nodes (plus bandwidth to connect them), number of backups and snapshots kept in rotation - we keep nightly backups for 3 months, plus hourly snapshots, plus monthly backups for 3 years, plus yearly backups forever. All in duplicate kept offsite at multiple locations. All of that backing up adds up.
That said, I can't give you our internal billing rate because we don't cost our services that way. Our actual costs are no where near $30/GB/month, but if that cost was acting as a proxy to cover other services as well, it might be reasonable. Message #33076260 from an AC below mentions a $ figure and brings up maintenance fees from the vendors, which are in the 10's to 100's of thousands. It all adds up - labor, equipment, outside services.... Plus, you have to factor in the lifetime of the capital equipment expenditure - figure 5-6 years before you retire everything and start fresh with another set of everything.
See post from Sycraft-fu above for more details - he backs your $30/gig number.
From your detail "run of the mill file storage" and "digital assets of the company" aren't entirely the same thing. Depending on the number of workers involved and the reliance on the data, even an hour of downtime could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (in my ~400 employee company it is well into that range). Therefore a simple network share is not appropriate. Even a raid 6 file server with a tape backup is not appropriate.
If the data is important, and large numbers of people will be accessing it, and uptime is critical - you are talking high-end SAN with snapshots and offsite backups - and you are talking money. Lots and lots of money. Backing up 500 GB is not a trick. The equipment to be able to back up 50 TB while the company is operating and get it done in a reasonable amount of time is a bit more elaborate. Now you have backup servers with their own drive arrays and tape libraries and dedicated backup networks... the bigger you get, the more complex and more expensive it gets - to a point. Then it starts getting cheaper again once you've got all that kit in place and are just adding storage space. But it never gets as cheap as picking up an external drive at Best Buy.
Sure, if we'd work like this everyone will want to have a 100Gb homedirectory/outlook mailbox/subversion repo whatever. You say go to management and I'll tell you what they'll decide: the teams that make most of the money get it the rest wont. So cut out the middleman and make this common practise by rebilling I say. But then everything should be rebilled (and that's where it goes wrong most of the time: some team rebill and some don't. This effectively means mixing a capitalist and communist society and that don't work....)
This is exactly what happens. If IT resources are "all you can eat" then IT ends up rationing the supply. This works in smaller organizations where IT is heavily involved in the business. As the size of the organization gets larger, having IT deciding priorities between various groups is less desirable.
The inevitable result of unbilled IT is the CEO holding the line on the IT budget while the departments are demanding more and more services. Simple econ101 will tell you what happens next. If you fix supply and decouple demand, you get rationing.
There is an inevitable curve as companies get larger and larger:
1. IT handles everything 2. resources become constrained and an executive group attempts to prioritize IT projects 3. internal billing and budgeting is used to prioritize IT resources 4. Numbers used for internal billing are used to justify outsourcing and/or mini IT departments spring up inside divisions. 5. outsourcing/distributed IT produces mixed results and added complexity - so IT is insourced.
This is the case for many traffic violations, even without the robo-cop accuser. In Georgia the only "facing your accuser" you can do in a speeding case is to ask the cop if he was properly certified, if the equipment was calibrated and he was properly positioned. If he answers yes to all, you are guilty, by statute. "I have a witness that will testify on my behalf" is not evidence. "I have a video with GPS logs that will show that I never exceeded the speed limit" is not admissible as evidence. If the cop says you did it, you did it. By law.
Similar situations abound for many moving violations. Depending on the jurisdiction your only way out is the good will of the prosecutor/judge. I saw a ton of cases plead out to lesser (and unrelated) offenses to avoid losing a license or high insurance - even when they were convinced they had proof of innocence.
Vaguely related anecdote: Many years ago I got a bogus ticket for running a red light that I did not actually run by a cop who missed important bits of the event. After wasting a full day at traffic court the prosecutor haggled price with me and dropped the ticket if I would pay a "civil fee" of $110. He knew I had the juice to win my case, and I knew he had the ability to cost me another day or two of work. Stalemate. He got his $110 and I lost some of my idealism. The red light cameras are an extension of this view of justice - the revenue is more important than the justice. In some jurisdictions they have even gone so far as to endanger public safety in the interest of increasing revenues (by shortening the yellow). Creating incentives that are at cross purposes to the public good is a very dangerous thing. (see also: asset forfeiture laws)
Great! There are now two people on the slashdot planet who apparently agree that a desire to ban books is an instant disqualifier for the high court. Some days I can't help but think that Descartes' daemon is real and he's just screwing with me.
You needed a court decision before you were prepared to deal with the fact that "seperate bu equal" is a contradiction in terms !
Actually, "Separate but equal" was a court decision. A second court decision declared that unconstitutional.
That is only okay as long as I have a right to tell them how abhorrent those viewpoints are, and as long as any time they actually ACT on those viewpoints the people who suffer as a result have genuine legal protection they can rely on to protect THEIR rights.
Now you are getting it. Fight ideas with ideas! The difference with Shakrai was in criminalizing the ideas. Actions can be criminal - words are just words.
Wow, I am ever so happy that you are not in charge of anything.
Your freedom of opinion does not INCLUDE the freedom to think I or anybody else is less than you.
Go back and re-read your own words. You'd actually advocate criminalizing thought. And you write this without hint of irony. So if you had the ability to see into the mind of a man and know that he secretly hates short people, you'd advocate locking him up even though he never did anything to act upon his secret hate?
Your definition of freedom is frightening. Freedom means "free to be an asshole", just so long as your inner asshole doesn't lead you to do something to harm someone else. And "harm" doesn't extend to "making them feel bad". If I insult your goofy looking haircut and make you cry, that makes me an ass, not a criminal. Even if I insult your goofy white-guy nose and insipid pale blue eyes and make you cry, I'm still just an ass, not a criminal.
Freedom of thought extends to everything. I'm free to believe that the moon landings are fake. Even if you can produce Neil Armstrong himself to verify his travels, I'm not bound by any law or doctrine to believe it. Yes, there is an objective reality that lies in conflict with that belief, but that just makes me wrong in my belief. Not a criminal.
Ideas are just ideas. Even ideas that hurt. You fight them with other ideas, not with violence. To paraphrase, "your right to desire to punch me in the nose ends where your fist and my nose meet".
What I suggested was globalising human rights and using the UN as a vehicle to do that. If every state recognized your right to free speech for example as a constitutional right
Actually the Knox case is a perfect example for this new law. The families of the two accused (now convicted) killers roundly criticized the prosecution of their case and all those involved. They are now facing libel charges. I think there's even jail time involved. Something that absolutely would not fly in the United States.
Your take on the case is interesting. I think your point about tribalism is spot on - the dispute from this side of the Atlantic has been about what constitutes evidence, so your comment: "it's a case about a murder, it's about evidence, and if she does not like the verdict she can ask for an appeal, which she did." has a different resonance over here than it apparently does for the speaker. Rightly or wrongly the legal analysis we've seen is that the Italian system (particularly in this case) allows wide latitude to the prosecution, to the point that a conviction in an Italian court seems similar to a grand jury indictment in a US court (from a procedural and evidentiary basis). The difference being that you go to jail convicted of a crime in Italy whereas following a grand jury indictment you then stand trial in the US (with much higher burdens of proof and more limited rules of evidence). Reports here indicated that the real action in Italian courts happens on appeal. The legal analysis reported in the media was that in Italy a good prosecutor could convict a ham sandwich on the first go-around.
Absent effective birth control methods and with strong social pressures against marriageability of single mothers or formerly pregnant women (non-virgins), the age of marriage will tend to be fairly close to the age of puberty. Imagine if you will the prospect of keeping a couple of teens from experimenting until they are in their early twenties. The hormones were the same back then as they are now. Getting them married off before they get pregnant is the rational response to the realities of teen sexuality in a birth control free era.
Focus on keeping Congress from being handed over to the corporations in November.
Handed over? In which timeline would ownership by corporations require a "handing over" event?
Re:No successful terrorist attacks since 9/11?
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The name of "terrorist" is applied when convenient.
That, plus the required political component. Blowing up a building because you are deranged and like to kill people is not a terrorist act. Blowing up the same building because you want to instill fear in people in order to further your political cause is a terrorist act. It is the political message component of terrorism that differentiates it from random violence - the intent cause fear is where the name draws it's "terror" root.
DC snipers? Serial killer nutters - no political objective, just killing folks.
Oklahoma City - domestic terrorist (wanted to affect political change via revenge killing against federal agents).
Unibomber - terrorist and nutter? (Used violent attacks to draw attention to his nutty political screed.)
That being said, we usually reserve "terrorist" for a larger organization that is using violent attacks against civilian targets as a political tool. IRA, PLO, Al-Quaeda, KKK.... these kinds of organizations are what people are referring to. 3 guys blowing up minority churches is an example of terrorist tactics, but without a larger movement behind them they don't generally get the capital-T "Terrorist" label.
gigabit to the home is a game-changer. At work we are consolidating servers into geo-separated data centers that are at co-lo facilities. Because of cheap gigabit interconnects at the data center, we are able to have distributed storage and VM clusters that would not have been possible even a few years ago. High-bandwidth, low-latency connections allow you to have your storage offsite - instead of having your backup at Carbonite, you have everything other than the boot disk over at Amazon. The same interconnects allow you to run your home PC as a VM in Amazon's cloud - with full 3d and speed enough for gaming. The possibilities are endless - the opportunities are immense.
I mention Carbonite because I just picked them up as my home backup provider. Because of bandwidth limitations it is going to take several months to complete my initial backup. if I had metro-e at home like I do at the office, this would take a day or two, instead of months. Full duplex gig-e would be a godsend. I could set up a NAS or even a SAN for my family - handling the backups and storage growth/allocation for them just like my team does at work. I could set up block level mirroring to my sister's house for redundant storage. I could set up Xen at my house and my parent's house and enable failover of my machines to their house (and the reverse).
And that's just what I can think of based on current use. With that much bandwidth available, I'm sure new services would spring up in surprising and unexpected ways.
Yeah, why would a country that has rigid and draconian population controls (one child) in place avoid taking an aggressive stance against a deadly communicable disease? It is almost as if losing MILLIONS of lives is of no consequence to them!
They're not just practicing abstinence, they're insisting the rest of us do so too, and depriving children of access to education -- often, to crucial information that will keep them safe. And THAT is the problem.
Which of course argues against government control of the educational system. But I don't think too many people on either side of that debate would be interested in that obvious conclusion.
That is a reality: they cannot impose their religious views on those that won't accept them.
Yes, moral components are still a strong piece how the mainstream lives. Dominating them, evangelizing them, imposing luridly awful religious restrictions, isn't the crux of liberty. Commonality is.... composed of democracy within this republic. Marginalizing thought isn't a good place to start.
And yet your posts on this thread indicate that you would very much love to impose your morality on others, particularly families with children and the children of those families. And that you would very much love to marginalize the thoughts of those you disagree with.
Another strange idea you present: Commonality is the crux of liberty. That is almost an oxymoron. Liberty means the freedom to do as you will. Commonality means the same as everyone else. Those two don't really go together very well. Unless, of course, you meant to suggest that a commonality of a communally held belief in the fundamental import of liberty is the crux of liberty.
You should have RTFA. This guy invented "hang it on a hook". No, really - that's the trick. You build a nice, heavy lead shield curtain and then you hang it from the ceiling to hold the weight. I guess if you don't have a handy ceiling mount (maybe you need a portable X-ray?) you could invent a wheeled gantry to carry it around with you. Anti-gravity would come under the category of "marketing hyperbole".
What ever happened to Helios, the NASA solar powered "atmospheric satellite"? It was like a giant version of the human-powered Gossamer Condor, but unmanned and solar powered. It flew to about 100k feet almost a decade ago and was designed to stay aloft for months. They had some kind of failure that resulted in a crash and that's the last I've heard of it.
Q: Why did this take so long (original deadline was mid-January)?
A: When we put out our initial call for ideas, we didn't expect so many, over 150,000! Reviewing each idea -- and we really did review each and every idea -- took a long time, and also forced us to revisit how this project would work. Ultimately, we recognized that many of the ideas we'd received were similar and could be strengthened by being combined with other ideas. The result is the top 16 finalist ideas. We know this took a long time and is organized a little differently from what we originally envisioned, but we hope that the solutions we ultimately arrived at will allow the greatest number of our interested users to have a real impact.
Yeah, a 2 liter is a pretty big version. We used to do it to great effect with eppendorf tubes. They make a satisfyingly loud pop and are of no danger at all - the lid just pops open.
I've done a 2 - liter, it is really, really loud. Not regular firecracker loud - like m-80 loud. Compared with an m-80 in your hand, the 2 liter is probably safer. Compared with an m-80 at 5 feet, the 2 liter might be more dangerous. So I guess my point is arguable.
compared to a firecracker, an eppendorf with dry ice or liquid nitrogen is super-safe. similar in bang, no fire.
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Many of the things you mention have been challenged on 5th amendment grounds, so there is precedent there. Many of them have lost those challenges as well, so there is another precedent. Adding an easement by eminent domain will usually require a payment in compensation for the "taking" (though not always). "Historic area" zoning is not really an easement, although it will put some pretty tough handcuffs on the use of your property.
Whether or not the actual laws allow such action by the federal government is not particularly relevant though - the real question is "what will this supreme court do?" The answer to that is: absolutely nothing. There's no way in the world this court would strike down a "net neutrality" law that was properly constructed on 5th amendment "taking" grounds. Others here have pointed out the likely legal theory for that stance (commerce clause), but the truth is that the court has very little appetite for limiting the authority and scope of the Federal government (a couple of recent minor exceptions to the contrary notwithstanding). A majority of the court believes in deference to the legislative branch for determining the "will of the people", and look to this for guidance on the limits of federal authority.
These do exist.... well, sorta.
I think I'd feel safer commuting on the electric bike.
I've considered the Model S. From the prototype it is truly an amazing vehicle - but $50k after subsidies is a little steep for my budget. Even so, if it lives up to the hype, it would be well worth that price (comparable to a BMW-5 but with much more room inside).
It is the comparison to the (finally real) Volt that is stunning. The Volt plug-in hybrid is not nearly as roomy, or as nice, or as peppy. And it has much worse mileage on an average commute (in my area at least - commutes are fairly long here). But it doesn't cost all that much less. From all outward appearances it is more comparable to a Camry than a BMW 5 series. What a crappy deal that would be - pay a premium of nearly 100% over a comparable car for a little plug-in goodness? Whereas the Model S gives you a car that is priced relatively close to it's gasoline counterpart. (with that big "if they can really build it" caveat)
I managed to wrangle a test drive in the Tesla Roadster, even though I'm not interested in a $140k commuter convertible sports car. It is an absolutely amazing little car. It drives unlike anything I've ever driven before. The acceleration is giggle-inducing and instantaneous - like a Porsche 911 turbo 4 only with absolutely no lag at all. The handling is go-kart tight as well. But the real difference is in how you use the accelerator. The moment you take your foot off the gas you begin a relatively hard deceleration as the regenerative braking kicks in. It takes a minute to get used to using the gas pedal as a "go-faster, go slower" pedal instead of an "Accelerate/coast" pedal. Then there's the actual brakes. Because you've got a motor assist on the braking, you could give yourself whiplash going from full acceleration to full-on brakes. If you ever get the chance to drive one, don't pass it up.
That being said, they'll have to seriously improve their game to live up to the Model S promises. The Roadster isn't quite as finished out and perfect as you'd expect. Compare the interior and options with a Skyline GTR at little more than half the price and you see some glaring omissions in the full high-performance car package. (ok, not fair - the Skyline is kind of in a class by itself for the price, and is well known for the tricked-out dash options) Still, it gave me enough reason to hesitate putting down a $5,000 deposit on the Model S - even though I'm reasonably confident that I could sell the thing for more than I paid for it in a couple of months.
I can't agree with your conclusions at all. If a tax raises the cost of the good (which gas taxes do) then they will impact the price to the seller - either driving sales down (which is one of the intended purposes of such taxes) or by reducing the profit available to the seller (they could have charged the same price themselves and just kept the difference as profit).
Limiting the definition of "tax" to "income tax" really makes no sense whatsoever. Tariffs on trade are taxes - they are one of the most important taxes globally. But they aren't income taxes. For most people in the US, property taxes are a significant portion of their tax burden, but you'd exclude those taxes. "Usage Fees" can also be pretty large, depending on what you are doing. There are lots and lots of taxes that are not "income taxes" and ignoring these as a portion of the tax burden distorts the argument in exactly the manner you are claiming including them does.
There is a separate argument to be made about the structure of the corporate income tax and methods of evading the corporate income tax. And particularly about the inherent incentives to make use of those methods of avoiding the income tax. But that isn't the same thing as claiming that no other taxes count.
(one nitpick with my nitpick - sales taxes are not in fact paid by the seller, they are paid by the buyer and collected by the seller on behalf of the government. While this is a simple fact, the reality of the economic transaction means that the question of which party is paying the tax is moot, other than the free tax collection services being run for the government by the seller. Well, that and the fact that many buyers can claim the local sales taxes as exemptions on their federal income tax returns.)
Rereading Sycraft-fu he stipulates 1-time cost. Anyway, additional factors include geo-separated SAN nodes (plus bandwidth to connect them), number of backups and snapshots kept in rotation - we keep nightly backups for 3 months, plus hourly snapshots, plus monthly backups for 3 years, plus yearly backups forever. All in duplicate kept offsite at multiple locations. All of that backing up adds up.
That said, I can't give you our internal billing rate because we don't cost our services that way. Our actual costs are no where near $30/GB/month, but if that cost was acting as a proxy to cover other services as well, it might be reasonable. Message #33076260 from an AC below mentions a $ figure and brings up maintenance fees from the vendors, which are in the 10's to 100's of thousands. It all adds up - labor, equipment, outside services.... Plus, you have to factor in the lifetime of the capital equipment expenditure - figure 5-6 years before you retire everything and start fresh with another set of everything.
See post from Sycraft-fu above for more details - he backs your $30/gig number.
From your detail "run of the mill file storage" and "digital assets of the company" aren't entirely the same thing. Depending on the number of workers involved and the reliance on the data, even an hour of downtime could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (in my ~400 employee company it is well into that range). Therefore a simple network share is not appropriate. Even a raid 6 file server with a tape backup is not appropriate.
If the data is important, and large numbers of people will be accessing it, and uptime is critical - you are talking high-end SAN with snapshots and offsite backups - and you are talking money. Lots and lots of money. Backing up 500 GB is not a trick. The equipment to be able to back up 50 TB while the company is operating and get it done in a reasonable amount of time is a bit more elaborate. Now you have backup servers with their own drive arrays and tape libraries and dedicated backup networks... the bigger you get, the more complex and more expensive it gets - to a point. Then it starts getting cheaper again once you've got all that kit in place and are just adding storage space. But it never gets as cheap as picking up an external drive at Best Buy.
Sure, if we'd work like this everyone will want to have a 100Gb homedirectory/outlook mailbox/subversion repo whatever. You say go to management and I'll tell you what they'll decide: the teams that make most of the money get it the rest wont. So cut out the middleman and make this common practise by rebilling I say. But then everything should be rebilled (and that's where it goes wrong most of the time: some team rebill and some don't. This effectively means mixing a capitalist and communist society and that don't work....)
This is exactly what happens. If IT resources are "all you can eat" then IT ends up rationing the supply. This works in smaller organizations where IT is heavily involved in the business. As the size of the organization gets larger, having IT deciding priorities between various groups is less desirable.
The inevitable result of unbilled IT is the CEO holding the line on the IT budget while the departments are demanding more and more services. Simple econ101 will tell you what happens next. If you fix supply and decouple demand, you get rationing.
There is an inevitable curve as companies get larger and larger:
1. IT handles everything
2. resources become constrained and an executive group attempts to prioritize IT projects
3. internal billing and budgeting is used to prioritize IT resources
4. Numbers used for internal billing are used to justify outsourcing and/or mini IT departments spring up inside divisions.
5. outsourcing/distributed IT produces mixed results and added complexity - so IT is insourced.
The vast majority of car owners use their vehicle to exceed the posted speed limit. Therefore?
This is the case for many traffic violations, even without the robo-cop accuser. In Georgia the only "facing your accuser" you can do in a speeding case is to ask the cop if he was properly certified, if the equipment was calibrated and he was properly positioned. If he answers yes to all, you are guilty, by statute. "I have a witness that will testify on my behalf" is not evidence. "I have a video with GPS logs that will show that I never exceeded the speed limit" is not admissible as evidence. If the cop says you did it, you did it. By law.
Similar situations abound for many moving violations. Depending on the jurisdiction your only way out is the good will of the prosecutor/judge. I saw a ton of cases plead out to lesser (and unrelated) offenses to avoid losing a license or high insurance - even when they were convinced they had proof of innocence.
Vaguely related anecdote: Many years ago I got a bogus ticket for running a red light that I did not actually run by a cop who missed important bits of the event. After wasting a full day at traffic court the prosecutor haggled price with me and dropped the ticket if I would pay a "civil fee" of $110. He knew I had the juice to win my case, and I knew he had the ability to cost me another day or two of work. Stalemate. He got his $110 and I lost some of my idealism. The red light cameras are an extension of this view of justice - the revenue is more important than the justice. In some jurisdictions they have even gone so far as to endanger public safety in the interest of increasing revenues (by shortening the yellow). Creating incentives that are at cross purposes to the public good is a very dangerous thing. (see also: asset forfeiture laws)
Great! There are now two people on the slashdot planet who apparently agree that a desire to ban books is an instant disqualifier for the high court. Some days I can't help but think that Descartes' daemon is real and he's just screwing with me.
You needed a court decision before you were prepared to deal with the fact that "seperate bu equal" is a contradiction in terms !
Actually, "Separate but equal" was a court decision. A second court decision declared that unconstitutional.
That is only okay as long as I have a right to tell them how abhorrent those viewpoints are, and as long as any time they actually ACT on those viewpoints the people who suffer as a result have genuine legal protection they can rely on to protect THEIR rights.
Now you are getting it. Fight ideas with ideas! The difference with Shakrai was in criminalizing the ideas. Actions can be criminal - words are just words.
Wow, I am ever so happy that you are not in charge of anything.
Your freedom of opinion does not INCLUDE the freedom to think I or anybody else is less than you.
Go back and re-read your own words. You'd actually advocate criminalizing thought. And you write this without hint of irony. So if you had the ability to see into the mind of a man and know that he secretly hates short people, you'd advocate locking him up even though he never did anything to act upon his secret hate?
Your definition of freedom is frightening. Freedom means "free to be an asshole", just so long as your inner asshole doesn't lead you to do something to harm someone else. And "harm" doesn't extend to "making them feel bad". If I insult your goofy looking haircut and make you cry, that makes me an ass, not a criminal. Even if I insult your goofy white-guy nose and insipid pale blue eyes and make you cry, I'm still just an ass, not a criminal.
Freedom of thought extends to everything. I'm free to believe that the moon landings are fake. Even if you can produce Neil Armstrong himself to verify his travels, I'm not bound by any law or doctrine to believe it. Yes, there is an objective reality that lies in conflict with that belief, but that just makes me wrong in my belief. Not a criminal.
Ideas are just ideas. Even ideas that hurt. You fight them with other ideas, not with violence. To paraphrase, "your right to desire to punch me in the nose ends where your fist and my nose meet".
What I suggested was globalising human rights and using the UN as a vehicle to do that. If every state recognized your right to free speech for example as a constitutional right
Unfortunately, the view in the UN toward free speech as a human right is that speaking in criticism of religion is a violation of human rights. Exactly the opposite of your hope of recognizing a freedom of speech like we strive for in the US.
Actually the Knox case is a perfect example for this new law. The families of the two accused (now convicted) killers roundly criticized the prosecution of their case and all those involved. They are now facing libel charges. I think there's even jail time involved. Something that absolutely would not fly in the United States.
Your take on the case is interesting. I think your point about tribalism is spot on - the dispute from this side of the Atlantic has been about what constitutes evidence, so your comment: "it's a case about a murder, it's about evidence, and if she does not like the verdict she can ask for an appeal, which she did." has a different resonance over here than it apparently does for the speaker. Rightly or wrongly the legal analysis we've seen is that the Italian system (particularly in this case) allows wide latitude to the prosecution, to the point that a conviction in an Italian court seems similar to a grand jury indictment in a US court (from a procedural and evidentiary basis). The difference being that you go to jail convicted of a crime in Italy whereas following a grand jury indictment you then stand trial in the US (with much higher burdens of proof and more limited rules of evidence). Reports here indicated that the real action in Italian courts happens on appeal. The legal analysis reported in the media was that in Italy a good prosecutor could convict a ham sandwich on the first go-around.
Absent effective birth control methods and with strong social pressures against marriageability of single mothers or formerly pregnant women (non-virgins), the age of marriage will tend to be fairly close to the age of puberty. Imagine if you will the prospect of keeping a couple of teens from experimenting until they are in their early twenties. The hormones were the same back then as they are now. Getting them married off before they get pregnant is the rational response to the realities of teen sexuality in a birth control free era.
Focus on keeping Congress from being handed over to the corporations in November.
Handed over? In which timeline would ownership by corporations require a "handing over" event?
The name of "terrorist" is applied when convenient.
That, plus the required political component. Blowing up a building because you are deranged and like to kill people is not a terrorist act. Blowing up the same building because you want to instill fear in people in order to further your political cause is a terrorist act. It is the political message component of terrorism that differentiates it from random violence - the intent cause fear is where the name draws it's "terror" root.
DC snipers? Serial killer nutters - no political objective, just killing folks.
Oklahoma City - domestic terrorist (wanted to affect political change via revenge killing against federal agents).
Unibomber - terrorist and nutter? (Used violent attacks to draw attention to his nutty political screed.)
That being said, we usually reserve "terrorist" for a larger organization that is using violent attacks against civilian targets as a political tool. IRA, PLO, Al-Quaeda, KKK.... these kinds of organizations are what people are referring to. 3 guys blowing up minority churches is an example of terrorist tactics, but without a larger movement behind them they don't generally get the capital-T "Terrorist" label.
gigabit to the home is a game-changer. At work we are consolidating servers into geo-separated data centers that are at co-lo facilities. Because of cheap gigabit interconnects at the data center, we are able to have distributed storage and VM clusters that would not have been possible even a few years ago. High-bandwidth, low-latency connections allow you to have your storage offsite - instead of having your backup at Carbonite, you have everything other than the boot disk over at Amazon. The same interconnects allow you to run your home PC as a VM in Amazon's cloud - with full 3d and speed enough for gaming. The possibilities are endless - the opportunities are immense.
I mention Carbonite because I just picked them up as my home backup provider. Because of bandwidth limitations it is going to take several months to complete my initial backup. if I had metro-e at home like I do at the office, this would take a day or two, instead of months. Full duplex gig-e would be a godsend. I could set up a NAS or even a SAN for my family - handling the backups and storage growth/allocation for them just like my team does at work. I could set up block level mirroring to my sister's house for redundant storage. I could set up Xen at my house and my parent's house and enable failover of my machines to their house (and the reverse).
And that's just what I can think of based on current use. With that much bandwidth available, I'm sure new services would spring up in surprising and unexpected ways.
Yeah, why would a country that has rigid and draconian population controls (one child) in place avoid taking an aggressive stance against a deadly communicable disease? It is almost as if losing MILLIONS of lives is of no consequence to them!
You're missing political context here.
They're not just practicing abstinence, they're insisting the rest of us do so too, and depriving children of access to education -- often, to crucial information that will keep them safe. And THAT is the problem.
Which of course argues against government control of the educational system. But I don't think too many people on either side of that debate would be interested in that obvious conclusion.
That is a reality: they cannot impose their religious views on those that won't accept them.
Yes, moral components are still a strong piece how the mainstream lives. Dominating them, evangelizing them, imposing luridly awful religious restrictions, isn't the crux of liberty. Commonality is.... composed of democracy within this republic. Marginalizing thought isn't a good place to start.
And yet your posts on this thread indicate that you would very much love to impose your morality on others, particularly families with children and the children of those families. And that you would very much love to marginalize the thoughts of those you disagree with.
Another strange idea you present: Commonality is the crux of liberty. That is almost an oxymoron. Liberty means the freedom to do as you will. Commonality means the same as everyone else. Those two don't really go together very well. Unless, of course, you meant to suggest that a commonality of a communally held belief in the fundamental import of liberty is the crux of liberty.
You should have RTFA. This guy invented "hang it on a hook". No, really - that's the trick. You build a nice, heavy lead shield curtain and then you hang it from the ceiling to hold the weight. I guess if you don't have a handy ceiling mount (maybe you need a portable X-ray?) you could invent a wheeled gantry to carry it around with you. Anti-gravity would come under the category of "marketing hyperbole".
What ever happened to Helios, the NASA solar powered "atmospheric satellite"? It was like a giant version of the human-powered Gossamer Condor, but unmanned and solar powered. It flew to about 100k feet almost a decade ago and was designed to stay aloft for months. They had some kind of failure that resulted in a crash and that's the last I've heard of it.
Asked and answered - from the FAQ:
Q: Why did this take so long (original deadline was mid-January)?
A: When we put out our initial call for ideas, we didn't expect so many, over 150,000! Reviewing each idea -- and we really did review each and every idea -- took a long time, and also forced us to revisit how this project would work. Ultimately, we recognized that many of the ideas we'd received were similar and could be strengthened by being combined with other ideas. The result is the top 16 finalist ideas. We know this took a long time and is organized a little differently from what we originally envisioned, but we hope that the solutions we ultimately arrived at will allow the greatest number of our interested users to have a real impact.
Yeah, a 2 liter is a pretty big version. We used to do it to great effect with eppendorf tubes. They make a satisfyingly loud pop and are of no danger at all - the lid just pops open.
I've done a 2 - liter, it is really, really loud. Not regular firecracker loud - like m-80 loud. Compared with an m-80 in your hand, the 2 liter is probably safer. Compared with an m-80 at 5 feet, the 2 liter might be more dangerous. So I guess my point is arguable.
compared to a firecracker, an eppendorf with dry ice or liquid nitrogen is super-safe. similar in bang, no fire.