But who the hell would opt in to being assaulted by this kind of shit? The only way these kinds of ads even remotely work is to force them on consumers.
Plenty of sites use inoffensive, non-deceptive ads. GMail was mentioned above, for example. The only reason these advertisers are resorting to trickery is because their products suck and no one would actually install them if they knew what they were.
Makerbot/Thingiverse also deletes designs for products they don't like, so they can go to hell. Of course, their behavior resulted in an all-too-predictable Streisand effect, so it was actually quite beneficial in a strange way, but that doesn't change my opinion of them.
Are they going to redesign HTTPS to allow multiple sites on one IP (virtual hosts) and not rely on the extortion racket that is the certificate market now? Because I don't see large hosting providers buying tens of thousands of IP addresses to move all their sites to HTTPS, let alone small providers, nor do I see people wanting to add $20-100/year to their hosting bill to buy a certificate from one of the CA racketeers like Verisign.
It matters because the conclusion that is being drawn is that BitTorrent usage is waning, a conclusion that cannot be drawn from the data, and then questions like "Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?" are being asked based on that unfounded conclusion.
Meanwhile Bittorrent traffic is down slightly (7.4% from 10%) in Internet traffic compared to last year. Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?
Or, could it be that someone doesn't understand percentages? If there are three people in a room, and two are using BitTorrent, that's 67%. If a fourth person walks in, and two people are still using BitTorrent, usage isn't down at all, but the percentage shrank to 50%.
BitTorrent traffic could be shrinking, or it could be holding steady, or it could even be increasing, just not enough for its proportion of total Internet traffic to even remain constant. But you can't tell anything by just looking at percentages of the whole like that.
The Feds can regulate immigration, but since general police power isn't an enumerated power, they can't actually police immigrants. In other words, the Feds can define "citizen," "permanent resident," &c., and they can grant privileges to each of these terms based on whatever criteria they come up with, but they don't actually have the constitutional power to send enforcers into the States and apprehend so-called "illegal" immigrants. The most they can do is deny such people recognition as U.S. citizens and the privileges that entails.
And of course the States are free to grant whatever privileges they wish to their inhabitants regardless of what the Feds call such people. If a State wants to allow non-citizens to have drivers licenses (the Feds have no jurisdiction at all over driver licensing), legal "residency" for State- or local-level purposes, &c., they can.
It could be a honeypot, but since everything done through a site like Silk Road is anonymous except receipt of delivery of items, the only users of the site the FBI would catch would be the drug buyers. Sellers, provided they're not using an OS or browser with the vulnerabilities that the FBI has used to de-anonymize TOR users in the past, and provided they don't do something dumb when they mail a package like reveal their identity, are safe. And since when is the FBI interested in going after drug buyers? Typically they only bust such small-time participants in the drug trade to get them to rat on their dealers, but that obviously won't work when your dealer is anonymous.
Or am I missing something here? My understanding was that Silk Road did things entirely through TOR and Bitcoin, meaning that those ends of the transactions are (excepting user stupidity) completely anonymous.
True. Although tellingly ad banner companies don't pay out to their clients until typically a minimum of $5-10 accrue in their accounts, and of course the deposit is rounded to whole pennies. So those hundredths of a cent per impression are mostly meaningless.
I don't think you can really compare the two. One, in the case of a right-to-know law, the government ignoring it is most likely not the will of the people; in the second case, it sounds like it is doing the exact opposite, following the will of the majority of the people. Two, again in the case of an RTK law, the government ignoring it sounds like pretty blatant self-serving corruption---what kinds of abuse of the citizenry are they hiding by not responding to FOIA requests served upon police departments?---whereas in the second case, this sounds like wilful civil disobedience by a large portion of the citizenry, and their representatives and law enforcement officials, who feel the law is unjust.
There's probably also a constitutional argument to be made in the case of the IIRIRA. Practically every policy the Federal Government tries to force on the states now is an unconstitutional overreach of their explicitly enumerated powers. New Hampshire, and I think this is virtually unique among the 50 state constitutions, has an explicit sovereignty clause: Part I, Art. 7. It's the complement to the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and says that New Hampshire has only ceded sovereignty where explicitly consented to by its people or their legislature. So if this IIRIRA thing wasn't explicitly consented to by New Hampshire's people or its legislature, it's not a "law" here regardless of what the Feds think.
1/10,000,000 of an ounce of gold is currently worth 0.01335 cents. (That's cents, not dollars.) Where is a hundredth of a cent worth anything? What can I buy that's denominated in such small amounts?
In New Hampshire, our state equivalent to FOIA, RSA 91-A, requires that a government entity respond within 5 days to a right-to-know request or they can be hauled into court. RSA 91-A:4, IV. They don't have to provide the information within 5 days, but they at least have to respond saying they have received the request and either say how long it will take to comply with the request, or explain---under a very short list of enumerated exemptions in RSA 91-A:5---why the request is being denied. Denials themselves can of course be appealed. RSA 91-A:7. And RSA 91-A:8 authorizes the courts to award attorneys fees to the complainant if they're successful in demonstrating the agency violated the right-to-know law. Wilful violations by individual bureaucrats can even render them personally liable for all the court costs. RSA 91-A:8, IV.
New York's FOIA law doesn't have remedies similar to this?
We have 400 State Representatives, which currently works out to 3,291 constituents per Rep. We also have, rather than a lieutenant governor, a five-member Executive Council, which holds a check on virtually all decisions that the Governor makes.
All towns in New Hampshire either follow the traditional "New England town meeting" style of direct democracy, or a two-stage system ("SB2 towns") where the town meeting just votes on what appears on the ballot, including the budget, and then the townspeople vote by secret ballot approximately a month later. The thirteen cities however all have city councils that replace direct democracy with a representative-style system.
New Hampshire has no sales or income tax, but does have a 9% restaurant/hotel tax, an "income and dividends" tax for capital gains over $1,200/year, and two business taxes---one is a typical business profits tax like you'll find in all states, and the other is a sort of "reverse" income tax, in that the business owner pays it rather than the employee. It's minimal though, something like 1/4% of the money paid to the employees.
New Hampshire also has a lot of user fees and professional licenses, although they don't have a general "business license" like many states. Many of the licenses are silly, for example, they license manicurists and a few years ago actually tried to start licensing interior decorators, but the huge number of libertarian activists here (including over a dozen freestaters in the State House) have pushed back against this nonsense and have been slowly wittling down the existing licensing and regulations every year. The state parks are entirely funded by user fees. There are a couple of large campgrounds and ski resorts in New Hampshire that are owned by the State, and these provide the bulk of that funding. New Hampshire also has state liquor stores, and whereas I would certainly like to see their monopoly broken, this is also a major source of revenue for the State and IMO far preferable to another general tax.
The State makes the bulk of their revenue from the above sources. Property taxes are high because virtually all local and school funding comes from local property taxes, plus the counties' budgets (which fund the superior courts, sheriffs, jails, and nursing homes) are entirely funded by property taxes. The State itself gives "block grants" to towns for certain purposes, for example highway maintenance, but it's minimal compared to what the towns have to raise in local property taxes. The biggest money sink in New Hampshire is the school districts---I live in Grafton, a town where our annual budget is under $1M, but the five-town school district gets $2.3M from Grafton. That district's total budget is something like $22M. So the school represents over two-thirds of our annual tax bill. I know people in other towns where it's even worse. So if anyone is looking to lighten their tax burden here, starting with the school district is the way to go.
The "Massholes bringing socialism here" thing is largely a myth. Most people moving from Massachusetts are in fact economic/political refugees, just like some of the people in this thread. (I left the day Romneycare went into effect, 2007-07-01.) And most settle around the southeastern part of the state, between Manchester/Nashua and the seacoast.
There's an organization called the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, of which I'm a board member; we rate State Representatives each year on their respect for liberty---both economic and personal---based on how they vote on bills with a liberty impact, for example, bills creating or eliminating taxes or fees, restricting or improving firearms freedoms, marijuana decrim/legalization, increasing or decreasing government transparency, and so on.
The most highly rated reps are from the same areas that those Massachusetts refugees tend to settle in. Rockingham County, for example. On the other hand, our most statist reps are from the college towns (Keene, Durham, Hanover) and the economically depressed areas such as Claremont and Berlin, not places "Massholes" are settling in.
We've had a couple of "high-profile" incidents where state reps trying to bring major statism to New Hampshire were recent movers here from the socialist holes to the south of us---a few years ago a rep from the Henniker area (I forget her name) introduced a bill to ban open carry in public buildings; she had moved here from Massachusetts less than a decade earlier. (The NHLA targeted her during reelection and she lost in the primary.) And just recently, Cynthia Chase, a rep who publicly claimed that freestaters moving here are "the single biggest threat" that N.H. faces was revealed to have moved here from Rhode Island herself in 2006 (two years after the FSP chose N.H.). But these few anecdotes don't really lead to the conclusion that Massachusetts movers are ruining the state.
This isn't the first time such a mistake was made. Google also labeled Taiwan as a Chinese province in 2005.
I don't think this is a "mistake." Taiwan's status is an open question and Apple is probably choosing whichever side will benefit them more. Where's their bigger customer base, the island or the mainland?
"Right now, it's considered impolite to talk on your cellphone while checking out at the grocery store, or to ignore a face-to-face conversation in favor of texting somebody. But 20 years ago, those actions weren't even on our social radar."
Sure they were. Twenty years ago, if you were in line at the grocery store and rather than paying attention to checking out, you were idly standing there chatting with the person next to you, that would be just as rude as talking on your cell phone. And if you were having a face-to-face conversation with someone and abruptly stopped to turn and interact with someone else, that would be considered just as rude as abruptly stopping to text.
The rude behavior is the same then and now. Distraction, interruption, inattentiveness, and so on. All that's changed is that the technology has allowed the other person in the scenario to become a virtual presence than an actual.
...but lawyers say as one of a series it confirms there is no longer any debate about the benefits of the vaccine.
No, it doesn't. The question of the benefits of the vaccine is a scientific question best left up to science, not lawyers, to decide. What this series of cases confirms is simply that people no longer have a right to opt out of vaccination.
New Hampshire recognizes a right of conscience to opt out of vaccines. It's in statute as a religious exemption (RSA 141-C:20-c, II) and backed up by our state constitution, Part I, Arts. 4 and 5. There's a well-organized movement here to improve the law to allow people to opt out of vaccines without resorting to the "all-or-nothing" religious exemption, for example, with HB1555 (2010). Perhaps this family ought to immigrate here and seek asylum like that homeschooling family from Germany.
Slashdot Mirror
But who the hell would opt in to being assaulted by this kind of shit? The only way these kinds of ads even remotely work is to force them on consumers.
Plenty of sites use inoffensive, non-deceptive ads. GMail was mentioned above, for example. The only reason these advertisers are resorting to trickery is because their products suck and no one would actually install them if they knew what they were.
Imagine if they only spent half a billion; the program wouldn't even be as good as random chance!
Nice. Here's more info on that for other people who didn't know about it:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4366 (section 3.1)
http://www.internetsociety.org/articles/dane-taking-tls-authentication-next-level-using-dnssec
Makerbot/Thingiverse also deletes designs for products they don't like, so they can go to hell. Of course, their behavior resulted in an all-too-predictable Streisand effect, so it was actually quite beneficial in a strange way, but that doesn't change my opinion of them.
Are they going to redesign HTTPS to allow multiple sites on one IP (virtual hosts) and not rely on the extortion racket that is the certificate market now? Because I don't see large hosting providers buying tens of thousands of IP addresses to move all their sites to HTTPS, let alone small providers, nor do I see people wanting to add $20-100/year to their hosting bill to buy a certificate from one of the CA racketeers like Verisign.
It matters because the conclusion that is being drawn is that BitTorrent usage is waning, a conclusion that cannot be drawn from the data, and then questions like "Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?" are being asked based on that unfounded conclusion.
Or, could it be that someone doesn't understand percentages? If there are three people in a room, and two are using BitTorrent, that's 67%. If a fourth person walks in, and two people are still using BitTorrent, usage isn't down at all, but the percentage shrank to 50%.
BitTorrent traffic could be shrinking, or it could be holding steady, or it could even be increasing, just not enough for its proportion of total Internet traffic to even remain constant. But you can't tell anything by just looking at percentages of the whole like that.
The Feds can regulate immigration, but since general police power isn't an enumerated power, they can't actually police immigrants. In other words, the Feds can define "citizen," "permanent resident," &c., and they can grant privileges to each of these terms based on whatever criteria they come up with, but they don't actually have the constitutional power to send enforcers into the States and apprehend so-called "illegal" immigrants. The most they can do is deny such people recognition as U.S. citizens and the privileges that entails.
And of course the States are free to grant whatever privileges they wish to their inhabitants regardless of what the Feds call such people. If a State wants to allow non-citizens to have drivers licenses (the Feds have no jurisdiction at all over driver licensing), legal "residency" for State- or local-level purposes, &c., they can.
A rule that was brought to you by the same government agency that now wants to ban this substance. Yet you trust them to get it right this time?
Yes.
It could be a honeypot, but since everything done through a site like Silk Road is anonymous except receipt of delivery of items, the only users of the site the FBI would catch would be the drug buyers. Sellers, provided they're not using an OS or browser with the vulnerabilities that the FBI has used to de-anonymize TOR users in the past, and provided they don't do something dumb when they mail a package like reveal their identity, are safe. And since when is the FBI interested in going after drug buyers? Typically they only bust such small-time participants in the drug trade to get them to rat on their dealers, but that obviously won't work when your dealer is anonymous.
Or am I missing something here? My understanding was that Silk Road did things entirely through TOR and Bitcoin, meaning that those ends of the transactions are (excepting user stupidity) completely anonymous.
True. Although tellingly ad banner companies don't pay out to their clients until typically a minimum of $5-10 accrue in their accounts, and of course the deposit is rounded to whole pennies. So those hundredths of a cent per impression are mostly meaningless.
I don't think you can really compare the two. One, in the case of a right-to-know law, the government ignoring it is most likely not the will of the people; in the second case, it sounds like it is doing the exact opposite, following the will of the majority of the people. Two, again in the case of an RTK law, the government ignoring it sounds like pretty blatant self-serving corruption---what kinds of abuse of the citizenry are they hiding by not responding to FOIA requests served upon police departments?---whereas in the second case, this sounds like wilful civil disobedience by a large portion of the citizenry, and their representatives and law enforcement officials, who feel the law is unjust.
There's probably also a constitutional argument to be made in the case of the IIRIRA. Practically every policy the Federal Government tries to force on the states now is an unconstitutional overreach of their explicitly enumerated powers. New Hampshire, and I think this is virtually unique among the 50 state constitutions, has an explicit sovereignty clause: Part I, Art. 7. It's the complement to the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and says that New Hampshire has only ceded sovereignty where explicitly consented to by its people or their legislature. So if this IIRIRA thing wasn't explicitly consented to by New Hampshire's people or its legislature, it's not a "law" here regardless of what the Feds think.
1/10,000,000 of an ounce of gold is currently worth 0.01335 cents. (That's cents, not dollars.) Where is a hundredth of a cent worth anything? What can I buy that's denominated in such small amounts?
In New Hampshire, our state equivalent to FOIA, RSA 91-A, requires that a government entity respond within 5 days to a right-to-know request or they can be hauled into court. RSA 91-A:4, IV. They don't have to provide the information within 5 days, but they at least have to respond saying they have received the request and either say how long it will take to comply with the request, or explain---under a very short list of enumerated exemptions in RSA 91-A:5---why the request is being denied. Denials themselves can of course be appealed. RSA 91-A:7. And RSA 91-A:8 authorizes the courts to award attorneys fees to the complainant if they're successful in demonstrating the agency violated the right-to-know law. Wilful violations by individual bureaucrats can even render them personally liable for all the court costs. RSA 91-A:8, IV.
New York's FOIA law doesn't have remedies similar to this?
We have 400 State Representatives, which currently works out to 3,291 constituents per Rep. We also have, rather than a lieutenant governor, a five-member Executive Council, which holds a check on virtually all decisions that the Governor makes.
All towns in New Hampshire either follow the traditional "New England town meeting" style of direct democracy, or a two-stage system ("SB2 towns") where the town meeting just votes on what appears on the ballot, including the budget, and then the townspeople vote by secret ballot approximately a month later. The thirteen cities however all have city councils that replace direct democracy with a representative-style system.
For those interested in the details:---
New Hampshire has no sales or income tax, but does have a 9% restaurant/hotel tax, an "income and dividends" tax for capital gains over $1,200/year, and two business taxes---one is a typical business profits tax like you'll find in all states, and the other is a sort of "reverse" income tax, in that the business owner pays it rather than the employee. It's minimal though, something like 1/4% of the money paid to the employees.
New Hampshire also has a lot of user fees and professional licenses, although they don't have a general "business license" like many states. Many of the licenses are silly, for example, they license manicurists and a few years ago actually tried to start licensing interior decorators, but the huge number of libertarian activists here (including over a dozen freestaters in the State House) have pushed back against this nonsense and have been slowly wittling down the existing licensing and regulations every year. The state parks are entirely funded by user fees. There are a couple of large campgrounds and ski resorts in New Hampshire that are owned by the State, and these provide the bulk of that funding. New Hampshire also has state liquor stores, and whereas I would certainly like to see their monopoly broken, this is also a major source of revenue for the State and IMO far preferable to another general tax.
The State makes the bulk of their revenue from the above sources. Property taxes are high because virtually all local and school funding comes from local property taxes, plus the counties' budgets (which fund the superior courts, sheriffs, jails, and nursing homes) are entirely funded by property taxes. The State itself gives "block grants" to towns for certain purposes, for example highway maintenance, but it's minimal compared to what the towns have to raise in local property taxes. The biggest money sink in New Hampshire is the school districts---I live in Grafton, a town where our annual budget is under $1M, but the five-town school district gets $2.3M from Grafton. That district's total budget is something like $22M. So the school represents over two-thirds of our annual tax bill. I know people in other towns where it's even worse. So if anyone is looking to lighten their tax burden here, starting with the school district is the way to go.
It's $200/term, which means $100/year---and I seem to remember a rep telling me it's actually about $93 after federal taxes.
The "Massholes bringing socialism here" thing is largely a myth. Most people moving from Massachusetts are in fact economic/political refugees, just like some of the people in this thread. (I left the day Romneycare went into effect, 2007-07-01.) And most settle around the southeastern part of the state, between Manchester/Nashua and the seacoast.
There's an organization called the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, of which I'm a board member; we rate State Representatives each year on their respect for liberty---both economic and personal---based on how they vote on bills with a liberty impact, for example, bills creating or eliminating taxes or fees, restricting or improving firearms freedoms, marijuana decrim/legalization, increasing or decreasing government transparency, and so on.
The most highly rated reps are from the same areas that those Massachusetts refugees tend to settle in. Rockingham County, for example. On the other hand, our most statist reps are from the college towns (Keene, Durham, Hanover) and the economically depressed areas such as Claremont and Berlin, not places "Massholes" are settling in.
We've had a couple of "high-profile" incidents where state reps trying to bring major statism to New Hampshire were recent movers here from the socialist holes to the south of us---a few years ago a rep from the Henniker area (I forget her name) introduced a bill to ban open carry in public buildings; she had moved here from Massachusetts less than a decade earlier. (The NHLA targeted her during reelection and she lost in the primary.) And just recently, Cynthia Chase, a rep who publicly claimed that freestaters moving here are "the single biggest threat" that N.H. faces was revealed to have moved here from Rhode Island herself in 2006 (two years after the FSP chose N.H.). But these few anecdotes don't really lead to the conclusion that Massachusetts movers are ruining the state.
Yet another reason to live in New Hampshire: No sales tax.
I don't think this is a "mistake." Taiwan's status is an open question and Apple is probably choosing whichever side will benefit them more. Where's their bigger customer base, the island or the mainland?
"Right now, it's considered impolite to talk on your cellphone while checking out at the grocery store, or to ignore a face-to-face conversation in favor of texting somebody. But 20 years ago, those actions weren't even on our social radar."
Sure they were. Twenty years ago, if you were in line at the grocery store and rather than paying attention to checking out, you were idly standing there chatting with the person next to you, that would be just as rude as talking on your cell phone. And if you were having a face-to-face conversation with someone and abruptly stopped to turn and interact with someone else, that would be considered just as rude as abruptly stopping to text.
The rude behavior is the same then and now. Distraction, interruption, inattentiveness, and so on. All that's changed is that the technology has allowed the other person in the scenario to become a virtual presence than an actual.
Maybe they can blame their buggy copiers. Didn't this used to be a quality company?
No, it doesn't. The question of the benefits of the vaccine is a scientific question best left up to science, not lawyers, to decide. What this series of cases confirms is simply that people no longer have a right to opt out of vaccination.
New Hampshire recognizes a right of conscience to opt out of vaccines. It's in statute as a religious exemption (RSA 141-C:20-c, II) and backed up by our state constitution, Part I, Arts. 4 and 5. There's a well-organized movement here to improve the law to allow people to opt out of vaccines without resorting to the "all-or-nothing" religious exemption, for example, with HB1555 (2010). Perhaps this family ought to immigrate here and seek asylum like that homeschooling family from Germany.