Analysis of the higher cost of patent encumbered drugs and the research budget of drug companies will show you in no uncertain terms that the state could spend several times the amount of money that the pharmaceutical companies spend on research, and our society would still save money because the price gouging is so brutal on patent encumbered drugs.
Actually the state does spend several times what the drug companies spend, at least in the U.S.. Here most if not all basic research, the kind that leads to new drugs, is funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), The National Science Foundation (NSF) with additional funding coming from groups such as the Department of Agriculture (new crops and crop engineering), and probably the FDA. Certainly the spending of the first two (NIH and NSF) vastly dwarfs the spending of the private drug companies and is focused on developing new cures, new technologies, and the basic understanding of diseases that lead to new cures.
By contrast most of the research funding from drug companies gets spent on things like Calculating Dosages, etc. Studies have shown that their spending on research is generally flat no matter what their profits are while spending on marketing absorbs big gains.
Take AZT for example. AZT was developed by researchers funded by the NIH. Under the auspices of the Byah-Dole act it was then sold to a private company. That company then proceeded to ignore it. Later it was the NIH that discovered that such drugs might be useful for attacking AIDS and sent out a call for people with such drugs. Their call was ignored. It was an NIH researcher who (at his own risk) actually tested the drug on live viruses and proved that it would work. The company then patented their dosage levels in England, and used international IP laws to enforce that "patent" in the U.S. They have also been the ones clamouring to have "their rights" protected against cheaper copies being made in countries where AIDS has ravaged half the population.
Another one, Viagra, also developed by the NIH and "purchased" by a private company under the Byah-Dole act.
For all the hay people make about "Parties" by and large mopst people vote for or against their legislators for local reasons. Joe Liberman and Hilary Clinton have annoyed many, many of whom are too young to vote but their reelection was based upon other factors than these. It is hard to claim based upon this result alone that the issues don't matter or that people locally don't care. What is clear is that their stances on this issue didn't offend enough people for them to lose. Whether it picked up votes is an open question.
Exactly the problem. The very reason that votes are typically retained by the people who conduct elections and copies are not sent home is to avoid vote-selling and worse, intimidation. As a basic upshot consider the problems of a few decently-armed thugs going house-to-house and pointing guns to people's heads to confirm that they voted the right way. Given enough terrified individuals you can easily manipulate a local election if not a national one. If a sufficient number of thugs can be rounded up (and historicaly they have) then this crypto protocol can be an invidation to abuse. Some people might argue that this would be eliminated by making it secret but as long as the vote can be verified then more than one person can verify it.
To my knowledge the FCC has not deregulated what you can do with the airwaves only how much of the airwaves any particular person can "own" by which they reduced the competition for airwaves and futher permitted the already powerful companies to own more. I cannot consider that to be a step in the right direction.
Why are you attempting to reason with my sarcasm? It was intended as just that, sarcasm. I am well aware that the airlines aren't "little guys" and that the airport's lobbying budget (if it even eists) is bound to be quite small.
Perhaps you should stop obsessing about the spelling and realize that it wasn't a conspiracy theory. It was a pointed joke.
No. While the nuances are up the counties a) many of them are using the same machines, and b) vote fraud is often purpetuated locally. In fact if local actors cause fraud in different ways and different places the national pattern will be less obvious and similarly harder to detect. Keep in mind though that the last two U.S. Presidential elections were "decided" by a single county in a single state. In both cases people knew that those counties would be the key areas well in advance so it wasn't an absolute surprise.
When you think about it though, national fraud (e.g. a Presidential Election) is of a different character than local fraud. It also requies a much larger base of people and resources to pull off. Local actors messing with machines (and they are not that hard to mess with) are more likely. Local elections typically have smaller margins and the payoff can be a lot closer to home. A single unscrupulous bagman might swing a mayoral election and get the district re-zoned in his favor or swing a County election and get the new highway contract. Surprisingly large amounts of money and corruption re in the offing in local elections. People just spend a great deal of time focusing on the national stuff.
Clearly the Airport officials were not paying the right people enough lobbying money. I mean the FCC is perfectly willing to accept bogous legal and technical arguments for deregulation of the airwaves. And it has been happy to digest bogous arguments against community wireless. Ditto the bogous arguments for the Broadcast flag. One can only assume that Logan Airport's lobbying budget is too small or has been misspent.
Additional State info can be found at VoteTrustUSA vtUSA has good links to individual state and local groups as well as to programs that one can become involved in such as
Verified Voting has long had The Verifier up on their site. This provides an interactive interface that gives more detailed info often on a county-by-county level. In many U.S. States the nuances of machines chosen and how they're deployed are up to the counties not the states. This results in an interesting patchwork of systems being run (often quite differently) under general and variable state laws.
Firstly the Pentagon shouldn't have a "message". The very idea that they have an outlook that is different from that of the American People and that said outlook must be promoted to the American people is wrong. Individual subgroups of the American People are free to have divergent opinions but the very purpose of the pentagon is to serve all Americans and to answer to us not convince us to answer to them.
Secondly the monitoring of blogs smacks of censorship. If I write on my Blog that Donald Rumsfeld is a dumbass who shouldn't be where he is (I just did) then will that be noted somewhere? Will the buy irvusucks.com so they can blog against me? Will the Pentagon maintain a "news file" on me for their own uses? Will the contents of said file be used against me at some point, say if I run for public office, or seek a job that the pentagon can influence?
During the heyday of the 50's much of America was really run by the head of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover employed "special agents" that spied on everyone who had "political involvement" this included people like the president. He used those files as part of blackmail campaigns or to track the ones who were "disloyal" I can't help but feel that this is one more step on the way to that again.
I wonder if Rumsfeld is also a transvestite?
Lastly the use of "surrogates" (read mouthpieces or stand-ins) makes this fundamentally unacceptable. Not only will they have a message that they wish to convince us of, they will be disguising the source of that message by having it said by others. Thus giving the appearence that the message does not come from them. That isn't just propaganda, that's lying, decieving, deluding people.
The Pentagon already has spokespeople, and well-paid ones at that. They already have "aligned" groups such as the VFW who can always be counted on to preach 'their' message. This is a step over the line from serving and protecting the American people, to ordering them around.
They alredy tried this with Talon News and it failed then. Then again, perhaps that was the warmup.
This is, bar none, the most childish and sensitive administration that we've ever had, and it bodes ill for us. From the start I opposed this war. From the start I also noticed that the Administration was desperate, desperate to get "their" side out. This wasn't just in the run-up to war this was afterwords.
Towards the end of the Vietnam war, Cheney and Rumsfeld were in the Nixon administration then, the Pentagon took to engaging in the "5'Oclock Follies" a daily press-conference during which they announced hills taken, napalm dropped, anything, anything that was a 'victory' no matter how small. They did this because the public was already agains the war, a war which the pentagon wasn't winning, and they were desperate to change that. This administration started the war that way. From day 1 they focused on announcing the toppling of statues and the reopening of hospitals (even though said hospitals were swimming in raw sewage) and of doggedly insisting that "things were getting better" even before Iraq was looted burned and pillaged.
It's not clear whether they intended this to prepare for the future losses by sterting the follies early or that they believed Americans had grown so short-sighted that we wouldn't pay attention for any longer than one news cycle. Without our daily sweetner of victory we would lose faith fast. They may be right.
From the start they also spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on negative press. Any criticism from anyone no matter how small was reacted too negatively, vigorously so. Not even Nixon at his darkest days seemed so sensitive to any criticism. During World War II FDR subscribed to Newspapers that did nothing but criticise him, and Eisenhower complained bitterly both about press reports claiming that they were losing, and
Fair enough. My goal was not to assume the existence of a single homogeneous "European Legal Tradition" so much as to make clear that what I was saying was based upon American legal traditions and does not directly map to any concepts in European legal traditions that I am aware of.
But this is still based upn a site that you chose to access or a virus that you run on your machine. This is (legally and philosophically) a categorical difference from scanning the radio dial randomly and more importantly uses only your resources not society's resources as a whole.
I'm presuming that you have other things to do with your day. One simple way to re-cast this question is in terms of costs. I presume that the justifications being offered for the reports are "finding time wasters" and "saving the company money".
The way that I would frame your response is to calculate how much these reports would cost in terms of:
Your time to develop these reports, maintain the system, print them out, sort them, etc.
The managers time to recieve, read and digest the reports, decide whether to fire anyone, have talks with employees about buying tickets online, etc.
The cost of hardware to purchase or maintain any specialized software and hardware for this alone.
And finally the cost in terms of employee morale and productivity once they know they are in an office that spends so much time monitoring their imdb searches.
Many companies (especially small ones) that I know of have cast the issue in this light and realized that it just isn't worth it. The costs both fiscal and morale-wize of building and maintining a system of reports and investigations far exceeds the value of curbing a few extra clicks. Especially if Pr0n is already being filtered out in large measure.
This is especially true if the employer is smart enough to be managing people in terms of the work they get done not the time they spend. In that event if they really get addicted to surfing online then it will show up in their work performance anyway at about the same time that any weekly TPS report would catch it. You said that this has been used in some disciplinary actions so far without the daily reports. I presume from that that "caught" the individuals through other means and then a report was run not the other way around. This is more true when the "problem" is just spending a little too much time looking at the Fantasy Football scores.
More than likely such reports, after a few initial: "You've been making fun of me online!" moments will end up sitting idle on the managers' desks and would only be read after an employee is caught anyway (Except of course for that one Boss from Hell who has nothing to do but spy). In that event all the time, money, and paper, taken to print them out weekly would be wasted.
Additionally you might calculate the expected loss of work days. There was one study performed (don't have the link right in front of me) that calculated the number of lost and sick days taken as a result of draconian internet policies. You see many workers have small errands that they like to do online during the day (e.g. gift shopping or some quick bill-paying). The study's authors found that companies where such usage was banned (or heavily monitored) had more workers taking whole sick days to "run these errands" at home rather than taking ten minutes here or there to do them at work. The net loss to the company was higher than if they had just let the errands be run at work.
A parent was quoted as saying that her son feels safer now and that she'd witnessed enough "near collisions"
Is it her son who feels safer or her?
Seriously I doubt her kid is so fearful that he's afraid of playing tag. Or if he is then it's his mother who has issues. I had a friend like that in school. His mother made him wash his hands ten times a day to guard himself agains anything and everything. As a result he became a nervous wreck that she then felt the need to fill with (prescription) drugs so he would 'relax'. At that point it became a vicious cycle. She got nervious, he got nervous, she got more nervious because he was nervous, etc.
IMHO some parents need to realize that their kids are far less fragile than they are, especially once they get out of diapers (nappys) if their parents ever let that happen.
At least in the U.S. The justification for curbs on foul language on the Public airwaves is thjat they are "coming to you" and using up a public resource into the bargain. The argument is "the children might accudentally tune in and do we want our scarce public resources (airwaves) being devoted to noneducational filth (with a special exception for most TV)?
This argument doesn't map onto the proposed situation because a) the broadcasts are not "over the air" but on a webiste that must be willingly accessed by the viewer (moreso than on a TV). b) the broadcaster is not "filling up scarece tubes" in any meaningful sense. The presence of video blogger A does not prevent video blogger B from setting up shop. Therefore there is no conflict and no justification.
That said this is based upon American legal and social traditions not the European ones where all hate speech is banned except hate speech based upon religion or national origin.
Hormel has made a point of suing many of the great defamers of their meat(ish) product. My personal favorite is when they sued Jim Henson for the character Spa'am leader of the Pig Pirates. The judge dismissed the case saying: "The American public can tell the difference between a puppet and a lunchmeat." (see Spam Bobbleheads, Spam Costumes and Spam Shorts. Spam Underwear has also been sold on occasion but I have yet to find any online.
You can understand why the company puts in so much effort to protect the good name though. After all Spam (Scattered Parts of Anonymous Mammals) is important to many people. Both Hawaii and Alaska love Spam. As has been noted about Alaska:
Spam® is like Alaska's only Congressman Don Young. Everyone makes fun of him, but he always wins by a landslide even though no one will ever admit voting for him. That's the story with Spam®. Nobody will admit eating it, but somebody is out there buying over 2,000 cans a day in Alaska.
At no point in the article does Reuters say that the game is actually being used to train terrorists. What they say is that the game puts the players in the position of carrying out an attack on a U.S. Tanker. Such an attack, in real life, would be terrorism. It also notes U.S. made games that put the players in the position of blowing up Iranian Nuclear facilities. But it does not suggest that they are being used to train Special Forces operatives in any way.
What is happening here is part of a long-running fight in the state of Maryland. The State elections director Linda Lamone. Linda Lamone has been nicknamed Ms. Diebold in some circles because of her tireless efforts on behalf of the company. Two years ago there was a massive push in the state house and senate for voter-verified paper records which Linda killed. Under Maryland's laws she has a great deal of power and independence.
Lamone was appointed by Democrats in the State House and has been backed by them even as she keeps giving them Hideous advice. Maryland's governor is a Republican and a great deal of this shoving back and forth over the machines has devolved to party wrangling. This is the interesting part about the whole e-voting situation. In some states poor systems are being instated and backed by Republicans (Ohio, California, etc.) In other states the very same systems are being doggedly defended by Democrats (Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc.). In some states such as Maryland it is Republican governors who are taking the lead in cleaning things up and in others it is Democratic governors like Bill Richardson of New Mexico who are taking charge. Ultimately its not about party nationally but local party power. Who ever was in power was sweet talked by the manufacturers who, at the end of the day, just want the billions of tax dollars that Bob Ney made us spend on this.
There are some great videos of Linda Lamone on Youtube:
Over My Dead Body This is my personal favorite. In it she says that the state will have paper records over her dead body.
I'M The boss" In this video Linda Lamone says "Im the boss and the buck stops here" essentially claiming credit (then) for all elections in the state. She has now reversed and said that the state is "decentralized"
Shocked Linda lamone is shocked shocked that Diebold would use the same master password for all machines in the U.S.
Now is the time for/.ers and anyone else who favors Net Neutrality to Speak Out While it would be nice to sit back and let google fight the fioght for us that is not how this works. If we want something done, if we want to live in a democracy, we have to take action. Action does not mean posting on/. or angrily croaking amongst ourselves while the water boils. It means speaking to others, explaining net-neutrality to our neighbors and *gasp* taking a hand in politics.
Here's how:
Prepare yourself by:
Familiarize youselves with the issues at hand. Wikipedia has a good piece on the topic.
Identify the specific legislation at issue, in this case the major bill in question is (I believe) S 2686 brought to you by Senators Ted (Tube boy) Stevens and Daniel Inouye. Ted has been in office for 37 years and Daniel for 43. Daniel is not the longest serving senator. Do not be fooled by the erroneous wikipedia entry stating that the bill was defeated by the Senate Commerce and Science Committee. Stevens and Inouye head that committee.
Contact your Senator and ask them where they stand on Net neutrality as you do explain why neutrality is a good thing and why they should support it (see below). You can identify them online. You can contact them via e-mail, smail mail, fax, or by telephone. I myself favor the phone followed up by a letter. Over the phone you can ask questions and get more info.
Contact your House Representative. Although this is a senate bill there is a house bill (H5417 above) on this issue and they had better support it.
Write a letter to your local paper. It is a truism that most people in the world do not read/. Many of those people get their opinion fodder from the local newspaper, and more people read the letters to the editor than any other part of the paper. This can likely be done via e-mail and can sway a lot of minds if done right. Those minds can then in turn act for net neutrality.
Tell other people. Surely you know at least one other person who hasn't heard about this threat to their ability to do business and/or just do what they want online as they always have. This person may be friends, family, coworkers, etc. It doesn't matter just tell them.
Repeat the above steps as often as possible.
In all cases be clear, firm, and polite. Net neutrality is important. Make it clear to any elected official that you will vote based upon their stance and donate money accordingly. You get bonus points if they are up for election this year (Senate).
Keep in mind that you will probably not reach them directly. Most likely your call or letter will be directed to an aide. That aide's job is to tell the individual what to think about an issue. The aide will be loyal to their boss but may be more easy to sway (they don't have to appear omnicient). If you make it clear to them why neutrality is important and why a non-neutral internet will cost them then you can get somewhere.
This tone also goes for letters and for the public.
The hearing itself is Available Online. It is interesting to note that no Civil Liberties groups or technically minded individuals were invited to testify. The speakers included 1 member of congress, Alberto (I want your DNA and your thoughts) Gonzales, The president of the national center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Four Bank and Credit Card executives.
Granted the hearing was before the Senate Committee on Banking Housing and Urban Affairs But if they are going to talk about what ISP's should do and what privacy people should give up to make that happen you would think that they would want to hear from the people involved.
Interestingly, rather than focusing on what new privacy-invasive efforts are needed Mr. Allan sounds an optimistic note about how successful they've been given what they have. It seems that existing information is useful and, as he points out, you can't arrest all child pornographers but you can drive them underground and through a coalition of banks refusing to transfer payments, make it unprofitable.
I am quite leery of banks monitoring my transactions for things that "look like" child porn and I'd hope they'd have a method for clearing accounts in the case of identity theft. (What kind of dumbass uses their own credit card to commit crimes?)
I may be the only one but I read this as another one of the Administrations knee-jerk dictator moments. When presented with anything they demand more retention of info and less privacy even when the people who devote their lives to fighting that thing, don't.
The choice of this committee is a bit creepy given the presence of Rick Santorum better known by the statement that the right to privacy "doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution"
He also made subsequent statmenets blaming Katrina Victims for their plight.
Possibly but that depends upon how the city sets it up. Look at it this way, you pay taxes to the city to collect garbage. That garbage may then be sold by the city to a production company. In that event the money paid for it may be used to fund the garbage collection reducing taxes. In that event you may not need to pay twice which would make sense because this is turning it into a resource.
From what I recall of CA's "deregulation", which was really moving regulations around, price caps were placed on power generators but not on the sale of the power, and the two were decoupled, ie generators could not be sellers and visa versa. At the same tyme as those rolling blackouts years ago there was a wind farm that was able to produce several megawatts of power that sat there ideal because there weren't any power transmission lines installed so the power could be transmitted. Now if the Govanator has his way with the million solar roofs the state will be more independent for electricity. His hydrogen initiative is also a good idea.
Solar panels everywhere is a good idea. But w.r.t. to the idled plants. I'm nt familiar with the wind farm that you mentioned but I am familiar with the fact that some well connected plants were taken offline deliberately because the resulting increase in power costs made the other plants more profitable. The ensuing "rolling blackouts" only increased the prices further thus making the companies that had caused the problems richer.
True but PVs can be "made to grow" on roofs. And as many people who are Off the grid can tell you people can and do make what electricity they use, and without those miles of electrical lines. Actually that's why some go off the grid, they build a home where there aren't any power lines and it can be cheaper to generate your own electricity than it would cost to have power lines installed.
Trua and we would be better off if more people were off the grid or supplemented the grid with local power. But that idea is nothing new it just never seems to get enough traction.
No it wasn't any free market that made gouging possible it was government granted monopolies that made gouging possible. A free market would of allowed anyone and everyone with the wherewithall, ability, to come in and create their own infrastructure. Why oh why do people mix up a freemarket with government granted monopolies?
As I recall there weren't any government granted monopolies. Production and distribution networks were private and the expectation was that deregulation would produce equal competition and lower prices. The problem with this is that reality is not so easy. You run int investement and physical space limitations. Investment in either power generation or transmission on an industrial scale is not free. It requires significant capital investments that few can come up with. Those that could are often already in the market or unwilling to do so because the exsiting players are so far ahead.
The second issue is primarily for transmission. Physically we don't have room for an infinite number of transmission lines in the ground or the air any more than we have room for an infinite number of parallel road systems. For that reason you cannot have real "pure" competition in the transmission market. Sooner or later there is no space for new lines and a large number of parallel grids would choke out space for water lines, sewer lines, or clear skies. As such the promises of market deregulation, especially with any transmission service, fall short.
No. Plants can cross-pollinate without producing seeds. This can be done by cuttings or by other methods some of them accidental. They are not "breeding" but the genes are being passed on. Moreover seeds can blow which can create cyclical problems. If seed from one farmer's field colonizes another then those plants may grow instead of the viable plants. Seeds harvested from that will look the same as viable seeds save that they are sterile. The Farmer in question will then not know he or she has a problem until the next year when some percentage of their planted seeds simply don't grow.
Not all GE crops are set to not breed as well. In some cases soy crops that have been modified to produce drugs can in fact breed and, when they get loose, cross pollinate with other breeds.
Some of these like The Jungle have always been available on Project Gutenberg. Many of them are also available for free offline at your local public library. Said institutions are often the places that spend the most effort fighting against banned books and doing so on total budgets smaller than Google's petty cash.
That's not to knowck what Google is doing. They are doing a good service here but let's not neglect the people who fight the fight every day of the week not just once a year.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the state does spend several times what the drug companies spend, at least in the U.S.. Here most if not all basic research, the kind that leads to new drugs, is funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), The National Science Foundation (NSF) with additional funding coming from groups such as the Department of Agriculture (new crops and crop engineering), and probably the FDA. Certainly the spending of the first two (NIH and NSF) vastly dwarfs the spending of the private drug companies and is focused on developing new cures, new technologies, and the basic understanding of diseases that lead to new cures.
By contrast most of the research funding from drug companies gets spent on things like Calculating Dosages, etc. Studies have shown that their spending on research is generally flat no matter what their profits are while spending on marketing absorbs big gains.
Take AZT for example. AZT was developed by researchers funded by the NIH. Under the auspices of the Byah-Dole act it was then sold to a private company. That company then proceeded to ignore it. Later it was the NIH that discovered that such drugs might be useful for attacking AIDS and sent out a call for people with such drugs. Their call was ignored. It was an NIH researcher who (at his own risk) actually tested the drug on live viruses and proved that it would work. The company then patented their dosage levels in England, and used international IP laws to enforce that "patent" in the U.S. They have also been the ones clamouring to have "their rights" protected against cheaper copies being made in countries where AIDS has ravaged half the population.
Another one, Viagra, also developed by the NIH and "purchased" by a private company under the Byah-Dole act.
For all the hay people make about "Parties" by and large mopst people vote for or against their legislators for local reasons. Joe Liberman and Hilary Clinton have annoyed many, many of whom are too young to vote but their reelection was based upon other factors than these. It is hard to claim based upon this result alone that the issues don't matter or that people locally don't care. What is clear is that their stances on this issue didn't offend enough people for them to lose. Whether it picked up votes is an open question.
Exactly the problem. The very reason that votes are typically retained by the people who conduct elections and copies are not sent home is to avoid vote-selling and worse, intimidation. As a basic upshot consider the problems of a few decently-armed thugs going house-to-house and pointing guns to people's heads to confirm that they voted the right way. Given enough terrified individuals you can easily manipulate a local election if not a national one. If a sufficient number of thugs can be rounded up (and historicaly they have) then this crypto protocol can be an invidation to abuse. Some people might argue that this would be eliminated by making it secret but as long as the vote can be verified then more than one person can verify it.
To my knowledge the FCC has not deregulated what you can do with the airwaves only how much of the airwaves any particular person can "own" by which they reduced the competition for airwaves and futher permitted the already powerful companies to own more. I cannot consider that to be a step in the right direction.
Yeah, back when each flush cost a quarter they were absolutely swimming in it :)
Why are you attempting to reason with my sarcasm? It was intended as just that, sarcasm. I am well aware that the airlines aren't "little guys" and that the airport's lobbying budget (if it even eists) is bound to be quite small.
Perhaps you should stop obsessing about the spelling and realize that it wasn't a conspiracy theory. It was a pointed joke.
No. While the nuances are up the counties a) many of them are using the same machines, and b) vote fraud is often purpetuated locally. In fact if local actors cause fraud in different ways and different places the national pattern will be less obvious and similarly harder to detect. Keep in mind though that the last two U.S. Presidential elections were "decided" by a single county in a single state. In both cases people knew that those counties would be the key areas well in advance so it wasn't an absolute surprise.
When you think about it though, national fraud (e.g. a Presidential Election) is of a different character than local fraud. It also requies a much larger base of people and resources to pull off. Local actors messing with machines (and they are not that hard to mess with) are more likely. Local elections typically have smaller margins and the payoff can be a lot closer to home. A single unscrupulous bagman might swing a mayoral election and get the district re-zoned in his favor or swing a County election and get the new highway contract. Surprisingly large amounts of money and corruption re in the offing in local elections. People just spend a great deal of time focusing on the national stuff.
Clearly the Airport officials were not paying the right people enough lobbying money. I mean the FCC is perfectly willing to accept bogous legal and technical arguments for deregulation of the airwaves. And it has been happy to digest bogous arguments against community wireless. Ditto the bogous arguments for the Broadcast flag. One can only assume that Logan Airport's lobbying budget is too small or has been misspent.
Additional State info can be found at VoteTrustUSA vtUSA has good links to individual state and local groups as well as to programs that one can become involved in such as
Voters Unite is also a good resource especially for lists of State Groups, Failures grouped by individual vendors, and a howto on helping entitled Pray With Your Feet.
Verified Voting has long had The Verifier up on their site. This provides an interactive interface that gives more detailed info often on a county-by-county level. In many U.S. States the nuances of machines chosen and how they're deployed are up to the counties not the states. This results in an interesting patchwork of systems being run (often quite differently) under general and variable state laws.
During the heyday of the 50's much of America was really run by the head of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover employed "special agents" that spied on everyone who had "political involvement" this included people like the president. He used those files as part of blackmail campaigns or to track the ones who were "disloyal" I can't help but feel that this is one more step on the way to that again.
I wonder if Rumsfeld is also a transvestite?
The Pentagon already has spokespeople, and well-paid ones at that. They already have "aligned" groups such as the VFW who can always be counted on to preach 'their' message. This is a step over the line from serving and protecting the American people, to ordering them around.
This is, bar none, the most childish and sensitive administration that we've ever had, and it bodes ill for us. From the start I opposed this war. From the start I also noticed that the Administration was desperate, desperate to get "their" side out. This wasn't just in the run-up to war this was afterwords.
Towards the end of the Vietnam war, Cheney and Rumsfeld were in the Nixon administration then, the Pentagon took to engaging in the "5'Oclock Follies" a daily press-conference during which they announced hills taken, napalm dropped, anything, anything that was a 'victory' no matter how small. They did this because the public was already agains the war, a war which the pentagon wasn't winning, and they were desperate to change that. This administration started the war that way. From day 1 they focused on announcing the toppling of statues and the reopening of hospitals (even though said hospitals were swimming in raw sewage) and of doggedly insisting that "things were getting better" even before Iraq was looted burned and pillaged.
It's not clear whether they intended this to prepare for the future losses by sterting the follies early or that they believed Americans had grown so short-sighted that we wouldn't pay attention for any longer than one news cycle. Without our daily sweetner of victory we would lose faith fast. They may be right.
From the start they also spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on negative press. Any criticism from anyone no matter how small was reacted too negatively, vigorously so. Not even Nixon at his darkest days seemed so sensitive to any criticism. During World War II FDR subscribed to Newspapers that did nothing but criticise him, and Eisenhower complained bitterly both about press reports claiming that they were losing, and
Fair enough. My goal was not to assume the existence of a single homogeneous "European Legal Tradition" so much as to make clear that what I was saying was based upon American legal traditions and does not directly map to any concepts in European legal traditions that I am aware of.
But this is still based upn a site that you chose to access or a virus that you run on your machine. This is (legally and philosophically) a categorical difference from scanning the radio dial randomly and more importantly uses only your resources not society's resources as a whole.
The way that I would frame your response is to calculate how much these reports would cost in terms of:
Many companies (especially small ones) that I know of have cast the issue in this light and realized that it just isn't worth it. The costs both fiscal and morale-wize of building and maintining a system of reports and investigations far exceeds the value of curbing a few extra clicks. Especially if Pr0n is already being filtered out in large measure.
This is especially true if the employer is smart enough to be managing people in terms of the work they get done not the time they spend. In that event if they really get addicted to surfing online then it will show up in their work performance anyway at about the same time that any weekly TPS report would catch it. You said that this has been used in some disciplinary actions so far without the daily reports. I presume from that that "caught" the individuals through other means and then a report was run not the other way around. This is more true when the "problem" is just spending a little too much time looking at the Fantasy Football scores.
More than likely such reports, after a few initial: "You've been making fun of me online!" moments will end up sitting idle on the managers' desks and would only be read after an employee is caught anyway (Except of course for that one Boss from Hell who has nothing to do but spy). In that event all the time, money, and paper, taken to print them out weekly would be wasted.
Additionally you might calculate the expected loss of work days. There was one study performed (don't have the link right in front of me) that calculated the number of lost and sick days taken as a result of draconian internet policies. You see many workers have small errands that they like to do online during the day (e.g. gift shopping or some quick bill-paying). The study's authors found that companies where such usage was banned (or heavily monitored) had more workers taking whole sick days to "run these errands" at home rather than taking ten minutes here or there to do them at work. The net loss to the company was higher than if they had just let the errands be run at work.
Is it her son who feels safer or her?
Seriously I doubt her kid is so fearful that he's afraid of playing tag. Or if he is then it's his mother who has issues. I had a friend like that in school. His mother made him wash his hands ten times a day to guard himself agains anything and everything. As a result he became a nervous wreck that she then felt the need to fill with (prescription) drugs so he would 'relax'. At that point it became a vicious cycle. She got nervious, he got nervous, she got more nervious because he was nervous, etc.
IMHO some parents need to realize that their kids are far less fragile than they are, especially once they get out of diapers (nappys) if their parents ever let that happen.
At least in the U.S. The justification for curbs on foul language on the Public airwaves is thjat they are "coming to you" and using up a public resource into the bargain. The argument is "the children might accudentally tune in and do we want our scarce public resources (airwaves) being devoted to noneducational filth (with a special exception for most TV)?
This argument doesn't map onto the proposed situation because a) the broadcasts are not "over the air" but on a webiste that must be willingly accessed by the viewer (moreso than on a TV). b) the broadcaster is not "filling up scarece tubes" in any meaningful sense. The presence of video blogger A does not prevent video blogger B from setting up shop. Therefore there is no conflict and no justification.
That said this is based upon American legal and social traditions not the European ones where all hate speech is banned except hate speech based upon religion or national origin.
You can understand why the company puts in so much effort to protect the good name though. After all Spam (Scattered Parts of Anonymous Mammals) is important to many people. Both Hawaii and Alaska love Spam. As has been noted about Alaska:
For more tasty info on the Simulated Pieces of Appalling Mutants see The Amazing and Fabulous Spam Site which includes a 300 DPI Scan of SPAM
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It's funny to see how much effort the company puts into targeting the brand given that Spam is so important to
At no point in the article does Reuters say that the game is actually being used to train terrorists. What they say is that the game puts the players in the position of carrying out an attack on a U.S. Tanker. Such an attack, in real life, would be terrorism. It also notes U.S. made games that put the players in the position of blowing up Iranian Nuclear facilities. But it does not suggest that they are being used to train Special Forces operatives in any way.
The post summary is wrong.
Lamone was appointed by Democrats in the State House and has been backed by them even as she keeps giving them Hideous advice. Maryland's governor is a Republican and a great deal of this shoving back and forth over the machines has devolved to party wrangling. This is the interesting part about the whole e-voting situation. In some states poor systems are being instated and backed by Republicans (Ohio, California, etc.) In other states the very same systems are being doggedly defended by Democrats (Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc.). In some states such as Maryland it is Republican governors who are taking the lead in cleaning things up and in others it is Democratic governors like Bill Richardson of New Mexico who are taking charge. Ultimately its not about party nationally but local party power. Who ever was in power was sweet talked by the manufacturers who, at the end of the day, just want the billions of tax dollars that Bob Ney made us spend on this.
There are some great videos of Linda Lamone on Youtube:
Here's how:
In all cases be clear, firm, and polite. Net neutrality is important. Make it clear to any elected official that you will vote based upon their stance and donate money accordingly. You get bonus points if they are up for election this year (Senate).
Keep in mind that you will probably not reach them directly. Most likely your call or letter will be directed to an aide. That aide's job is to tell the individual what to think about an issue. The aide will be loyal to their boss but may be more easy to sway (they don't have to appear omnicient). If you make it clear to them why neutrality is important and why a non-neutral internet will cost them then you can get somewhere.
This tone also goes for letters and for the public.
The hearing itself is Available Online. It is interesting to note that no Civil Liberties groups or technically minded individuals were invited to testify. The speakers included 1 member of congress, Alberto (I want your DNA and your thoughts) Gonzales, The president of the national center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Four Bank and Credit Card executives.
Granted the hearing was before the Senate Committee on Banking Housing and Urban Affairs But if they are going to talk about what ISP's should do and what privacy people should give up to make that happen you would think that they would want to hear from the people involved.
Then again it appears from my initial reading of the other statements that Gonzales was more or less alone in his demand for other info. The statmenets of Senator Richard Shelby (Committee Chairman), and of Mr. Ernie Allen Head of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children do not mention additional data retention. Both focus on the Financial Coalition against Child Pornography.
Interestingly, rather than focusing on what new privacy-invasive efforts are needed Mr. Allan sounds an optimistic note about how successful they've been given what they have. It seems that existing information is useful and, as he points out, you can't arrest all child pornographers but you can drive them underground and through a coalition of banks refusing to transfer payments, make it unprofitable.
I am quite leery of banks monitoring my transactions for things that "look like" child porn and I'd hope they'd have a method for clearing accounts in the case of identity theft. (What kind of dumbass uses their own credit card to commit crimes?)
I may be the only one but I read this as another one of the Administrations knee-jerk dictator moments. When presented with anything they demand more retention of info and less privacy even when the people who devote their lives to fighting that thing, don't.
The choice of this committee is a bit creepy given the presence of Rick Santorum better known by the statement that the right to privacy "doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution"
He also made subsequent statmenets blaming Katrina Victims for their plight.
Possibly but that depends upon how the city sets it up. Look at it this way, you pay taxes to the city to collect garbage. That garbage may then be sold by the city to a production company. In that event the money paid for it may be used to fund the garbage collection reducing taxes. In that event you may not need to pay twice which would make sense because this is turning it into a resource.
Solar panels everywhere is a good idea. But w.r.t. to the idled plants. I'm nt familiar with the wind farm that you mentioned but I am familiar with the fact that some well connected plants were taken offline deliberately because the resulting increase in power costs made the other plants more profitable. The ensuing "rolling blackouts" only increased the prices further thus making the companies that had caused the problems richer.
Trua and we would be better off if more people were off the grid or supplemented the grid with local power. But that idea is nothing new it just never seems to get enough traction.
As I recall there weren't any government granted monopolies. Production and distribution networks were private and the expectation was that deregulation would produce equal competition and lower prices. The problem with this is that reality is not so easy. You run int investement and physical space limitations. Investment in either power generation or transmission on an industrial scale is not free. It requires significant capital investments that few can come up with. Those that could are often already in the market or unwilling to do so because the exsiting players are so far ahead.
The second issue is primarily for transmission. Physically we don't have room for an infinite number of transmission lines in the ground or the air any more than we have room for an infinite number of parallel road systems. For that reason you cannot have real "pure" competition in the transmission market. Sooner or later there is no space for new lines and a large number of parallel grids would choke out space for water lines, sewer lines, or clear skies. As such the promises of market deregulation, especially with any transmission service, fall short.
No. Plants can cross-pollinate without producing seeds. This can be done by cuttings or by other methods some of them accidental. They are not "breeding" but the genes are being passed on. Moreover seeds can blow which can create cyclical problems. If seed from one farmer's field colonizes another then those plants may grow instead of the viable plants. Seeds harvested from that will look the same as viable seeds save that they are sterile. The Farmer in question will then not know he or she has a problem until the next year when some percentage of their planted seeds simply don't grow.
Not all GE crops are set to not breed as well. In some cases soy crops that have been modified to produce drugs can in fact breed and, when they get loose, cross pollinate with other breeds.
Some of these like The Jungle have always been available on Project Gutenberg. Many of them are also available for free offline at your local public library. Said institutions are often the places that spend the most effort fighting against banned books and doing so on total budgets smaller than Google's petty cash.
That's not to knowck what Google is doing. They are doing a good service here but let's not neglect the people who fight the fight every day of the week not just once a year.