Because a government, any government, even a democracy or republic, might abuse its (effective) monopoly on force, the best, if not only, solution for society is to make sure the government does not have a monopoly on, or even predomenence of, force.
An interesting concept, no? If I, a responsible citizen who would never consider murdering anyone, want to own an armed fighter plane, why should I not be permitted to own one? Fighter plane or not, there is still zero probability that I am going to murder anyone. Now, admittedly this concept runs into some problems when using extreme examples such as nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. I don't know what to say about it; this is really taking Franklin's liberty versus security quote to the extreme. Perhaps the best system would be to allow citizens to have everything that law enforcement does, and limit certain things to the Army, Navy, and Air Force (institutions intended to protect the nation itself, not to enforce the nation's laws)? But then, that doesn't work for encryption because these same organizations would still be allowed to have a monopoly on that.
What a dilemma!. It doesn't work for the government to be able to monopolize whatever they declare to be a weapon. The government has too much power in this case. Apparently, it also doesn't work for citizens to have whatever they want because unsuitable individuals might get their hands on (and use) things that could destroy the entire country. The government does not have enough power in this case. This is when it becomes clear that the Constitution wasn't built with weapons of mass destruction in mind. Citizens can't keep government power in check without enough firepower to back them up, but the government cannot enforce basic laws if citizens have too much firepower. I can safely assume that the government won't release chemical weapons on innocent people or destroy entire parts of the country with nuclear weapons, but when it comes to things such as herding 'subversive' individuals into internment camps protected by government personnel with machine guns that I can't have, the line gets blurrier.
Every patriot probably has their own idea of what the government will and will not resort to in its thirst for power. Perhaps the real problem is that the government is deciding where to draw the line. Obviously my initial post was rather unrealistic, but we have to do better to prevent the relationship between government and its citizens from turning into a case of the haves and have-nots. It will be incredibly difficult, especially since most Americans have probably never seen the Bill of Rights. Who makes the decisions that government cannot be trusted to make?
Did you type that post on a Transmeta desktop system? Now, I know this isn't pertinent to a discussion of mainstream systems, but I cannot find a place to purchase Transmeta hardware outside of buying an entire system. Anyone know where to buy Transmeta processors and the mainboards to support them?
These weapons you speak of have likely always been readily available to criminals who needed them. They absolutely should be readily available to the masses as well, assuming the government in question possesses these tools.
One of the problems that I see lately is the fact that governments want to take things out of society, such as guns, but also want to keep those things for themselves. Will the US government use backdoored encryption for their own electronic communications? I highly doubt it, and each time something like this happens it makes it that much easier for other freedoms to be taken away from the citizenry. In the US at least, the government is supposed to be upholding the Constitution, not writing legislation that simply makes people happy. It's simply not the job of our politicians to make sure that people aren't wringing their hands over the fact that their next door neighbor owns powerful weapons or sends encrypted messages that can't be read by the 'authorities' because they refuse to use backdoor-equipped software.
Does the government have backdoors on our safes? Do the cops have a key to my appartment's door?
No, but if they get a warrant they can have your apartment door opened by your landlord and take that safe to a locksmith who can break it open if they can convince a judge that it contains evidence. What's different about encryption is that even if they do get a warrant to look at the data contained in an encrypted file, they can't break the encryption with current technology (at least in a reasonable timeframe). There's nobody to give them the key but yourself right now, and they can't force you to give it to them. Not a solution for a government that wants total control.
Those who set up free porn sites realize quickly that bandwidth/image protection is an essential part of site development. Fortunately, Apache and.htaccess allows you to prevent hotlinking, at least with browsers that pass along the HTTP referrer.
For people that pay the extra $$$, make available 160-256 VBR Ogg files, so the music you get doesn't sound like crap
Sure, 128Kbps MP3's aren't great, but if the songs you are getting sound that bad, I doubt that a higher bitrate is going to make much difference. A lot of MP3.com artists lack the equipment and/or technical knowledge to produce songs that sound as good as those produced by professionals. I wonder if they could justify a 50-100% increase in bandwidth consumption when a lot of artists don't know what they are doing in the first place.
You have a good reason to use Windows, so just use it; don't make your poor son suffer just because you have a personal problem with it. Yours is a perfect application for dual booting because you simply have no need to run two OS's at the same time (unless you also have an uptime fetish). I vote for the dual boot option as a few minutes for reboots won't kill you; after all, dual booting is the best option for your son's needs.
Re:Servers were never allowed out on cable
on
Broadband Crackdown
·
· Score: 1
The @Home customer agreements never allowed servers, particularly web servers.
Not true. I subscribed to @Home on February 8, 1997. The subscriber agreement I was issued stated the following under "Service Characteristics":
b)FTP/HTTP Service Setup. Customer should be aware that when using the Service to access the Internet or any other online network or service, there are certain applications, such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server or HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) server, which may be used to allow other Service users and Internet users to gain access to Customer's computer. If Customer chooses to run such applications, Customer should take the appropriate security measures. Neither TCI nor @Home Network shall have any liability whatsoever for any claims, losses, actions, damages, suits or proceedings resulting from, arising out of or otherwise relating to the use of such applications by Customer, including without limitation, damages resulting from others accessing Customer's computer.
Subsequent calls to customer service revealed that such servers were allowed, but were not "supported" as in they would not answer technical questions relating to the operation of servers. The rest of your points are certainly valid, but it's interesting to note that @Home did allow servers once upon a time.
Indeed, a good idea. If no one else had a gun, most of us wouldn't feel a need to have guns. However, the police will surely keep their guns and criminals will always be able to get their hands on guns. Therefore, we will always need to have guns. Thus, it's silly to make the argument. The idea that the presence of guns can be absolutely eliminated is an absurd one. It's no wonder that idealist liberals are usually the people in favor of gun control!
The people making hiring decisions don't necessarily have the company's best interests in mind. If they have a personal agenda of racism to satisfy, they can get away with discrimination because Microsoft is so large that the top management simply cannot check up on every hiring, promotion, or termination decision to make sure that the decision is one that will be beneficial to the company.
Discrimination these days is typically not the fault of the company itself, but is the fault of disloyal employees who have an agenda. I don't know if that will ever change simply because honest and loyal employees are getting harder and harder to find. Lawsuits won't fix that problem, nor will any legislation proposed by elite civil rights groups.
I see your answer to my final question is that you do want a mommy and not a government. The government is not there to ensure that everybody is able to access the Internet and do whatever they want on it. Yes, I know some people want the government to give poor people subsidized access to the 'Net, but that's pathetic and sad and I hope it doesn't happen. Anyway...When are people going to start calling and mailing their ISPs in force about particularly restrictive terms of service agreements? If a million customers of an ISP complain, you'd better believe there is going to be some change. I see great danger in holding businesses to a government-based and not a consumer-based standard. Free-market force works...too many people are just too lazy to apply it.
Every day a show is broadcast from Colorado called "The Troubleshooter Show" hosted by Tom Martino. It's actually a national show but is still small. When somebody has a problem with a business or they've been ripped off and the company refuses to negotiate, this guy gives the number of the business out and tells them to complain. He'll say stuff like "if you want to get ripped off, call blahblahblah." As a result, when people have a problem and call his show, they usually get results. Programs like this on a larger scale would work wonders for consumers. Imagine what would happen if the media got millions of people to complain to their ISPs (something to think about when you see another Time Warner/AOL). They could do it if there was support for it. People are just too lazy and would rather do nothing or cry to the government.
Here's another tidbit: any one government cannot regulate the Internet directly. A government can and will regulate it in their own countries through ISPs if you don't lower your rhetoric though. Most politicians already hate the Internet because they can't control it; don't go asking for them to control it!
Actually speaking of this, perhaps its time for someone to propose a law that assures users rights on the internet. Basically saying that these kinds of restrictions are not allowed.
Why should the government step in and legislate to solve a problem between you and a business? If you do not agree with the rules, you drop the service. If enough people drop the service, the rules change. The idea that government should replace this function of business is ridiculous. Unfortunately, nobody is willing to give up their service because the alternative just plain sucks. That doesn't mean that "THERE SHOULD BE A LAW" like so many people declare these days, but that people need to realize that they might need to make a sacrifice (gasp) to get what they want. Do you want a government, or do you want a mommy?
Why would we want to trust the government to manage healthcare? We can't even get an accurate election result and you want us to put people's lives in the hands of our government? We pay up to 40% of our income to the federal government already, and all we get for it is a bunch of excess legislation, waste and corruption. I'm not willing to sell off all my assets in the interests of an unfair socialist system under the guise of humane health care.
It's no wonder that some of the wealthiest people in the US are the biggest supporters of these ideas. If socialized healthcare really cut into the pockets of these millionaire celebrities or perhaps some of the wealthy Democrats who claim they are fighting for the "people," I think they'd change their tune.
I don't think anybody wants those who "don't conform to the system they were born into" to die. However, they don't want the government to give these people handouts. There's no conspiracy to prevent charity. The government has simply shown that they are incapable of providing for people without massive corruption and waste which nobody can be expected to pay for. The UN can spout their human rights propaganda filth, but they just want to seize power, just like sleazy politicians who say they will provide for the people.
The truth is, capitalism doesn't work for some people, but communism doesn't work for anybody because the nature of communism requires a dictatorship in order to stay in force. It looks like an classic but unfortunate case of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. Well, now that I've proven myself to be worse than the "most rabid of the old communists," I'll end my rant.
No. Communism feeds off itself too much for a middle ground to hold. Are people living off the government going to vote for somebody that isn't going to give them more? Of course not...they will vote for the person who will give them more handouts, and in this fashion the nation falls further into communism until private property is completely gone. Nice thought, but human nature just doesn't allow for a middle ground.
I was under the impression that elections were a state's buisness. Shouldnt it stop at the state level?
Yes, conducting elections are the responsibility of the individual states. However, certain laws in the constitution govern these elections as well. The Republicans claim that the Florida SC overruled constitutional laws when they changed the rules governing the certification date after the election. What this ruling says is that the FLSC must find some Florida law regarding elections that shows they did not change Florida law with their decision.
I guess florida should succeed from the Union and take it all the way if they want all their votes counted.
All the votes in Florida have been counted. Twice. The media might try to make you think that there's a sealed ballot box full of votes that was somehow left out, but the fact is all known votes were counted twice by machine. All that's left now is to decide whether or not hand recounts should be allowed, and that is all in the hands of the Florida courts.
Unfortunately, as with a few parts of our constitution, the electoral college system does not always work the way we want.
Children are sometimes killed accidentally with guns, and it's unfortunate, but that doesn't mean that our second amendment should be ripped out of the constitution.
Similarly, just because a presidential candidate received a majority in the overall popular vote and the electoral college may not reflect that, we cannot overhaul parts of the constitution. There are many other ways in which election reform can be accomplished without changing the basis of our republic.
Like it or not, the constitution must stay as intact as possible. Once people start changing things, the liberals will likely ramp up their efforts to get rid of things like the 2nd amendment. We cannot allow that, or any other constitutional travesties, to happen.
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For those without postscript readers, a PDF version is available here.
What a dilemma!. It doesn't work for the government to be able to monopolize whatever they declare to be a weapon. The government has too much power in this case. Apparently, it also doesn't work for citizens to have whatever they want because unsuitable individuals might get their hands on (and use) things that could destroy the entire country. The government does not have enough power in this case. This is when it becomes clear that the Constitution wasn't built with weapons of mass destruction in mind. Citizens can't keep government power in check without enough firepower to back them up, but the government cannot enforce basic laws if citizens have too much firepower. I can safely assume that the government won't release chemical weapons on innocent people or destroy entire parts of the country with nuclear weapons, but when it comes to things such as herding 'subversive' individuals into internment camps protected by government personnel with machine guns that I can't have, the line gets blurrier.
Every patriot probably has their own idea of what the government will and will not resort to in its thirst for power. Perhaps the real problem is that the government is deciding where to draw the line. Obviously my initial post was rather unrealistic, but we have to do better to prevent the relationship between government and its citizens from turning into a case of the haves and have-nots. It will be incredibly difficult, especially since most Americans have probably never seen the Bill of Rights. Who makes the decisions that government cannot be trusted to make?
Did you type that post on a Transmeta desktop system? Now, I know this isn't pertinent to a discussion of mainstream systems, but I cannot find a place to purchase Transmeta hardware outside of buying an entire system. Anyone know where to buy Transmeta processors and the mainboards to support them?
These weapons you speak of have likely always been readily available to criminals who needed them. They absolutely should be readily available to the masses as well, assuming the government in question possesses these tools.
One of the problems that I see lately is the fact that governments want to take things out of society, such as guns, but also want to keep those things for themselves. Will the US government use backdoored encryption for their own electronic communications? I highly doubt it, and each time something like this happens it makes it that much easier for other freedoms to be taken away from the citizenry. In the US at least, the government is supposed to be upholding the Constitution, not writing legislation that simply makes people happy. It's simply not the job of our politicians to make sure that people aren't wringing their hands over the fact that their next door neighbor owns powerful weapons or sends encrypted messages that can't be read by the 'authorities' because they refuse to use backdoor-equipped software.
Those who set up free porn sites realize quickly that bandwidth/image protection is an essential part of site development. Fortunately, Apache and .htaccess allows you to prevent hotlinking, at least with browsers that pass along the HTTP referrer.
.*\.(jpg|gif|png)$ /404.html
Example:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule
Sure, 128Kbps MP3's aren't great, but if the songs you are getting sound that bad, I doubt that a higher bitrate is going to make much difference. A lot of MP3.com artists lack the equipment and/or technical knowledge to produce songs that sound as good as those produced by professionals. I wonder if they could justify a 50-100% increase in bandwidth consumption when a lot of artists don't know what they are doing in the first place.
You have a good reason to use Windows, so just use it; don't make your poor son suffer just because you have a personal problem with it. Yours is a perfect application for dual booting because you simply have no need to run two OS's at the same time (unless you also have an uptime fetish). I vote for the dual boot option as a few minutes for reboots won't kill you; after all, dual booting is the best option for your son's needs.
Indeed, a good idea. If no one else had a gun, most of us wouldn't feel a need to have guns. However, the police will surely keep their guns and criminals will always be able to get their hands on guns. Therefore, we will always need to have guns. Thus, it's silly to make the argument. The idea that the presence of guns can be absolutely eliminated is an absurd one. It's no wonder that idealist liberals are usually the people in favor of gun control!
The people making hiring decisions don't necessarily have the company's best interests in mind. If they have a personal agenda of racism to satisfy, they can get away with discrimination because Microsoft is so large that the top management simply cannot check up on every hiring, promotion, or termination decision to make sure that the decision is one that will be beneficial to the company.
Discrimination these days is typically not the fault of the company itself, but is the fault of disloyal employees who have an agenda. I don't know if that will ever change simply because honest and loyal employees are getting harder and harder to find. Lawsuits won't fix that problem, nor will any legislation proposed by elite civil rights groups.
I see your answer to my final question is that you do want a mommy and not a government. The government is not there to ensure that everybody is able to access the Internet and do whatever they want on it. Yes, I know some people want the government to give poor people subsidized access to the 'Net, but that's pathetic and sad and I hope it doesn't happen. Anyway...When are people going to start calling and mailing their ISPs in force about particularly restrictive terms of service agreements? If a million customers of an ISP complain, you'd better believe there is going to be some change. I see great danger in holding businesses to a government-based and not a consumer-based standard. Free-market force works...too many people are just too lazy to apply it.
Every day a show is broadcast from Colorado called "The Troubleshooter Show" hosted by Tom Martino. It's actually a national show but is still small. When somebody has a problem with a business or they've been ripped off and the company refuses to negotiate, this guy gives the number of the business out and tells them to complain. He'll say stuff like "if you want to get ripped off, call blahblahblah." As a result, when people have a problem and call his show, they usually get results. Programs like this on a larger scale would work wonders for consumers. Imagine what would happen if the media got millions of people to complain to their ISPs (something to think about when you see another Time Warner/AOL). They could do it if there was support for it. People are just too lazy and would rather do nothing or cry to the government.
Here's another tidbit: any one government cannot regulate the Internet directly. A government can and will regulate it in their own countries through ISPs if you don't lower your rhetoric though. Most politicians already hate the Internet because they can't control it; don't go asking for them to control it!
Why would we want to trust the government to manage healthcare? We can't even get an accurate election result and you want us to put people's lives in the hands of our government? We pay up to 40% of our income to the federal government already, and all we get for it is a bunch of excess legislation, waste and corruption. I'm not willing to sell off all my assets in the interests of an unfair socialist system under the guise of humane health care.
It's no wonder that some of the wealthiest people in the US are the biggest supporters of these ideas. If socialized healthcare really cut into the pockets of these millionaire celebrities or perhaps some of the wealthy Democrats who claim they are fighting for the "people," I think they'd change their tune.
I don't think anybody wants those who "don't conform to the system they were born into" to die. However, they don't want the government to give these people handouts. There's no conspiracy to prevent charity. The government has simply shown that they are incapable of providing for people without massive corruption and waste which nobody can be expected to pay for. The UN can spout their human rights propaganda filth, but they just want to seize power, just like sleazy politicians who say they will provide for the people.
The truth is, capitalism doesn't work for some people, but communism doesn't work for anybody because the nature of communism requires a dictatorship in order to stay in force. It looks like an classic but unfortunate case of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. Well, now that I've proven myself to be worse than the "most rabid of the old communists," I'll end my rant.
No. Communism feeds off itself too much for a middle ground to hold. Are people living off the government going to vote for somebody that isn't going to give them more? Of course not...they will vote for the person who will give them more handouts, and in this fashion the nation falls further into communism until private property is completely gone. Nice thought, but human nature just doesn't allow for a middle ground.
Yes, conducting elections are the responsibility of the individual states. However, certain laws in the constitution govern these elections as well. The Republicans claim that the Florida SC overruled constitutional laws when they changed the rules governing the certification date after the election. What this ruling says is that the FLSC must find some Florida law regarding elections that shows they did not change Florida law with their decision.
All the votes in Florida have been counted. Twice. The media might try to make you think that there's a sealed ballot box full of votes that was somehow left out, but the fact is all known votes were counted twice by machine. All that's left now is to decide whether or not hand recounts should be allowed, and that is all in the hands of the Florida courts.
Unfortunately, as with a few parts of our constitution, the electoral college system does not always work the way we want.
Children are sometimes killed accidentally with guns, and it's unfortunate, but that doesn't mean that our second amendment should be ripped out of the constitution.
Similarly, just because a presidential candidate received a majority in the overall popular vote and the electoral college may not reflect that, we cannot overhaul parts of the constitution. There are many other ways in which election reform can be accomplished without changing the basis of our republic.
Like it or not, the constitution must stay as intact as possible. Once people start changing things, the liberals will likely ramp up their efforts to get rid of things like the 2nd amendment. We cannot allow that, or any other constitutional travesties, to happen.