He waited his turn like everyone else on the list. Quite possibly. Of course, being on many different lists may have increased his chances a bit. There's also the slightly iffy sounding real-estate deal where his doctor ended up with a house that Jobs bought.
Let's not forget that, although he did have the excuse of desperation, he did use his wealth to put himself essentially at the top of the list for a transplant organ. A transplant organ which was mostly wasted on him. As I said, desperate. Maybe any of us would have done the same thing in his situation. But the very fact that their actions have such stronger effects on other people's lives are one of the reasons that many of us judge the powerful more harshly than we might others.
If there were substantial parallels to that world, you wouldn't even be able to talk about it. You wouldn't even know to talk about it. It would have been immediately covered up and history re-written. And then in a dark room somewhere, Manning would be re-educated and then freed. No one would give a shit about him other than the Inner Party. And that would be that.
Hmmm, if I remember 1984, after being broken, people are freed so that they can be publicly seen to have been broken. It also wasn't over there. After being released, they were quietly awaiting a surprise execution.
At lunch today, I handed my credit card to a waiter to pay for a meal. By your logic, that waiter should be allowed to copy down all of the info from my card, because it's a public space. Multiply that by every customer at that restaurant, and then by the total number of restaurants in that chain.
That's a very interesting analogy to me. It throws into sharp relief the problem here: having to resort to shaky legal principles when the real problem is a poor technological implementation. With cell phones and wireless Internet, the problem is that the protocols being used should not be uniquely identifying themselves in the clear with any random hotspot. Unique IDs for devices on the network are fine, but they should be randomly assigned and negotiated on the fly. If device identification is necessary for authentication on the network, that should be done with crypto tokens that are never transmitted on the same channel, and that kind of authentication is required, it should never be done automatically without user approval. For that matter, the very idea of a unique MAC address is a relic. It made sense with the limited hardware of the time, but who does it actually serve today? If the network requires authentication, it should be done at a higher level and preferably out of channel, if it doesn't, no unique IDs should be required.
In the example of credit cards... Really, what is there to be be said about credit cards? The basic security model of a plastic card with a magnetic strip that provides all the authentication information to extract any amount from it to every merchant it's used with has been obsolete for decades. Pocket calculators were already dirt cheap by the end of the 1970's and a very basic device using a single hidden key and an on-board pin could have been created with the same technology. Transactions could have been processed based on time of purchase and a vendor id and the hidden key. The old credit card impression machines could have been replaced with a simple battery-operated reader. With modern technology, we should have smart payment devices (NOT cell phones, unless they're using an external cryptographic device with unreadable keys) handling all of our credit cards, holding pre-generated transaction keys for every minute of every day for the lifetime of the device so that every transaction uses a unique key.Credit cards would be an absolute joke from a security standpoint except that there's absolutely nothing funny about them. If the credit card companies actually cared about security at all, they would have to be drooling idiots scribbling on the walls with their own excrement to keep using them as is.
All that said, there should be legal protections too, but there's honestly no reason for any of this data to actually be available to be misused in the first place.
Regarding Gates, he claims that the only thing he did was politely and repeatedly ask Officer Crowley for his name and badge number. Officer Crowley claims that as soon as he showed up, Gates got belligerent, started saying that Crowley was harassing him for being "Black in America," and was immediately verbally abusive. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between and they were both partially in the wrong. Maybe Crowley overreacted in arresting him for disorderly conduct (but sorry, when he went outside, he was in public). None of that matters to the GP's allegation that Gates was just some random, well-dressed black guy happily going about his business when he was profiled by the police. I can acknowledge that it's not a simple issue. In fact, that's really my whole point.
Gates claims aren't really relevant since we have Crowley's claims to go by. Crowley's claims support that he verified that Gates was not a burglar and that he refused to identify himself properly to Crowley so that Crowley could file a complaint against him. Crowley also admits to asking Gates to step outside afterwards, effectively luring him into "public". It's pretty clear this was just a ploy to falsely arrest him, otherwise Crowley could have simply left the property. Also, shouldn't a disorderly conduct arrest be supported by an actual complaint from a member of the public?
Ultimately you are correct that Gates is not really a good example of a black man profiled by the police. He is an example of a police officer overstepping his authority in order to arrest someone merely for not being submissively polite to him, but it clearly wasn't a random stop and the whole affair started out with reasonable suspicion. It should, of course, have ended as soon as the suspicion ended.
No, it's a normal problem of morality. he like everyone else wants free stuff. But free comes from someone else.
Why does no-one seem to get that the "someone else" may not actually be someone else. You pay taxes for medicare your entire working life. You might end up needing more than you put in, or you might need it after you've only been working for a year, or before you've ever worked, but, in other cases, you're just drawing from what amounts to a medical savings plan that you've paid into. You might never need major health care at any point in your life, but maybe you will and there's no good way to predict the future.
I mean, seriously, any sane person realizes that it's stupid not to have health insurance, which is a way to pool risk. So, why not make pooling risk a government function and save a mountain of middleman costs?
So, basically even more harmless than I thought. So, another example of police putting more effort into someone putting up a _picture_ of something harmless than they typically do for, for example, grand theft.
Talking on a cell phone in a movie theatre may actually be disturbing the peace or even trespassing. Paying for one newspaper in a newspaper vending box but taking five is actually quite clearly theft, petty though it may be. Farting in church... well, that could be disturbing the peace again, but they'd have to prove it wasn't an involuntary biological function. Similarly, making deceptive or intentionally misleading statements in advertising is illegal as well as objectionable.
I'm continually amazed that astroturfing is, apparently, de facto legal. It's illegal to lie in advertising. Paid commercial speech as certain restrictions as far as disclosure. If you pay a bunch of people to go out and randomly say good things about your product/company, you should be legally liable for any false statements they make and for non-disclosure of their paid advertiser status. If all of this is somehow legal, then there's something seriously wrong with the consumer protection laws in the US. Even if it's somehow entirely legal, it's a gross ethical breach.
Fair enough. That does take us away from grammatical errors to other kinds of errors. Of course, there's the common usage argument...
It's a bit off topic anyway. Going back to the original thread parent's statement, it's worth noting that another poster pointed out that what actually started this was a facebook post she made of some firecrackers. That suggests that, if the topic of pressure cooker and backpack searches came up in the police investigation, the investigation started first because of the pictures and they scooped up their search history as part of the investigation. That would seem to make this a less egregious intrusion, except we still have the case of someone being investigated for no good reason.
Hmm. Maybe. Although if the police asked her about searches for backpacks and pressure cookers, that's still a little worrying. As for the pictures. Very suspicious. She has pictures of subway stations, bridges and other infrastructure in there too! Seriously though, we're talking about pictures of firecrackers here. They're just about at the level where, if you set one off in your open palm, it might possibly cause some real damage rather than just stinging like heck. It's disturbing enough that anyone would be investigated for having a picture like that on a website, even without the notion that a red flag came up somewhere because of a google search.
But wouldn't they need to have said "proper english [grammar]" rather than just "proper english"? I would interpret "proper english" to also include well established idiomatic expressions.
You wouldn't die from the lashes themselves no matter how many you receive (mostly just superficial damage to your skin which technically you don't actually need to live, at least not in a sterile environment).
Ummm, you do actually need your skin to live, although you can do without some of it. Aside from infection, traumatized and/or necrotic tissue can also poison the rest of your body.
You realize that we are genetically pretty far from orangutans and are actually closer to dogs, pigs and dolphins.
That simply isn't true. We share about 97% of our DNA with Orangutans. Research indicates we split off from a common ancestor roughly 15 million years ago. We are close to dogs, pigs and dolphins, and also to mice genetically, but we're still closer to orangutans. Interestingly, however, research has shown that there may have been some horizontal gene transfer from humans to domestic animals like dogs and pigs by way of viruses.
But it was going to be disclosed in the US at a conference by a UK subject. This concept that all people are under the jurisdiction of their home government at all times has become a bit worrying. Frankly, it seems like the legal concept of jurisdiction has been virtually thrown out the window in recent years.
Or it could have been $200 per year, accumulated from 1 to 18. That gives $3600 over almost two decades.
It could have been. Of course, in adjusted dollars that would have been close to $2000 per year in the early years. Still a fairly hefty sum. That doesn't appear to be exactly it, however. I've posted a larger quote below that has more of the details. Ann Romney refers to the stock growing about 16 times in value over five years. Romney's father was chairman of AMC for five years ending in '62. That is probably the time period she was referring to. If that's the case, then it's obviously not 18 years of accumulation since he would have gone to university around 5 years after that. At best, it's five years of birthday money. This means that, when he started university, he had assets worth hundreds of thousands in adjusted dollars. Now, that's not a whole lot to live on the dividends of, but we are talking about college students here. Living on peanuts is the norm. And, all that aside, she still dismisses more money than a typical worker earns in a year as "it wasn't much".
Anyway, here's more of the quote:
“They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income.
“It was tiny. And I didn’t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting.
“We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.
“The stock came from Mitt’s father. When he took over American Motors, the stock was worth nothing. But he invested Mitt’s birthday money year to year — it wasn’t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself. Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education.
“Mitt and I walked to class together, shared housekeeping, had a lot of pasta and tuna fish and learned hard lessons.
Don't get me wrong. I come from an upper middle class background. We lived in decent houses (actually, they tended to start out as pretty crummy houses and then my father heavily remodeled them) on lots of land (literally hundreds of times what I live on at present, actually). My parents were in the top of their fields and I didn't have to work while I was at University. I lived in a dorm room. It was a cement box. Either that or the kind of basement apartment the Romney's lived in, or a rented house shared with too many roommates is the typical experience for University students.
Ann Romney talks about this period of her life as if it were a period of desperate poverty with little hope in sight rather than just being the standard higher education right of passage for privileged children with a lifeline to their parents if things get rough. I think it rubs me the wrong way because I was once that naive and actually thought that my family was poor. Of course, that was when I was a small child. Actually reaching adulthood and still being that naive is sort of disturbing. This is why I had to agree with the GP that statements like that make the Romney's come off sounding like Thurston and Lovey Howell.
You really have no idea what she meant, but just want to bash someone you don't agree with. Great post.
Disagreeing with her and bashing her seem to be the same thing from your perspective. I just think that she comes off like an adult spoiled brat trying to pretend that she has any real acquaintance with hardship.
Yeah, the Thurston Howell the Third comparison works pretty well for Romney. There's a great quote from Mrs. Romney about how they came about those stocks:
But he invested Mitt’s birthday money year to year—it wasn’t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself
Even today most people don't get a few thousand per year in birthday money. Assuming a "few" means at least 3 and we're talking about 1967, that's 20 thousand dollars in todays terms. We can also look at it another way. 1967 minimum wage was at something like $1.25 an hour (it was legal to pay full-time students less at the time though). We can call it $1.50 to be on the safe side. Working full time, 50 weeks a year, a worker would earn $3000 per year and Romney was getting that as "birthday money" along with other direct financial assistance
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Your solution is great for about 1% of the population, but won't work for the vast majority. I'm not sure why you would even bother writing that down.
To eliminate middlemen altogether, you'd have to pay directly and fully for your own health care.
I don't think you quite understand the concept of pooling risk.
He waited his turn like everyone else on the list. Quite possibly. Of course, being on many different lists may have increased his chances a bit. There's also the slightly iffy sounding real-estate deal where his doctor ended up with a house that Jobs bought.
Let's not forget that, although he did have the excuse of desperation, he did use his wealth to put himself essentially at the top of the list for a transplant organ. A transplant organ which was mostly wasted on him. As I said, desperate. Maybe any of us would have done the same thing in his situation. But the very fact that their actions have such stronger effects on other people's lives are one of the reasons that many of us judge the powerful more harshly than we might others.
Yes, what he said. To paraphrase: it's a petty power trip by HR empire builders who get their wisdom out of fortune cookies.
In this current economic climate I or anyone wont hire anyone with a gap on their resume or without a reference recently.
Good grief. Are you familiar with the concept of a death spiral?
If there were substantial parallels to that world, you wouldn't even be able to talk about it. You wouldn't even know to talk about it. It would have been immediately covered up and history re-written. And then in a dark room somewhere, Manning would be re-educated and then freed. No one would give a shit about him other than the Inner Party. And that would be that.
Hmmm, if I remember 1984, after being broken, people are freed so that they can be publicly seen to have been broken. It also wasn't over there. After being released, they were quietly awaiting a surprise execution.
At lunch today, I handed my credit card to a waiter to pay for a meal. By your logic, that waiter should be allowed to copy down all of the info from my card, because it's a public space. Multiply that by every customer at that restaurant, and then by the total number of restaurants in that chain.
That's a very interesting analogy to me. It throws into sharp relief the problem here: having to resort to shaky legal principles when the real problem is a poor technological implementation. With cell phones and wireless Internet, the problem is that the protocols being used should not be uniquely identifying themselves in the clear with any random hotspot. Unique IDs for devices on the network are fine, but they should be randomly assigned and negotiated on the fly. If device identification is necessary for authentication on the network, that should be done with crypto tokens that are never transmitted on the same channel, and that kind of authentication is required, it should never be done automatically without user approval. For that matter, the very idea of a unique MAC address is a relic. It made sense with the limited hardware of the time, but who does it actually serve today? If the network requires authentication, it should be done at a higher level and preferably out of channel, if it doesn't, no unique IDs should be required.
In the example of credit cards... Really, what is there to be be said about credit cards? The basic security model of a plastic card with a magnetic strip that provides all the authentication information to extract any amount from it to every merchant it's used with has been obsolete for decades. Pocket calculators were already dirt cheap by the end of the 1970's and a very basic device using a single hidden key and an on-board pin could have been created with the same technology. Transactions could have been processed based on time of purchase and a vendor id and the hidden key. The old credit card impression machines could have been replaced with a simple battery-operated reader. With modern technology, we should have smart payment devices (NOT cell phones, unless they're using an external cryptographic device with unreadable keys) handling all of our credit cards, holding pre-generated transaction keys for every minute of every day for the lifetime of the device so that every transaction uses a unique key.Credit cards would be an absolute joke from a security standpoint except that there's absolutely nothing funny about them. If the credit card companies actually cared about security at all, they would have to be drooling idiots scribbling on the walls with their own excrement to keep using them as is.
All that said, there should be legal protections too, but there's honestly no reason for any of this data to actually be available to be misused in the first place.
Regarding Gates, he claims that the only thing he did was politely and repeatedly ask Officer Crowley for his name and badge number. Officer Crowley claims that as soon as he showed up, Gates got belligerent, started saying that Crowley was harassing him for being "Black in America," and was immediately verbally abusive. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between and they were both partially in the wrong. Maybe Crowley overreacted in arresting him for disorderly conduct (but sorry, when he went outside, he was in public). None of that matters to the GP's allegation that Gates was just some random, well-dressed black guy happily going about his business when he was profiled by the police. I can acknowledge that it's not a simple issue. In fact, that's really my whole point.
Gates claims aren't really relevant since we have Crowley's claims to go by. Crowley's claims support that he verified that Gates was not a burglar and that he refused to identify himself properly to Crowley so that Crowley could file a complaint against him. Crowley also admits to asking Gates to step outside afterwards, effectively luring him into "public". It's pretty clear this was just a ploy to falsely arrest him, otherwise Crowley could have simply left the property. Also, shouldn't a disorderly conduct arrest be supported by an actual complaint from a member of the public?
Ultimately you are correct that Gates is not really a good example of a black man profiled by the police. He is an example of a police officer overstepping his authority in order to arrest someone merely for not being submissively polite to him, but it clearly wasn't a random stop and the whole affair started out with reasonable suspicion. It should, of course, have ended as soon as the suspicion ended.
No, it's a normal problem of morality. he like everyone else wants free stuff. But free comes from someone else.
Why does no-one seem to get that the "someone else" may not actually be someone else. You pay taxes for medicare your entire working life. You might end up needing more than you put in, or you might need it after you've only been working for a year, or before you've ever worked, but, in other cases, you're just drawing from what amounts to a medical savings plan that you've paid into. You might never need major health care at any point in your life, but maybe you will and there's no good way to predict the future.
I mean, seriously, any sane person realizes that it's stupid not to have health insurance, which is a way to pool risk. So, why not make pooling risk a government function and save a mountain of middleman costs?
That article seems to talk about phytoplankton which is not presently considered to be a plant as I understand it.
To be fair, apple started the iProduct meme with the iMac. Not saying it should be a trademark, but giving props.
Well, there's the ipaq, which someone else pointed out. There's also Sony i.LINK and iSCSI. There are probably a lot more.
That's a bit more entrepreneurial than what the GP was talking about.
There's bismuth, but it's much scarcer than lead.
So, basically even more harmless than I thought. So, another example of police putting more effort into someone putting up a _picture_ of something harmless than they typically do for, for example, grand theft.
Talking on a cell phone in a movie theatre may actually be disturbing the peace or even trespassing. Paying for one newspaper in a newspaper vending box but taking five is actually quite clearly theft, petty though it may be. Farting in church... well, that could be disturbing the peace again, but they'd have to prove it wasn't an involuntary biological function. Similarly, making deceptive or intentionally misleading statements in advertising is illegal as well as objectionable.
I'm continually amazed that astroturfing is, apparently, de facto legal. It's illegal to lie in advertising. Paid commercial speech as certain restrictions as far as disclosure. If you pay a bunch of people to go out and randomly say good things about your product/company, you should be legally liable for any false statements they make and for non-disclosure of their paid advertiser status. If all of this is somehow legal, then there's something seriously wrong with the consumer protection laws in the US. Even if it's somehow entirely legal, it's a gross ethical breach.
Fair enough. That does take us away from grammatical errors to other kinds of errors. Of course, there's the common usage argument...
It's a bit off topic anyway. Going back to the original thread parent's statement, it's worth noting that another poster pointed out that what actually started this was a facebook post she made of some firecrackers. That suggests that, if the topic of pressure cooker and backpack searches came up in the police investigation, the investigation started first because of the pictures and they scooped up their search history as part of the investigation. That would seem to make this a less egregious intrusion, except we still have the case of someone being investigated for no good reason.
Hmm. Maybe. Although if the police asked her about searches for backpacks and pressure cookers, that's still a little worrying. As for the pictures. Very suspicious. She has pictures of subway stations, bridges and other infrastructure in there too! Seriously though, we're talking about pictures of firecrackers here. They're just about at the level where, if you set one off in your open palm, it might possibly cause some real damage rather than just stinging like heck. It's disturbing enough that anyone would be investigated for having a picture like that on a website, even without the notion that a red flag came up somewhere because of a google search.
But wouldn't they need to have said "proper english [grammar]" rather than just "proper english"? I would interpret "proper english" to also include well established idiomatic expressions.
You wouldn't die from the lashes themselves no matter how many you receive (mostly just superficial damage to your skin which technically you don't actually need to live, at least not in a sterile environment).
Ummm, you do actually need your skin to live, although you can do without some of it. Aside from infection, traumatized and/or necrotic tissue can also poison the rest of your body.
You realize that we are genetically pretty far from orangutans and are actually closer to dogs, pigs and dolphins.
That simply isn't true. We share about 97% of our DNA with Orangutans. Research indicates we split off from a common ancestor roughly 15 million years ago. We are close to dogs, pigs and dolphins, and also to mice genetically, but we're still closer to orangutans. Interestingly, however, research has shown that there may have been some horizontal gene transfer from humans to domestic animals like dogs and pigs by way of viruses.
But it was going to be disclosed in the US at a conference by a UK subject. This concept that all people are under the jurisdiction of their home government at all times has become a bit worrying. Frankly, it seems like the legal concept of jurisdiction has been virtually thrown out the window in recent years.
Or it could have been $200 per year, accumulated from 1 to 18. That gives $3600 over almost two decades.
It could have been. Of course, in adjusted dollars that would have been close to $2000 per year in the early years. Still a fairly hefty sum. That doesn't appear to be exactly it, however. I've posted a larger quote below that has more of the details. Ann Romney refers to the stock growing about 16 times in value over five years. Romney's father was chairman of AMC for five years ending in '62. That is probably the time period she was referring to. If that's the case, then it's obviously not 18 years of accumulation since he would have gone to university around 5 years after that. At best, it's five years of birthday money. This means that, when he started university, he had assets worth hundreds of thousands in adjusted dollars. Now, that's not a whole lot to live on the dividends of, but we are talking about college students here. Living on peanuts is the norm. And, all that aside, she still dismisses more money than a typical worker earns in a year as "it wasn't much".
Anyway, here's more of the quote:
“They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income.
“It was tiny. And I didn’t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting.
“We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.
“The stock came from Mitt’s father. When he took over American Motors, the stock was worth nothing. But he invested Mitt’s birthday money year to year — it wasn’t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself. Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education.
“Mitt and I walked to class together, shared housekeeping, had a lot of pasta and tuna fish and learned hard lessons.
Don't get me wrong. I come from an upper middle class background. We lived in decent houses (actually, they tended to start out as pretty crummy houses and then my father heavily remodeled them) on lots of land (literally hundreds of times what I live on at present, actually). My parents were in the top of their fields and I didn't have to work while I was at University. I lived in a dorm room. It was a cement box. Either that or the kind of basement apartment the Romney's lived in, or a rented house shared with too many roommates is the typical experience for University students.
Ann Romney talks about this period of her life as if it were a period of desperate poverty with little hope in sight rather than just being the standard higher education right of passage for privileged children with a lifeline to their parents if things get rough. I think it rubs me the wrong way because I was once that naive and actually thought that my family was poor. Of course, that was when I was a small child. Actually reaching adulthood and still being that naive is sort of disturbing. This is why I had to agree with the GP that statements like that make the Romney's come off sounding like Thurston and Lovey Howell.
You really have no idea what she meant, but just want to bash someone you don't agree with. Great post.
Disagreeing with her and bashing her seem to be the same thing from your perspective. I just think that she comes off like an adult spoiled brat trying to pretend that she has any real acquaintance with hardship.
Yeah, the Thurston Howell the Third comparison works pretty well for Romney. There's a great quote from Mrs. Romney about how they came about those stocks:
But he invested Mitt’s birthday money year to year—it wasn’t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself
Even today most people don't get a few thousand per year in birthday money. Assuming a "few" means at least 3 and we're talking about 1967, that's 20 thousand dollars in todays terms. We can also look at it another way. 1967 minimum wage was at something like $1.25 an hour (it was legal to pay full-time students less at the time though). We can call it $1.50 to be on the safe side. Working full time, 50 weeks a year, a worker would earn $3000 per year and Romney was getting that as "birthday money" along with other direct financial assistance