the power brick's connector goes green when plugged in to the laptop, and then the light goes brown. This isn't very intuitive.
It's funny that you should say this, because that function is nearly perfect otherwise. As noted, green when charged, amber when charging. I've had to use other laptops which do not have this feature, and it's missed.
On the other hand, as the saying goes, it's the stone in your sandal which bugs you, and not the mountain you're climbing.
I'm not an electrical engineer, so I dunno why the light defaults to green. If the light could be programmed to default to anything, it should default to amber, and once it's figured out the battery is charged, default to green.
I'm not sure what it would take for that to occur. I wouldn't call this problem "unintuitive." I hesitate to call it sloppy, since it's so well designed otherwise.
Knowing Apple, it's probably some type of unfortunate compromise (the expense and complexity of getting a default to amber would not have been justifiable.) And yet, as you work with something that's been expertly crafted, it's minor failures seem more significant.
I honestly believe statutory rape is not real rape.
I should also add here that it's a terribly misunderstood/misued term.
Until the early to mid 20th century statutory rape existed as the legal concept that people assume it is to be--sexual relations with an individual so young that they are completely incapable of giving consent. The age at which this occurred was called the age of consent, and it typically was 10 to 12.
This concept still exists. In Ohio, for instance, statutory rape kicks in only if the person is 12 or younger.
In the mid 20th century, people became bothered by instances that happened over 12, but under 14/16/18. Eventually states codified a new crime (called many things, in Ohio it's "sexual conduct with a minor" and it refers to sexual conduct by an adult with an individual between 13 and 16.)
This is not technically statutory rape...this charge does not have the severity of a statutory rape charge (in fact, the severity is nowhere near that) and it does recognize that consent is possible, even though the act is illegal. That is to say, consentual sex by an adult with a 15 year old in Ohio may result in a conviction under the sexual conduct with a minor law, but the same adult raping the 15 year old is a real rape charge. Big difference that goes unnoticed by many.
For this reason, "statutory rape" is terribly misused (and to a lesser extent "age of consent means something very different today than it meant 100 years ago.) The higher age of consent recognizes a new moral concept, whereas before it was a concept of protection of victimization. (I believe that age of consent needs to be renamed to reflect the new use.)
So, the article is comparing a the state of California (a physical region) with MySpace, which is in Cyberspace. To me, that does not sound like a fair comparison.
I happen to agree, but for other reasons.
So called "statutory rape" statistics are inherently misleading about the crime itself as well as the victims and the perpetrators...especially in a state like California, whose age of consent of 18 doesn't have any exception.
Consentual sex happens all the time between people of multiple age groups in various situations. The 62 caught in California hit peculiar circumstances (a parent finds out and decides they don't like it, or the underage person decides to enact revenge against their older lover, and it usually *has* to be a combination for a successful prosecution.)
Each face has to be compared against the database.
The article implied that they wouldn't be doing this (that is--all 1.3 billion pictures would be loaded in the database, and the computer would be matching each face to each picture many times per day.)
We don't have that type of technology. We don't have anything *near* that type of technology (I've understood facial recognition to be accurate at fewer than 10,000 photographs. Anything above that and it just loses it.)
The article implies that they will only use the facial recognition system for very special purposes--they will seek out a particular individual and load that person's picture into the comparison database, and compare everyone to that one picture.
The girls in particular are almost totally incapable of understanding that that 25 year old who wants to have a "heart-to-heart" conversation with a 15 year old is probably just trying to get some.
I believe this to be a myth.
25 year olds chasing around 15 year olds are likely not "all" about the sex. After all, it's extremely difficult, relatively speaking, to get sex from 15 year olds (who have such things as parents, curfews, conservative sleep schedules, school, their own virginity and likely a conservative view on it...et cetera.)
Whereas a 19-21 year old has no curfew, likely drinks like a fish, has no parents to worry about, has a less conservative view about sex, and that's a a short list of reasons why it's a lot easier to get sex from them than a 15 year old.
Any 25 year old seeking a 15 year old for easy sex is a straight up moron. I don't believe they exist, and haven't seen a lick of evidence to suggest they do (relationships that you see in the newspaper about adults and under 16 year olds tend to be well-developed and complex.)
In all seriousness, I see what you're trying to do, but the law "don't work that way." (Though it probably came a lot closer 100 years ago than it does today.)
A law professor friend of mine is convinced that most states will eliminate the at-will concept in the next few decades because they will have been eaten away at so much that it would require a lawyer to know who can be fired and when.
Property taxes are something that should be done away with anyway.
I'm not really sure where to start off here. Property taxes were the preferred method of taxation for about 150 years. To this day, many think it's the only type there should be. (Although with changes...personally I'll be happy to end the property tax and replace it with a land tax though in my home state that would require a change to the constitution. Land taxes would allow for a more efficient use of land.)
Property taxes tend to pay for very local things (schools and city services.) They are also the most stable tax (whereas consumption and income taxes, depending on the latter's progressivity, go through wild fluctuations that make for difficulty in budgeting.)
Though the federal government has never had a tax on wealth, I wouldn't mind a national property tax to replace the income tax. C'mon...it'd be fun.:-)
Sucks but its the law of the land for 49 states...
It's my understanding that it's easier to fire someone in the state that's not at-will (I think it's Wyoming.) The reason for that is because the other 49 states have massive amounts of common law judicial restrictions that have eaten away at the at-will concept, which Wyoming eliminated when they codified their employment agreement structure.
There has to be a statistical reason why your car insurance is so absurdly high when you're a late teen
I suspect that driving experience/knowledge is a bigger factor. While it's true that younger drivers are more likely to take risks and be more aggressive (which might be related to the driving experience/knowledge thing) it's also true that very good, well trained drivers can be more aggressive and have the ability to manage that aggression/risk.
I've pointed out that one of the major failures of driving schools is that they teach 16 year olds to drive like grandmas. Of course, they get out into the world and they drive based on the fact that their perception and coordination skills are several times better than your average grandma, so to them what they are doing isn't all that risky. In reality, it's risky because they're not taught to drive to the level of their abilities.
This is because over quarter million people daily visit the temple and crowd control is a big job for the administration.
I rather doubt that it works very well. The American Association of Motor Vehicle, in a 2004 policy document, noted that the best fingerprint scanning equipment (used to just take one fingerprint and compare it to a fingerprint already in the database) can, at their best, work at a ratio of 1 to 10,000. (Meaning that once you get over 10,000 fingerprints, you incur the wrath of Type I and Type II errors, depending on how you've configured things.)
In case any one is interested, AAMVA is interested in biometrics only when they are reliable at 1 to 300 million.
I never, EVER received a spam/junk telegram. Ever.
There's not a doubt in my mind that the telegram, at its height, was used for scamming (it likely was too expensive for extensive spam-use however.) A quick google search finds this article .
My finances are not very complex, but apparently enough that I'm relegated to the long-form return.
I made less than $6,000 in 2005 (I'm a recently graduate so I'm still starting out in the world) and I have to use the long-form with at least one supplementary schedule.
My income mostly came as "miscellaneous income" on a 1099--which automatically kicked me onto the long-form. I suspect there are plenty of people in my situation--with just one exception that bumps them to the regular 1040.
Maybe it's just me, but that sounds remarkably similar to how it is now.
According to the Columbus Dispatch, there are 42 ways of losing your Ohio driver's license not related to driving...such as not paying child support. Those are innovations that have grown out of the "privlege" era.
The airline industry is a private corporation, not a federally run operation.
As others have noted, the claim was made that this was a government rule, not an airline specific rule.
There's actually huge amounts of gray area, and I'm not sure if that's because the rule is flexible or the airlines have a lot of discretion. For instance, in Continental Airline's ID Requirements page you'll see that you could fly as a normal passenger with a non-photo ID (for instance, with a Mastercard and a Social Security Card.) I'd presume that if you did show those documents, barring the computer choosing you as a Selectee, you'd undergo normal security procedures.
The idea of requiring ID to travel started after TWA 800. Airlines "claimed" that the rule was put in place by the government as a security procedure. In reality, I don't believe the government cared about ID and travel until 9/11.
The hypothesis by some is that the airlines (who were trying to create their own rules on requring ID to travel as early as 1994) needed the requirement in order to prevent the resale of discount tickets. By forcing people to travel with the name on the ticket, those travellers unlucky enough to need to fly to Miami tomorrow had to buy the $1200 fare, as opposed to buying it off any old John Smith who bought the ticket 3 months ago for $200.
The airlines couldn't actually make up the rule themselves, at risk of cheesing off their customers, so they took advantage of the mysteriousness of TWA 800 and pretended it was a security thing required by the government.
If that's true (and I'd love to prove that) then the government happened to forget that the ID requirement was not security related at all, so it's probably not a good idea to rely on it so much. In particular because it introduces the needless contradiction that people who fly without ID are put through stricter security procedures, which implies that people with ID are somehow less dangerous than those without.
I'm sick of this "it's not a right it's a priviledge" concept. Is that really the law? I always considered it a ploy used by the DMV to scare teenagers into driving safely.
You actually more or less hit it on the button. The idea that driving is a "privilege" was an innovation of the late 1950-1960's, when motor vehicle safety advocates were trying to push certain types of safety initiatives (which were apparently more palatable if the concept of driving were reinvented.)
I did my research in Ohio, a state which didn't introduce driving licenses until 1933--well past the time of the Model T--when driving became a normal thing to do. There *were* driving laws and regulations, but, once meeting those laws and regulations (such as license plates, fitness, age...etc) any Ohioan just got into their car and drove. For the people of that time, driving was clearly a right. The creation of the driver's license didn't make it any less of a right.
Even after 1933, the motor vehicle code was littered with text that used the term "driving rights" (like...situations in which driving rights could be suspended.)
By the 1960s this language disappeared.
I vouch that, yes, historically, it was a right. One which you could lose, and one whose exercise required meeting common sense laws and regulations. As time went on, people let it become something less.
Now having said that, law dictionaries consider "right" and "privilege" to be synonymous. It's the connotative meaning of "privilege" which is being used popularly but not necessarily accurately (at least, in a legal context.) Privilege is undeniably a word used by people in power against those not (consider the fact that no one ever says "we reserve the privilege.")
I've always been a bit attracted to the Natural Law Party, which I used to sum as being so entirely clever that they were little chance that they could get elected.
It might be the closest thing to what you're looking for.
Otherwise, I consider myself a Progressive Libertarian (essentially, a person who is fundamentally Libertarian, but, at the same time, admitting the idea that contracts are not always made in perfect circumstances, and therefore can't be always considered legitimate. That might go some way to assuage your neo-feudalism concerns (which I partially agree and partially disagree with.)
Y'know there was a time when people were encouraged to feel welcomed in schools.
I'm not really sure of this. I've been given the impression that during quite a lot of the time of modern public schools, parents were treated offhandedly and told to butt out and let the professionals do their jobs. Any welcoming schools evidenced was to serve their own needs.
People are a lot more demanding today, but I've seen recent situations of schools treating parents offhandedly.
"It's takes too long to count the ballots" is not a valid answer.
I actually agree. (I for one don't care if we don't know the election results for a few weeks.)
I've done pollworking in Franklin County and have an idea what we would do if we had regular paper ballots. The process of counting ballots becomes exponentially more complex with the higher quantity of offices. Under 10 offices is fine, but after that it just gets bizarre.
Hypothetically, the 4 precinct officials would count all the ballots (of which there might be as many as 3000 cast.) I think that at those numbers accuracy is thrown out the window.
Paper based ballots with optical scan isn't a bad compromise.
In all fairness, you could use paper ballots in the New England states, which don't vote for all that much. You might only vote for 5 offices in any given year.
In 2004, here in Columbus (Franklin County, Ohio) we voted for 57 different offices, judgeships, city/county/state initiatives and referenda. If you multiply that out by the 590,000 votes cast, then you see why electronic balloting is a necessity.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to keep 25yr old men and women out of the highschool system.
I'd be curious to hear your reasons for this. I believe the idea of (essentially) incarcerating large quantities of people of the same very awkward age range is artificial and counter-productive, and is one of the reasons for why people graduate high school so immature--they've had no other model or interaction.
So I don't see the diference. Especially since 25 year olds and younger often teach. And in Ohio, 10th, 11th and 12th graders are given free access to public colleges and universities. ("Post-secondary option.")--Thereby putting them with people of a variety of ages.
They should be made to work hard, and learn as much as they can.
They (students) do work hard...doing a lot of meaningless and repetitive tasks. The educator Maria Montessorri believed that children are naturally curious creatures and will seek out learning. The purpose of the teacher is to setup the class environment to maximize the curiosity.
Our school system, has been carefully designed to beat out any creativity and curiosity that a child has. In this regard, the one thing asian schools do better is that they beat the creativity and curiosity faster and more effectively than we could ever dream.
Yes, I believe that if a kid doesn't want to learn, let them languish behind the grill at a burger joint for a few years to get inspired to go back and learn something.
I agree with this, alas, our school system is notoriously unflexible. An individual's college path is essentially decided by their performance in 9th grade. There are quite a lot of 14 year olds in this world who simply aren't able to make those decisions at that time.
Worse, our school system is not built around the idea that a person has to be learning for life. We all know that people need to be learning for life in some way, and that education isn't supposed to just come to an end at 18 or 21, but our school system has yet to recognize this. My parents pay huge amount of property taxes to their local school district...so why shouldn't she be allowed to attend a French class at the high school? We need to reevaluate the goals of schooling.
The VAST majority of the lower classes vote Democrat, and people who are more successful tend to vote Republican.
Though this topic isn't exactly germane to the thread...but your assertion was true about 20 years ago, but isn't so true today.
Poor minorities are the main poor group voting for the Democratic party, however the Republicans have swept the white poor and lower class groups and middle income groups (as indicated by the demographics of the states they are winning.) Democrats are taking the high income coastal types (and Republicans are taking the very high income corporate executives.)
Interestingly, the Economist noted that the Republican party has no interest in making changes to the tax code to relieve the AMT. The AMT tax is typically paid by people making over $100,000 per year (essentially, people who are in the upper income range, but not exactly rich.) The reason that the Republicans don't care for the AMT payers is because they tend to be Democrat voters. The Republican base is now the middle class with campaign funding from the very rich, and that's what they will continue to concentrate on.
As for the grandparent post, both parties are happy with dumb voters. Nothing's better than someone who will consistently vote for a particular name or issue for little reason at all.
They are national and are more difficult to forge.
They are, however, statistically more likely to be fraudulent than most driver's licenses. It's a simple fact of numbers (the value of the document, the quantity of individuals involved in its issuance, the quantity in the wild, the quantity of forgers counterfeiting it...et cetera.)
The quantity of forgers is a big negative for the passport. It's forged worldwide, whereas US driver's licenses are typically only counterfeited in the United States. The passport would need to be immeasurably more difficult to counterfeit before overcoming this issue--and even then, you might get "counterfeitlossness"--(elements of the document which are difficult to counterfeit are not easily detectable, so they need not be counterfeited anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
What's so hard?
:-)
I dunno. It was the grandparent post that had the problem. I think of it as inelegant, but nothing more.
p.s. my step-father's family's last name is your nickname. any relation?
the power brick's connector goes green when plugged in to the laptop, and then the light goes brown. This isn't very intuitive.
It's funny that you should say this, because that function is nearly perfect otherwise. As noted, green when charged, amber when charging. I've had to use other laptops which do not have this feature, and it's missed.
On the other hand, as the saying goes, it's the stone in your sandal which bugs you, and not the mountain you're climbing.
I'm not an electrical engineer, so I dunno why the light defaults to green. If the light could be programmed to default to anything, it should default to amber, and once it's figured out the battery is charged, default to green.
I'm not sure what it would take for that to occur. I wouldn't call this problem "unintuitive." I hesitate to call it sloppy, since it's so well designed otherwise.
Knowing Apple, it's probably some type of unfortunate compromise (the expense and complexity of getting a default to amber would not have been justifiable.) And yet, as you work with something that's been expertly crafted, it's minor failures seem more significant.
I honestly believe statutory rape is not real rape.
I should also add here that it's a terribly misunderstood/misued term.
Until the early to mid 20th century statutory rape existed as the legal concept that people assume it is to be--sexual relations with an individual so young that they are completely incapable of giving consent. The age at which this occurred was called the age of consent, and it typically was 10 to 12.
This concept still exists. In Ohio, for instance, statutory rape kicks in only if the person is 12 or younger.
In the mid 20th century, people became bothered by instances that happened over 12, but under 14/16/18. Eventually states codified a new crime (called many things, in Ohio it's "sexual conduct with a minor" and it refers to sexual conduct by an adult with an individual between 13 and 16.)
This is not technically statutory rape...this charge does not have the severity of a statutory rape charge (in fact, the severity is nowhere near that) and it does recognize that consent is possible, even though the act is illegal. That is to say, consentual sex by an adult with a 15 year old in Ohio may result in a conviction under the sexual conduct with a minor law, but the same adult raping the 15 year old is a real rape charge. Big difference that goes unnoticed by many.
For this reason, "statutory rape" is terribly misused (and to a lesser extent "age of consent means something very different today than it meant 100 years ago.) The higher age of consent recognizes a new moral concept, whereas before it was a concept of protection of victimization. (I believe that age of consent needs to be renamed to reflect the new use.)
So, the article is comparing a the state of California (a physical region) with MySpace, which is in Cyberspace. To me, that does not sound like a fair comparison.
I happen to agree, but for other reasons.
So called "statutory rape" statistics are inherently misleading about the crime itself as well as the victims and the perpetrators...especially in a state like California, whose age of consent of 18 doesn't have any exception.
Consentual sex happens all the time between people of multiple age groups in various situations. The 62 caught in California hit peculiar circumstances (a parent finds out and decides they don't like it, or the underage person decides to enact revenge against their older lover, and it usually *has* to be a combination for a successful prosecution.)
Otherwise, statutory rape crimes aren't self-reporting.
Each face has to be compared against the database.
The article implied that they wouldn't be doing this (that is--all 1.3 billion pictures would be loaded in the database, and the computer would be matching each face to each picture many times per day.)
We don't have that type of technology. We don't have anything *near* that type of technology (I've understood facial recognition to be accurate at fewer than 10,000 photographs. Anything above that and it just loses it.)
The article implies that they will only use the facial recognition system for very special purposes--they will seek out a particular individual and load that person's picture into the comparison database, and compare everyone to that one picture.
The girls in particular are almost totally incapable of understanding that that 25 year old who wants to have a "heart-to-heart" conversation with a 15 year old is probably just trying to get some.
I believe this to be a myth.
25 year olds chasing around 15 year olds are likely not "all" about the sex. After all, it's extremely difficult, relatively speaking, to get sex from 15 year olds (who have such things as parents, curfews, conservative sleep schedules, school, their own virginity and likely a conservative view on it...et cetera.)
Whereas a 19-21 year old has no curfew, likely drinks like a fish, has no parents to worry about, has a less conservative view about sex, and that's a a short list of reasons why it's a lot easier to get sex from them than a 15 year old.
Any 25 year old seeking a 15 year old for easy sex is a straight up moron. I don't believe they exist, and haven't seen a lick of evidence to suggest they do (relationships that you see in the newspaper about adults and under 16 year olds tend to be well-developed and complex.)
What is the opposite?
;-)
Not being able to leave anytime you want.
In all seriousness, I see what you're trying to do, but the law "don't work that way." (Though it probably came a lot closer 100 years ago than it does today.)
A law professor friend of mine is convinced that most states will eliminate the at-will concept in the next few decades because they will have been eaten away at so much that it would require a lawyer to know who can be fired and when.
Property taxes are something that should be done away with anyway.
:-)
I'm not really sure where to start off here. Property taxes were the preferred method of taxation for about 150 years. To this day, many think it's the only type there should be. (Although with changes...personally I'll be happy to end the property tax and replace it with a land tax though in my home state that would require a change to the constitution. Land taxes would allow for a more efficient use of land.)
Property taxes tend to pay for very local things (schools and city services.) They are also the most stable tax (whereas consumption and income taxes, depending on the latter's progressivity, go through wild fluctuations that make for difficulty in budgeting.)
Though the federal government has never had a tax on wealth, I wouldn't mind a national property tax to replace the income tax. C'mon...it'd be fun.
Sucks but its the law of the land for 49 states...
It's my understanding that it's easier to fire someone in the state that's not at-will (I think it's Wyoming.) The reason for that is because the other 49 states have massive amounts of common law judicial restrictions that have eaten away at the at-will concept, which Wyoming eliminated when they codified their employment agreement structure.
There has to be a statistical reason why your car insurance is so absurdly high when you're a late teen
I suspect that driving experience/knowledge is a bigger factor. While it's true that younger drivers are more likely to take risks and be more aggressive (which might be related to the driving experience/knowledge thing) it's also true that very good, well trained drivers can be more aggressive and have the ability to manage that aggression/risk.
I've pointed out that one of the major failures of driving schools is that they teach 16 year olds to drive like grandmas. Of course, they get out into the world and they drive based on the fact that their perception and coordination skills are several times better than your average grandma, so to them what they are doing isn't all that risky. In reality, it's risky because they're not taught to drive to the level of their abilities.
This is because over quarter million people daily visit the temple and crowd control is a big job for the administration.
I rather doubt that it works very well. The American Association of Motor Vehicle, in a 2004 policy document, noted that the best fingerprint scanning equipment (used to just take one fingerprint and compare it to a fingerprint already in the database) can, at their best, work at a ratio of 1 to 10,000. (Meaning that once you get over 10,000 fingerprints, you incur the wrath of Type I and Type II errors, depending on how you've configured things.)
In case any one is interested, AAMVA is interested in biometrics only when they are reliable at 1 to 300 million.
I never, EVER received a spam/junk telegram. Ever.
There's not a doubt in my mind that the telegram, at its height, was used for scamming (it likely was too expensive for extensive spam-use however.) A quick google search finds this article .
My finances are not very complex, but apparently enough that I'm relegated to the long-form return.
I made less than $6,000 in 2005 (I'm a recently graduate so I'm still starting out in the world) and I have to use the long-form with at least one supplementary schedule.
My income mostly came as "miscellaneous income" on a 1099--which automatically kicked me onto the long-form. I suspect there are plenty of people in my situation--with just one exception that bumps them to the regular 1040.
Maybe it's just me, but that sounds remarkably similar to how it is now.
According to the Columbus Dispatch, there are 42 ways of losing your Ohio driver's license not related to driving...such as not paying child support. Those are innovations that have grown out of the "privlege" era.
The airline industry is a private corporation, not a federally run operation.
As others have noted, the claim was made that this was a government rule, not an airline specific rule.
There's actually huge amounts of gray area, and I'm not sure if that's because the rule is flexible or the airlines have a lot of discretion. For instance, in Continental Airline's ID Requirements page you'll see that you could fly as a normal passenger with a non-photo ID (for instance, with a Mastercard and a Social Security Card.) I'd presume that if you did show those documents, barring the computer choosing you as a Selectee, you'd undergo normal security procedures.
The idea of requiring ID to travel started after TWA 800. Airlines "claimed" that the rule was put in place by the government as a security procedure. In reality, I don't believe the government cared about ID and travel until 9/11.
The hypothesis by some is that the airlines (who were trying to create their own rules on requring ID to travel as early as 1994) needed the requirement in order to prevent the resale of discount tickets. By forcing people to travel with the name on the ticket, those travellers unlucky enough to need to fly to Miami tomorrow had to buy the $1200 fare, as opposed to buying it off any old John Smith who bought the ticket 3 months ago for $200.
The airlines couldn't actually make up the rule themselves, at risk of cheesing off their customers, so they took advantage of the mysteriousness of TWA 800 and pretended it was a security thing required by the government.
If that's true (and I'd love to prove that) then the government happened to forget that the ID requirement was not security related at all, so it's probably not a good idea to rely on it so much. In particular because it introduces the needless contradiction that people who fly without ID are put through stricter security procedures, which implies that people with ID are somehow less dangerous than those without.
I'm sick of this "it's not a right it's a priviledge" concept. Is that really the law? I always considered it a ploy used by the DMV to scare teenagers into driving safely.
You actually more or less hit it on the button. The idea that driving is a "privilege" was an innovation of the late 1950-1960's, when motor vehicle safety advocates were trying to push certain types of safety initiatives (which were apparently more palatable if the concept of driving were reinvented.)
I did my research in Ohio, a state which didn't introduce driving licenses until 1933--well past the time of the Model T--when driving became a normal thing to do. There *were* driving laws and regulations, but, once meeting those laws and regulations (such as license plates, fitness, age...etc) any Ohioan just got into their car and drove. For the people of that time, driving was clearly a right. The creation of the driver's license didn't make it any less of a right.
Even after 1933, the motor vehicle code was littered with text that used the term "driving rights" (like...situations in which driving rights could be suspended.)
By the 1960s this language disappeared.
I vouch that, yes, historically, it was a right. One which you could lose, and one whose exercise required meeting common sense laws and regulations. As time went on, people let it become something less.
Now having said that, law dictionaries consider "right" and "privilege" to be synonymous. It's the connotative meaning of "privilege" which is being used popularly but not necessarily accurately (at least, in a legal context.) Privilege is undeniably a word used by people in power against those not (consider the fact that no one ever says "we reserve the privilege.")
I would love a party...
I've always been a bit attracted to the Natural Law Party, which I used to sum as being so entirely clever that they were little chance that they could get elected.
It might be the closest thing to what you're looking for.
Otherwise, I consider myself a Progressive Libertarian (essentially, a person who is fundamentally Libertarian, but, at the same time, admitting the idea that contracts are not always made in perfect circumstances, and therefore can't be always considered legitimate. That might go some way to assuage your neo-feudalism concerns (which I partially agree and partially disagree with.)
Y'know there was a time when people were encouraged to feel welcomed in schools.
I'm not really sure of this. I've been given the impression that during quite a lot of the time of modern public schools, parents were treated offhandedly and told to butt out and let the professionals do their jobs. Any welcoming schools evidenced was to serve their own needs.
People are a lot more demanding today, but I've seen recent situations of schools treating parents offhandedly.
"It's takes too long to count the ballots" is not a valid answer.
I actually agree. (I for one don't care if we don't know the election results for a few weeks.)
I've done pollworking in Franklin County and have an idea what we would do if we had regular paper ballots. The process of counting ballots becomes exponentially more complex with the higher quantity of offices. Under 10 offices is fine, but after that it just gets bizarre.
Hypothetically, the 4 precinct officials would count all the ballots (of which there might be as many as 3000 cast.) I think that at those numbers accuracy is thrown out the window.
Paper based ballots with optical scan isn't a bad compromise.
In all fairness, you could use paper ballots in the New England states, which don't vote for all that much. You might only vote for 5 offices in any given year.
In 2004, here in Columbus (Franklin County, Ohio) we voted for 57 different offices, judgeships, city/county/state initiatives and referenda. If you multiply that out by the 590,000 votes cast, then you see why electronic balloting is a necessity.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to keep 25yr old men and women out of the highschool system.
I'd be curious to hear your reasons for this. I believe the idea of (essentially) incarcerating large quantities of people of the same very awkward age range is artificial and counter-productive, and is one of the reasons for why people graduate high school so immature--they've had no other model or interaction.
So I don't see the diference. Especially since 25 year olds and younger often teach. And in Ohio, 10th, 11th and 12th graders are given free access to public colleges and universities. ("Post-secondary option.")--Thereby putting them with people of a variety of ages.
They should be made to work hard, and learn as much as they can.
They (students) do work hard...doing a lot of meaningless and repetitive tasks. The educator Maria Montessorri believed that children are naturally curious creatures and will seek out learning. The purpose of the teacher is to setup the class environment to maximize the curiosity.
Our school system, has been carefully designed to beat out any creativity and curiosity that a child has. In this regard, the one thing asian schools do better is that they beat the creativity and curiosity faster and more effectively than we could ever dream.
Yes, I believe that if a kid doesn't want to learn, let them languish behind the grill at a burger joint for a few years to get inspired to go back and learn something.
I agree with this, alas, our school system is notoriously unflexible. An individual's college path is essentially decided by their performance in 9th grade. There are quite a lot of 14 year olds in this world who simply aren't able to make those decisions at that time.
Worse, our school system is not built around the idea that a person has to be learning for life. We all know that people need to be learning for life in some way, and that education isn't supposed to just come to an end at 18 or 21, but our school system has yet to recognize this. My parents pay huge amount of property taxes to their local school district...so why shouldn't she be allowed to attend a French class at the high school? We need to reevaluate the goals of schooling.
The VAST majority of the lower classes vote Democrat, and people who are more successful tend to vote Republican.
Though this topic isn't exactly germane to the thread...but your assertion was true about 20 years ago, but isn't so true today.
Poor minorities are the main poor group voting for the Democratic party, however the Republicans have swept the white poor and lower class groups and middle income groups (as indicated by the demographics of the states they are winning.) Democrats are taking the high income coastal types (and Republicans are taking the very high income corporate executives.)
Interestingly, the Economist noted that the Republican party has no interest in making changes to the tax code to relieve the AMT. The AMT tax is typically paid by people making over $100,000 per year (essentially, people who are in the upper income range, but not exactly rich.) The reason that the Republicans don't care for the AMT payers is because they tend to be Democrat voters. The Republican base is now the middle class with campaign funding from the very rich, and that's what they will continue to concentrate on.
As for the grandparent post, both parties are happy with dumb voters. Nothing's better than someone who will consistently vote for a particular name or issue for little reason at all.
They are national and are more difficult to forge.
They are, however, statistically more likely to be fraudulent than most driver's licenses. It's a simple fact of numbers (the value of the document, the quantity of individuals involved in its issuance, the quantity in the wild, the quantity of forgers counterfeiting it...et cetera.)
The quantity of forgers is a big negative for the passport. It's forged worldwide, whereas US driver's licenses are typically only counterfeited in the United States. The passport would need to be immeasurably more difficult to counterfeit before overcoming this issue--and even then, you might get "counterfeitlossness"--(elements of the document which are difficult to counterfeit are not easily detectable, so they need not be counterfeited anyway.)
If it's such a great idea, then why are passport holders *forced* into having one?
Oddly enough, I could see a congressman introducing a bill here in the US making the RFID enabled passport optional.