Aside from his 15 minutes of fame, I don't really see how the reward justified the risks he took, although encore proved a significant lack of common sense.
The encore probably solidifies him as the kind of person the prosecutor called an "immensely entitled young man." His actions were arrogant and selfish, and he clearly thought himself far smarter and far more capable than he actually was if he thought he could get away with it.
I doubt very seriously that he had the capacity to intelligently assess the risks involved. I think there's a reasonable chance he may suffer from narcissistic personality disorder or at least has inclinations in that direction. I mean, for crying out loud, he even googled "jailtime for keylogger" and did it anyway, clearly being aware of the risks but overestimating his cleverness to get away with it. And again that encore after being caught red-handed at it.
Though maybe I just inherently distrust anyone who would make a PowerPoint presentation to convince his buddies to run for office for cash rather than just trying to convince them in person by speech. There's a certain sort of grandiose posturing and relentless corporate mediocrity involved in that.:-)
I think anything you try to do to my computer via the internet should be legal. It is my responsibility to ensure that the software on my computer is secure.
Can I beat you up? It's your responsibility, after all, to ensure that you're in proper shape and well-enough trained or armed to defend yourself.
I think breaking into my house and tampering with my computer should be illegal.
Okay, so I can't break into your house and beat you up, what if I beat you up in the streets instead of breaking in first? After all, you did voluntarily step into public away from the safety of your own four walls.
Please tell me that you wobbled because you decided to check what the message said.
Sure, it's a stupid thing to do. But I don't know if I could handle the idea that the buzz alone is enough to interfere with your driving, nevermind how bad you might be if you actually picked it up and looked at it.
Sadly, I must confess that I did check it. Perhaps a little hypocritical of me considering how reckless I think people are who talk/text and drive at the same time.
I was listening to a podcast at the time, and the alert is distinctive and VERY attention-getting. I had no idea what it was and was worried about what on earth could be causing my phone to make an alert sound like that. However, the wobble in my case was more from the initial surprise and confusion that from trying to check what it was. I managed to keep pretty straight in my lane while fishing it out of the pocket.
In this case, a child was stolen away from child services by his mother in the middle of a supervised visit. While the woman was bipolar and could have been a theoretical risk to her child (why she didn't have custody in the first place), this is not the sort of child abduction scenario most people envisioned when the Amber Alert system was put into place.
Additionally, most of the people contacted were in no position to help. And I doubt the alert was timely since it's highly unlikely that this woman has given a supervised visitation at a social services facility just shy of 4:00 AM. This means that the situation most likely had been developing for hours, and the alert should have gone out when it was likely she'd still be driving with the child. That means the information was most likely useless to everyone who received it. Contacting them caused them harm with no benefit to the child.
I mean, really, what do you expect people to do? Get up, get out of bed, get dressed, and go hunting around their block for cars matching the description? At 4:00 AM? Or should they just lie there in bed, frustrated at their powerlessness to help a child that somewhere is maybe suffering?
What is the appropriate reaction in your mind that shows ones priorities are in place?
While emergency authorities have yet to give a precise reason for why the decision was made to wake up the city, many have taken the step of deactivating these alerts to avoid future jolting mid-slumber alarms (likely not the indented result of last night's exercise).
I don't live in NYC, but my phone settings were recently updated by AT&T to display Amber Alerts and weather alerts. The very first moment one of these went off while I was driving, I decided to shut it off forever as a menace. After all, I noticed that I wasn't the only driver wobbling a little in their lane right after it happened.
If I was woken in the early morning by one of these things, I just hope I'd have the presence of mind not to throw the damned thing out a window!
A hefty fine would be much more appropriate assuming that he only rigged a meaningless election.
Then you assume much by not actually reading the fine article. The wire fraud charges are appropriate (since he stood to win an $8000 stipend), and he also tried (poorly) to frame others for his crimes after being caught red-handed. (That what the judge meant when he said, "He's on fire for this crime, and then he pours gasoline on it to try to cover it up.")
Do you honestly think that any sane person would roll the dice on that when maybe facing 10+ years if the jury convicts?
That's exactly why plea bargains must be abolished. Because no sane person can exercise their right to a trial anymore.
That is a total non-sequitur. His argument was that going to jury trial is an insane choice. You state that the option of not going to a jury trial must be removed so that a sane person can exercise their right to a trial.
So, the only way to make sane people do so is to remove sane alternatives? Are you arguing that giving people a choice not to go to trial somehow prevents them from having a choice to go to trial? That's kind of madness.
Okay, cool. Why don't we just not bother implementing D3D9 until we have the full D3D11 stack. I mean, it's not like it's a good idea to bite off a project in reasonable pieces or to release code that's complete enough for many games to run on itself to get it out in the field, being tested and building a userbase. 'Cause if it can't play the latest shiny thing, it's USELESS.
Nah, let's just stick the project in development hell until everyone who might use it and most of the developers who would contribute to it lose interest in it and it withers on the vine like so many other OSS projects to recreate some piece of commercial software.
Who cares? Linux (counting Android and other systems) is doing quite well everywhere else, and between servers, laptops, phones, tablets, and dedicated gaming consoles, who even needs a desktop anymore? The slump in PC sales suggests the answer is "no one." (Thank you, Windows 8!)
If 2014 is the Year of Nothing on the Desktop, then Linux can count itself a winner.
They want the ones with no sense of ethics or morality.
Actually, they probably want ones with a strong sense of ethics that can be bent in a direction of their choosing. You don't get nearly as hard work out of someone ethically unmoored as you do out of someone who is acting for a "greater good," and you get even more work out of someone who doesn't even see the lesser evil. Worse for the former, you may get junk data since they don't care enough.
No, no greater evil is committed than by those who believe they are doing a great good. There are plenty of people in this country that passionately believe the principle that only those who do wrong have something to hide and that privacy is nothing but a shield for criminals. That's a form of strong ethics, though it's one I'd disagree with.
Wow...just wow. I can understand him getting kicked out of school, but freaking federal prison for a year for just messing with a STUDENT school election?!?! [...] This is a freaking school election...not a federal / city/state election..it is college, it means NOTHING....
Read the full article (especially the utsandiego.com link). He committed wire fraud -- the winner of the presidential election gets a $8000 stipend, and the vice-president gets $7000. He planned ahead (even putting together a PowerPoint presentation the year before for his frat brothers to run for the #2 slot) to "win" these prizes. Fraud over wire for financial gain is a serious federal crime with a maximum of 20 years in prison.
He also attempted to cover up his crime once caught *red-handed* at the machine he was entering the votes from in a computer lab by later creating Facebook profiles in other real people's names and generating a lot of fake comments intended to make it look like those people had conspired to frame him, and he sent it to local media outlets. It was stupid in way that shows how much smarter he thinks he is than the people around him.
This kid is a budding con artist. He was acting for financial motive to defraud the school, and he was willing to trash the lives of others to try to get out of paying the penalty for something he did. This kid has displayed blatant, selfish disregard for others and a willingness to hurt or exploit them for profit.
This isn't a harmless prank. These are the actions of a malicious liar with an inflated sense of his own capabilities who doesn't seem to grasp the idea that consequences should apply to him for his actions. They should have thrown the book at him. Imagine the harm he could have done if he'd waited a few more years to "ripen" as a criminal and landed himself in management somewhere.
Yet another American deprived of his right to a trial. No doubt they would have tried to send him to prison for a decade or more if he decided to exercise his rights.
A year in prison is probably a fair outcome if the story is as described. But he deserves to have a jury decide that, and not face absurd amounts of time in prison if he wants a jury trial.
There was an $8000 stipend for the winner. This wasn't just a simple resume builder. He committed fraud to attempt to win a monetary prize due to the fair winner. Something he'd planned out the year before with four of his fraternity brothers running for the vice-president slot and it's $7000 stipend. This was planned for monetary benefit. Hell, his attorney's statement that wasn't even planning on staying at the school is even more damning in that light.
Worse, after he was caught, he set up Facebook pages with the names of real students to manufacture evidence that they were conspiring to frame him and sent it to various news stations. This is what the judge referred to when he said, "Heâ(TM)s on fire for this crime, and then he pours gasoline on it to try to cover it up,â
Frankly, a year in prison is a little light considering all the facts. Based on the facts, I wouldn't disagree with the prosecutor's description of him as being an "incredibly entitled" kid. The kid sounds like a budding narcissist to me. If it had just been rigging an election as a protest, maybe a year would be fair. But planning ahead with financial motivation and then attempting to frame others for his crime shows someone society needs to deal with more harshly. I'd have given him 5-10. God forbid this guy get a job where he could do some real damage to people.
And I do not agree with your indoctrinated bullshit. "Professionalism" is not and won't ever be a good thing. Most worth things created in this world came from unprofessional people. And cursing is a tool as any other despite your prejudices and oversensibilities regarding it.
If you say rudeness is tool, then well violence is one too, and most people disapprove of both for the same reason. Aggression and deliberately stepping on others toes facilitates resentment and sabotage. Worse, "letting it all out" doesn't diminish anger. Studies are clear that it only trains you to experience it more.
However you may feel about it, that is a motive why companies and kernel development groups are not democracies. If you can't take direct orders you can't work in group.
If you can't give orders without attempting to browbeat your inferiors with hostile language, then you can't really work in a group either. Managers like that are the ones that everyone is either waiting to see replaced or jumping ship to avoid. No one respects a tyrant.
How the leader of one of the most warmongering nations on Earth got awarded a Nobel Peace Prize is beyond me.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in part, for campaigning on the promise of Not Being Bush. It's a low bar he set for himself that he's consistently failed to reach.
A bird once flew into the house through an open window - perhaps because there was another window open on the other side of the room, so it looked like there was clear way through. The cat happened to be in the room at the time, and the bird never made it to the opposite window. We couldn't react in time to prevent the poor bird from getting his neck broken as soon as the cat brought it down, nay, slammed it down on the floor.
If our cat wanted to maim us, he certainly could. If he's in a rogue mood, he'll chase and kill occasional insects that make it into the house. Mostly he's too lazy too bother, so he just observes them and sometimes uses his paws like flipper paddles in a pinball machine.
I'm surprised that he doesn't bark at the older TV. A 1 year old chihuahua will bark at anything: vacuum cleaners, blenders, the neighbor's doorbell, ice cream trucks, spiders, particularly large clumps of dust in a sunbeam, etc....
The government isn't a producer of wealth. Every penny it spends is taken from us.
Whereas the private sector just pulls money out of thin air, huh?
What exactly does it mean to produce wealth in your mind? Please explain in a such a manner that accounts for both inputs and outputs and yet explains how the government's use of money doesn't meet this definition.
When rapid communication became essential for doing business and for receiving emergency services. (See also, when water and electricity became basic rights.)
2. Why people have to have phone that requires 90% or more of the country to pay for it because of where they choose to live 3. Why I should pay more because someone wants to live in a rural area where they can't make any money and don't have phone service. And where storms can bring down phone lines causing thousands of dollars in repair costs for a phone they don't pay for.
Same reason we gave them electricity. Not only is it a basic right in modern society, but we also want to encourage some people to live in sparsely populated land (e.g. farmers).
Let me guess: You're the kind of person who wonders why people starving in Africa don't just move somewhere nice, aren't you? Is there even any reason to attempt to explain the economics and other reasons why someone might not want to or be able to move if you think this is an intelligent question
Hint: The cost of relocation isn't trivial -- especially for the people who might need it the most.
5. Why, after all of the above, if they don't have skills, can't live off the land, can't get a job, can't move, and are poor, we don't relocate them someplace else since they must already be living on the government dole. When you don't make your own way and don't contribute to society, you don't get to decide the rules that govern how you receive free money and other things.
Wow, that's an amazing and insulting list of assumptions. Who says that rural people "can't live off the land" and "can't get a job?" How is that relevant at all to getting telecom lines ran to them? Who says that they're "living on the government dole" just because we pay for infrastructure to reach them? I mean, if you're so high and mighty about your own ability to pay for infrastructure to be run to you yourself, then are you running on fiber right now? If not, why not?
I'm guessing you're just incredibly privileged and deluded that the benefits of society you enjoy are all a product of your hard labor. People who talk about other people not "contributing to society" often over-inflate their own contribution and ignore how many other people's backs they are carried on.
Also, it says a lot about you that you think people who aren't contributing enough should be rounded up and stripped of their freedoms. None of them good.
Nuclear power still remains the safest, most powerful energy source yet known, so long as the government isn't running the show (see Chernobyl).
Are you seriously arguing that the public sector is inherently less responsible than the private sector, based on a single data-point?
Maybe you should look more into what caused the Fukushima disaster: It was a serious of bad design decisions for the active cooling system all made by General Electric and TEPCO, failure to report and explain design changes that made them even less safe, falsification of safety records, and failure to heed engineer warnings about flood risks from tsunamis.
Three Mile Island happened because of workers failing to obey safety regulations, bad design in relying on turbines still being active for cooling, and bad design of the indicator light for the stuck valve -- all failures in the private sector side of things.
Of course, those are only two points of a data. I'd be a hypocrite if I insisted with such a small sample set that this demonstrated that the private industry was less responsible. However, I think that's more than enough to say that the notion that nuclear power is safe unless the government comes in and screws things up is demonstrably false. Private industry is just as capable of screwing up nuclear power.
Also, in review of all of these disasters, there was nothing inherently economic about the nature of them -- all were human failures led by failure to follow established procedures, failures of engineering, and/or cost-cutting or blame-avoiding. These kind of failures are rife in both the private and public sectors. Blaming "teh gubbermint" is just intellectual laziness and/or the product of viewing the world through a partisan lens.
First of all, it's not parenthetical. My post was a direct refutation to the notion that "great literature" is something that "that virtually everyone agrees on" and that the GP was crazy for asserting that Card's work should be counted as such. It was also a refutation to the assertion that everything written today will be available in the future, when there's clear indication that it will not be. If we can't even keep works around for future generations, why do you expect commentary on said works to be available?
However, if you'd like me to address your argument more directly, then if you want to define literature as you did above, you should probably be aware that "Ender's Game" won the 1985 Nebula and the 1986 Hugo awards for Best Novel, and its sequel "Speaker for the Dead" won the 1986 Nebula and the 1987 Hugo. He also received recognition by the American Library Association in 2008 for contributions to young adult literature for "Ender's Game" and "Ender's Shadow." By your own criteria, his works are ones that "subject matter experts and especially **a consensus of other writers** consider definitively influential in some capacity," unless you want to pull some sort of "No True Scotsman" on the Nebula and Hugo awards process.
Lastly, I think you're the last person to have a leg to stand on to criticize my grammar.
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Aside from his 15 minutes of fame, I don't really see how the reward justified the risks he took, although encore proved a significant lack of common sense.
The encore probably solidifies him as the kind of person the prosecutor called an "immensely entitled young man." His actions were arrogant and selfish, and he clearly thought himself far smarter and far more capable than he actually was if he thought he could get away with it.
I doubt very seriously that he had the capacity to intelligently assess the risks involved. I think there's a reasonable chance he may suffer from narcissistic personality disorder or at least has inclinations in that direction. I mean, for crying out loud, he even googled "jailtime for keylogger" and did it anyway, clearly being aware of the risks but overestimating his cleverness to get away with it. And again that encore after being caught red-handed at it.
Though maybe I just inherently distrust anyone who would make a PowerPoint presentation to convince his buddies to run for office for cash rather than just trying to convince them in person by speech. There's a certain sort of grandiose posturing and relentless corporate mediocrity involved in that. :-)
I think anything you try to do to my computer via the internet should be legal. It is my responsibility to ensure that the software on my computer is secure.
Can I beat you up? It's your responsibility, after all, to ensure that you're in proper shape and well-enough trained or armed to defend yourself.
I think breaking into my house and tampering with my computer should be illegal.
Okay, so I can't break into your house and beat you up, what if I beat you up in the streets instead of breaking in first? After all, you did voluntarily step into public away from the safety of your own four walls.
Please tell me that you wobbled because you decided to check what the message said.
Sure, it's a stupid thing to do. But I don't know if I could handle the idea that the buzz alone is enough to interfere with your driving, nevermind how bad you might be if you actually picked it up and looked at it.
Sadly, I must confess that I did check it. Perhaps a little hypocritical of me considering how reckless I think people are who talk/text and drive at the same time.
I was listening to a podcast at the time, and the alert is distinctive and VERY attention-getting. I had no idea what it was and was worried about what on earth could be causing my phone to make an alert sound like that. However, the wobble in my case was more from the initial surprise and confusion that from trying to check what it was. I managed to keep pretty straight in my lane while fishing it out of the pocket.
In this case, a child was stolen away from child services by his mother in the middle of a supervised visit. While the woman was bipolar and could have been a theoretical risk to her child (why she didn't have custody in the first place), this is not the sort of child abduction scenario most people envisioned when the Amber Alert system was put into place.
Additionally, most of the people contacted were in no position to help. And I doubt the alert was timely since it's highly unlikely that this woman has given a supervised visitation at a social services facility just shy of 4:00 AM. This means that the situation most likely had been developing for hours, and the alert should have gone out when it was likely she'd still be driving with the child. That means the information was most likely useless to everyone who received it. Contacting them caused them harm with no benefit to the child.
I mean, really, what do you expect people to do? Get up, get out of bed, get dressed, and go hunting around their block for cars matching the description? At 4:00 AM? Or should they just lie there in bed, frustrated at their powerlessness to help a child that somewhere is maybe suffering?
What is the appropriate reaction in your mind that shows ones priorities are in place?
While emergency authorities have yet to give a precise reason for why the decision was made to wake up the city, many have taken the step of deactivating these alerts to avoid future jolting mid-slumber alarms (likely not the indented result of last night's exercise).
I don't live in NYC, but my phone settings were recently updated by AT&T to display Amber Alerts and weather alerts. The very first moment one of these went off while I was driving, I decided to shut it off forever as a menace. After all, I noticed that I wasn't the only driver wobbling a little in their lane right after it happened.
If I was woken in the early morning by one of these things, I just hope I'd have the presence of mind not to throw the damned thing out a window!
A hefty fine would be much more appropriate assuming that he only rigged a meaningless election.
Then you assume much by not actually reading the fine article. The wire fraud charges are appropriate (since he stood to win an $8000 stipend), and he also tried (poorly) to frame others for his crimes after being caught red-handed. (That what the judge meant when he said, "He's on fire for this crime, and then he pours gasoline on it to try to cover it up.")
If anything, he got off too lightly.
Do you honestly think that any sane person would roll the dice on that when maybe facing 10+ years if the jury convicts?
That's exactly why plea bargains must be abolished. Because no sane person can exercise their right to a trial anymore.
That is a total non-sequitur. His argument was that going to jury trial is an insane choice. You state that the option of not going to a jury trial must be removed so that a sane person can exercise their right to a trial.
So, the only way to make sane people do so is to remove sane alternatives? Are you arguing that giving people a choice not to go to trial somehow prevents them from having a choice to go to trial? That's kind of madness.
Okay, cool. Why don't we just not bother implementing D3D9 until we have the full D3D11 stack. I mean, it's not like it's a good idea to bite off a project in reasonable pieces or to release code that's complete enough for many games to run on itself to get it out in the field, being tested and building a userbase. 'Cause if it can't play the latest shiny thing, it's USELESS.
Nah, let's just stick the project in development hell until everyone who might use it and most of the developers who would contribute to it lose interest in it and it withers on the vine like so many other OSS projects to recreate some piece of commercial software.
Who cares? Linux (counting Android and other systems) is doing quite well everywhere else, and between servers, laptops, phones, tablets, and dedicated gaming consoles, who even needs a desktop anymore? The slump in PC sales suggests the answer is "no one." (Thank you, Windows 8!)
If 2014 is the Year of Nothing on the Desktop, then Linux can count itself a winner.
Or "Valley of the Wind."
[I wonder] If Doc Holiday had this instead of his diagnosed tuberculosis.
Doubtful since he was living in Atlanta when he contracted TB and moved out West in the hopes it would improve his symptoms.
They want the ones with no sense of ethics or morality.
Actually, they probably want ones with a strong sense of ethics that can be bent in a direction of their choosing. You don't get nearly as hard work out of someone ethically unmoored as you do out of someone who is acting for a "greater good," and you get even more work out of someone who doesn't even see the lesser evil. Worse for the former, you may get junk data since they don't care enough.
No, no greater evil is committed than by those who believe they are doing a great good. There are plenty of people in this country that passionately believe the principle that only those who do wrong have something to hide and that privacy is nothing but a shield for criminals. That's a form of strong ethics, though it's one I'd disagree with.
Hire those people, and you're golden.
Wow...just wow.
I can understand him getting kicked out of school, but freaking federal prison for a year for just messing with a STUDENT school election?!?!
[...]
This is a freaking school election...not a federal / city/state election..it is college, it means NOTHING....
Read the full article (especially the utsandiego.com link). He committed wire fraud -- the winner of the presidential election gets a $8000 stipend, and the vice-president gets $7000. He planned ahead (even putting together a PowerPoint presentation the year before for his frat brothers to run for the #2 slot) to "win" these prizes. Fraud over wire for financial gain is a serious federal crime with a maximum of 20 years in prison.
He also attempted to cover up his crime once caught *red-handed* at the machine he was entering the votes from in a computer lab by later creating Facebook profiles in other real people's names and generating a lot of fake comments intended to make it look like those people had conspired to frame him, and he sent it to local media outlets. It was stupid in way that shows how much smarter he thinks he is than the people around him.
This kid is a budding con artist. He was acting for financial motive to defraud the school, and he was willing to trash the lives of others to try to get out of paying the penalty for something he did. This kid has displayed blatant, selfish disregard for others and a willingness to hurt or exploit them for profit.
This isn't a harmless prank. These are the actions of a malicious liar with an inflated sense of his own capabilities who doesn't seem to grasp the idea that consequences should apply to him for his actions. They should have thrown the book at him. Imagine the harm he could have done if he'd waited a few more years to "ripen" as a criminal and landed himself in management somewhere.
Yet another American deprived of his right to a trial. No doubt they would have tried to send him to prison for a decade or more if he decided to exercise his rights.
A year in prison is probably a fair outcome if the story is as described. But he deserves to have a jury decide that, and not face absurd amounts of time in prison if he wants a jury trial.
There was an $8000 stipend for the winner. This wasn't just a simple resume builder. He committed fraud to attempt to win a monetary prize due to the fair winner. Something he'd planned out the year before with four of his fraternity brothers running for the vice-president slot and it's $7000 stipend. This was planned for monetary benefit. Hell, his attorney's statement that wasn't even planning on staying at the school is even more damning in that light.
Worse, after he was caught, he set up Facebook pages with the names of real students to manufacture evidence that they were conspiring to frame him and sent it to various news stations. This is what the judge referred to when he said, "Heâ(TM)s on fire for this crime, and then he pours gasoline on it to try to cover it up,â
Frankly, a year in prison is a little light considering all the facts. Based on the facts, I wouldn't disagree with the prosecutor's description of him as being an "incredibly entitled" kid. The kid sounds like a budding narcissist to me. If it had just been rigging an election as a protest, maybe a year would be fair. But planning ahead with financial motivation and then attempting to frame others for his crime shows someone society needs to deal with more harshly. I'd have given him 5-10. God forbid this guy get a job where he could do some real damage to people.
And I do not agree with your indoctrinated bullshit. "Professionalism" is not and won't ever be a good thing. Most worth things created in this world came from unprofessional people. And cursing is a tool as any other despite your prejudices and oversensibilities regarding it.
If you say rudeness is tool, then well violence is one too, and most people disapprove of both for the same reason. Aggression and deliberately stepping on others toes facilitates resentment and sabotage. Worse, "letting it all out" doesn't diminish anger. Studies are clear that it only trains you to experience it more.
However you may feel about it, that is a motive why companies and kernel development groups are not democracies. If you can't take direct orders you can't work in group.
If you can't give orders without attempting to browbeat your inferiors with hostile language, then you can't really work in a group either. Managers like that are the ones that everyone is either waiting to see replaced or jumping ship to avoid. No one respects a tyrant.
How the leader of one of the most warmongering nations on Earth got awarded a Nobel Peace Prize is beyond me.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in part, for campaigning on the promise of Not Being Bush.
It's a low bar he set for himself that he's consistently failed to reach.
A bird once flew into the house through an open window - perhaps because there was another window open on the other side of the room, so it looked like there was clear way through. The cat happened to be in the room at the time, and the bird never made it to the opposite window. We couldn't react in time to prevent the poor bird from getting his neck broken as soon as the cat brought it down, nay, slammed it down on the floor.
If our cat wanted to maim us, he certainly could. If he's in a rogue mood, he'll chase and kill occasional insects that make it into the house. Mostly he's too lazy too bother, so he just observes them and sometimes uses his paws like flipper paddles in a pinball machine.
How much do cats actually kill?
A bit off-topic, but I just thought I'd put that out there. I think the GP is being way to kind/naive in calling cats "incompetent" supervillains.
I'm surprised that he doesn't bark at the older TV. A 1 year old chihuahua will bark at anything: vacuum cleaners, blenders, the neighbor's doorbell, ice cream trucks, spiders, particularly large clumps of dust in a sunbeam, etc....
The government isn't a producer of wealth. Every penny it spends is taken from us.
Whereas the private sector just pulls money out of thin air, huh?
What exactly does it mean to produce wealth in your mind? Please explain in a such a manner that accounts for both inputs and outputs and yet explains how the government's use of money doesn't meet this definition.
Brilliant satire of Caller ID.
My alma mater used to have saying that summed this up quite nicely for the freshman physics weed-out classes:
"E-mag, Re-mag, Three-mag, Management."
1. When having a phone became a 'right'
When rapid communication became essential for doing business and for receiving emergency services.
(See also, when water and electricity became basic rights.)
2. Why people have to have phone that requires 90% or more of the country to pay for it because of where they choose to live
3. Why I should pay more because someone wants to live in a rural area where they can't make any money and don't have phone service. And where storms can bring down phone lines causing thousands of dollars in repair costs for a phone they don't pay for.
Same reason we gave them electricity. Not only is it a basic right in modern society, but we also want to encourage some people to live in sparsely populated land (e.g. farmers).
Rural taxpayers subsidize urban dwellers in ways that don't directly benefit them too -- public transit, highway maintenance, etc. In fact, per capita federal spending is higher in urban counties than in rural ones.
4. Why they can't move
Let me guess: You're the kind of person who wonders why people starving in Africa don't just move somewhere nice, aren't you? Is there even any reason to attempt to explain the economics and other reasons why someone might not want to or be able to move if you think this is an intelligent question
Hint: The cost of relocation isn't trivial -- especially for the people who might need it the most.
5. Why, after all of the above, if they don't have skills, can't live off the land, can't get a job, can't move, and are poor, we don't relocate them someplace else since they must already be living on the government dole. When you don't make your own way and don't contribute to society, you don't get to decide the rules that govern how you receive free money and other things.
Wow, that's an amazing and insulting list of assumptions. Who says that rural people "can't live off the land" and "can't get a job?" How is that relevant at all to getting telecom lines ran to them? Who says that they're "living on the government dole" just because we pay for infrastructure to reach them? I mean, if you're so high and mighty about your own ability to pay for infrastructure to be run to you yourself, then are you running on fiber right now? If not, why not?
I'm guessing you're just incredibly privileged and deluded that the benefits of society you enjoy are all a product of your hard labor. People who talk about other people not "contributing to society" often over-inflate their own contribution and ignore how many other people's backs they are carried on.
Also, it says a lot about you that you think people who aren't contributing enough should be rounded up and stripped of their freedoms. None of them good.
There is nothing in the world more honest than a price.
A fist is.
Honesty, in and of itself, does not virtue make, and a price can be quite dishonest if it does not match a thing's actual value.
Nuclear power still remains the safest, most powerful energy source yet known, so long as the government isn't running the show (see Chernobyl).
Are you seriously arguing that the public sector is inherently less responsible than the private sector, based on a single data-point?
Maybe you should look more into what caused the Fukushima disaster: It was a serious of bad design decisions for the active cooling system all made by General Electric and TEPCO, failure to report and explain design changes that made them even less safe, falsification of safety records, and failure to heed engineer warnings about flood risks from tsunamis.
Three Mile Island happened because of workers failing to obey safety regulations, bad design in relying on turbines still being active for cooling, and bad design of the indicator light for the stuck valve -- all failures in the private sector side of things.
Of course, those are only two points of a data. I'd be a hypocrite if I insisted with such a small sample set that this demonstrated that the private industry was less responsible. However, I think that's more than enough to say that the notion that nuclear power is safe unless the government comes in and screws things up is demonstrably false. Private industry is just as capable of screwing up nuclear power.
Also, in review of all of these disasters, there was nothing inherently economic about the nature of them -- all were human failures led by failure to follow established procedures, failures of engineering, and/or cost-cutting or blame-avoiding. These kind of failures are rife in both the private and public sectors. Blaming "teh gubbermint" is just intellectual laziness and/or the product of viewing the world through a partisan lens.
First of all, it's not parenthetical. My post was a direct refutation to the notion that "great literature" is something that "that virtually everyone agrees on" and that the GP was crazy for asserting that Card's work should be counted as such. It was also a refutation to the assertion that everything written today will be available in the future, when there's clear indication that it will not be. If we can't even keep works around for future generations, why do you expect commentary on said works to be available?
However, if you'd like me to address your argument more directly, then if you want to define literature as you did above, you should probably be aware that "Ender's Game" won the 1985 Nebula and the 1986 Hugo awards for Best Novel, and its sequel "Speaker for the Dead" won the 1986 Nebula and the 1987 Hugo. He also received recognition by the American Library Association in 2008 for contributions to young adult literature for "Ender's Game" and "Ender's Shadow." By your own criteria, his works are ones that "subject matter experts and especially **a consensus of other writers** consider definitively influential in some capacity," unless you want to pull some sort of "No True Scotsman" on the Nebula and Hugo awards process.
Lastly, I think you're the last person to have a leg to stand on to criticize my grammar.