Apple already ships remote kill software with iPhones.
That statement sent a chill down my spine as an iPhone user. Is there any way to disable this? I'm far, far less worried about my phone getting stolen from my pocket or house (the only two places it resides) than I am about a hacker bricking it.
It's crap like this that makes thinking individuals question the integrity of 'enviro-kooks'.
If you were thinking clearly, you'd notice that it was a headline on a website that gets its money from page views and that inflammatory headlines are a great source of clicks. It's journalism you should be blaming here, not environmentalism.
That is, unless you want to engage in exactly the same kind of attribution error to smear the opposition that you accuse them of making.
I hope you've got a big mixer to make sure that blends evenly, because it turns out that dropping stuff in the ocean isn't like putting food coloring in a glass. The ocean is big and has currents and thermal zones that prevent even, global mixing. That's why Fukushima raised Strontium-90 levels 100-fold in some hot spots in the three months after the disaster.
The science needs to be broken down in ways the average person can understand.
They can't. Almost every time someone tries, it gets taken out of context by either the deniers or the fervent believers and distorted.
It's not the scientists making crazy predictions: it's the laymen who have listened to what the scientists tried to explain and not quite understood it all and who are rightfully concerned by it but either (a) get irrationally scared or (b) think the other side's irrational people and the undecided won't listen unless it's scary enough.
A warm spell somewhere is evidence for AGW, but a cold spell across a region should be ignored.
Well, there are (to broadly generalize) four positions on AGW: 1) Scientifically informed acceptance. 2) Fervent, incorrect denial. 3) Fervent, incorrect acceptance. ("OMG! Hurricane Katrina was directly caused by Global Warming!") 4) Easily swayed people with the memories of goldfish.
#4 is the group of people that keeps "swing voting" on it depending on the current weather.
That flow is also a reason why it's heavily used for hydroelectric power. The Columbia River is also both a major protected wild salmonid habitat and also a major shipping route for the NW.
Draining it to feed CA would not go over well in OR/WA.
Although if that is your scale, even the UK has free essential health care, paid by taxes, without anyone thinking of us as lousy pink commies.
America also has a number of socialist programs: social security for national pensions, free healthcare for the indigent and the elderly (though managed through terrible public-private collaborations), the minimum wage, progressive income and inheritance taxes, etc.
We just have a lot less than the Europeans do, and believe me, there are plenty of far right-wing people in America who do think of the UK that way thanks to the NHS. But honestly, the UK is at the far right end of the scale economically in Europe. Much more like the US than the EU.
There are about 13,900 vehicle fires per year without structural involvement and 366,000 home structure fires of which only 8,9000 started in a garage or vehicle storage area, according to the NFPA. Cars don't even make the 1% cut-off for inclusion in their table of sources of ignition. Your washer and drier are a far bigger risk (15,200 house fires).
By far the most common causes of house fires are cooking accidents (43%), heating equipment (16%), arson (8%), faulty wiring or other electrical (6%), and smoking accidents (5%).
I see no evidence for this. There is not enough oil to spend on transportation driving fuel guzzling vehicles like in the US but this is not the model used in other 'civilized' places in Asia like Japan. They use electric public transport a lot.
Japan is not the model that places like China and India are going with. Auto use is on the rise in both countries, since ownership of a car, just like in America, is partially a status symbol and partially a means of great autonomy. China passed the US for largest number of auto sales in 2009, and they've multiplied the number of miles of car-capable roads by tenfold from 1999 to 2011. There's roughly 3 cars for every 5 families in China right now. Imagine what it's going to be like when it reaches 2 per family like the U.S. India's sales have been on a slump since the global financial crisis, but they are still the 6th largest automobile market and are expected to continue growth. Per capita, people in the US consume 4x the oil that the Chinese do.
But it's not just oil. Food is the biggest concern, especially as Western diets start to dominate. Meat takes a lot of land to feed by grazing. It takes less land to feed with grain but more water and energy. Converting diets from traditional, more plant-heavy diets to more affluent and meat-heavy diets will put a strain on world land and water resources.
Water is also a huge issue, especially with climate change reducing snowpacks and the resulting unreliability of streams and rivers bringing greater droughts and floods. Increased agricultural use of water will not aid in matters either. Desalinization can help, but that's energy costly.
Speaking of energy, people in the US use about twice as much power as people from the EU, and they use about twice as much power per capita as the Chinese, who use 3-4x as much as people in India. That's going to rise, and it's probably going to come from coal due to no one wanting to compromise growing their standard of living at the fastest possible rate despite the long-term consequences for everyone. As air conditioning and consumer electronics and appliances spread, so will energy consumption.
In short, trends do not look good without a massive shift towards lower birthrates.
Yes, I am because that's exactly what's happening. Sexual orientation ranges along a continuum, from exclusive attraction to the opposite sex to exclusive attraction to the same sex. I don't need to see 50 god damned options so you can personally identify the exact brand/amount of penis/vagina/other you like or don't like to me.
Sexual orientation != gender != physical sex (and certainly != some fetish).
And frankly, it's isn't about you. Or me. Or anyone else but the person trying to deal with their own identity. I'm lucky to be part of the majority, but I've known people who didn't fit into the simple M/F boxes, and if it helps them find a place, then I'm all for it.
You know, concepts like socialism and even communism actually sound pretty good.. on paper, but in reality they forget one ineffable truth: Human beings like power and being in control.
No, that's definitely not their sin of omission. Marx's "The Communist Manifesto" is almost entirely about this issue and proposes instituting checks and balances on this, like progressive income taxes, the abolition of land ownership, a 100% inheritance tax, a minimum wage, free education, no more child labor, and the centralization of several utilities and services considered essential or potentially exploitative in the hands of private citizens.
The failure to recognize the abuse of power as an abuse is more capitalism's failing. Socialism's failing is Marx's denial that people will attempt to get the most reward for the least effort. He glosses over the issue by pointing out that most of the rich still work (but ignoring that most of them do so in the attempt to acquire more than what they need).
Cynical as I am, I unfortunately believe that even in the fictional reality of the Federation where energy and posessions are easy to come by and essentially free, there's always going to be a group of people who want all the power and control they can amass.
Deep Space Nine is the show for you then. It's certainly the show which is least idealistic about the Federation. (And really, in any Star Trek, it seems that to rise to Admiral rank, you have to be corrupt, a zealot, or outright evil in some other way.)
It means a mixed-model economy in which the government steps in when essential services would be poorly served by a profit motive, and the free market is allowed to handle issues where a profit motive would drive improvements. Typically, it also includes strong worker protections, socialized medicine, and mostly public utilities and transit.
On the more free-market end, you'll have countries like Germany and the UK. On the more socialist end, you'll have counties like France and the Scandinavian countries.
And we need to understand that the poor don't have 40 hour a week jobs. Jobs for the poor are scheduled on a weekly basis. So one week, they're working M 8am - 3 PM, W 3PM - 7PM, Thrs 8am - Noon. And maybe another day. Then it switches completely the next week to a completely different schedule; so planning ahead is impossible. And you are very rarely scheduled for more than 30 hours - so, you have to get another job that pulls the same crap.
Ever since the housing bubble collapsed, many employers are taking this one step further by demanding continuous availability. That means that your schedule must be open at all times, and if you have conflicts with another job, then you'd better pick which one is more important.
I know a few friends who can't even get a second job because of this "dance for it, monkey!" attitude.
Overpopulation is only a problem in India and China. The rest of the civilized world, especially Japan, is having severe problems due to negative population growth. Population is predicted to plateau and start shrinking after around 2060. I am not worried about overpopulation.
The problem is not really that the number of people is increasing in "the civilized world." The problem is that the rest of the world is getting "civilized," and China and India are at the forefront of multiplying the resources consumed per capita while also growing their populations. If everyone in the world lived at a US standard of living, we absolutely could not feed and provide energy for the populace. Especially without transitioning away from carbon-heavy energy.
We're caught between a rock and a hard place. You don't want to kill off people or impose harsh fertility limits, because, you know, ethics and human decency, but you can't feed everyone steak in air conditioned restaurants either, and it's extremely hard to say, "No you can't have that," while having it yourself or convincing the people who already have it to give it up.
Part of the reason for the electoral college system was to make elections actually slant more dramatically one way or the other.
No it wasn't. The electoral college was not designed with a two-party system in mind (the greatest evidence of this is the elections of 1796 and 1800). No, it was designed with Congress as a backup in case no one won a majority, because they expected that to happen quite often once Washington was no longer in the picture. In fact, the framers were more worried about a couple of large states ganging up than what we would now think of as issue-driven parties. (This is the main reason for the large state/small state compromise showing up against in assigning electors by Congressional + Senate seats). They expected most elections to have to be decided between more than five candidates since electors from multiple states would have difficulty colluding before sending their votes in.
So dramatic, magnified consensus was not one of the design goals for it. In pretty much every way, it was designed without the opinions of the public much in mind. It turns out that you don't actually have any Constitutional right to elect the President. States can choose to pick the electors without you. (In fact, South Carolina did that all the way up until it seceded from the Union.)
You can read more of the history of the debate in the Constitutional Convention here. Also some really great history of the foundation of the first political parties in the years leading up to and after the ratification of the Constitution.
George W Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, and many of the people on your list bear almost NO resemblance to a modern Republican in terms of political views (e.g. Roosevelt, Eisenhower).
Still, the GP's argument is almost as bad for much the same reason, because if the current Republicans kept getting drubbed in the polls, they'd very quickly become a different party. The parties change their mix of positions about once every 2-3 generations or so -- sometimes much faster. Heck, just look at how different Republicans were today and in the 1990s, the 1970s, the 1950s, and the 1930s.
Well, you know what you do when someone pushes you around. You FIGHT BACK. Punch them in the face if you're on the school yard, or ridicule and sue them if you're in the corporate world.
A bully is someone who picks on someone because they know that they can't/won't fight back. If your problem is the latter, then it's simple to do as you say. If you simply *can't* fight back, because the other party will destroy you if you try, then that's a different story. What you advocate is simply self-destructive stupidity in the name of pride.
Fighting back in court isn't free, and King's victims simply can't afford justice.
I do look in amazement at scenes of the roadside carnage in the south caused by what I perceive as a dusting of snow.
That's your problem right there. It wasn't "a dusting of snow." It was wintry mix, complete with 1/4 thick sheets of solid ice on all the roads that formed as people were trying to get home.
Plus, honestly, if 80% of the people in Atlanta had panicked and jumped on the roads in the same half hour in good driving conditions, you'd have had hours long snarls anyway. The ice that trapped us in transit made it much, much worse, but it would have been bad without it. Probably not, "abandon your car and walk home because it's low on gas, and the gas station 1 mile away is about 2 hours away in this traffic" bad, but still bad.
It's the same look I get when I complain to my store managers in Florida about it being oppressively hot in Boston when it's 'only' 96 degrees in August.
People in the South are spoiled by air conditioning. I know, because I lived in Oregon for a few years and didn't understand what it was like to live in a house without AC in that weather until it happened.
That led to his next inquiry: If current could turn off regions of the brain making people temporarily math-challenged, could a different type of stimulation improve math performance?
Here's one. What's the long-term effect of using TCMS during development? Strengthening of the affected areas or weakening thereof / dependency on the stimulation?
It kind of depends on how you make your own living. If you make your living as a middle man, it doesn't seem like an achievement; it looks more like a disaster.
Yes, and if you make your living as a window-maker, anti-vandalism laws might seem to be a bad idea too. The car dealer is a holdover from the days in which haggling was a common practice. The average consumer today would far rather get the best deal by comparing fixed numbers rather than their ability to beat a negotiator who practices every day at screwing people of as much extra money as possible.
Which is even more baffling, I usually associate free market to republicans. Dems are usually supporters of bigger government.
Don't buy the talking points of the parties. Each party has a number of conflicting interest groups within them, and which group is on top varies from region to region. Some conservatives believe in the free market almost religiously, while many others believe in the free market is only a great idea to apply *outside* of their industry. Furthermore, the lower you go down from the national level, the more an individual politician's interests will be tied into which big fish is willing to dribble money into their campaign, and that will more often than not be tied to the local rich guy.
Car dealerships are local businesses that pull in a lot of money and which have long had a history of being big donors to local politics. There are a number of ideological reasons that Republicans would support protection of a local elite at the expense of what the public wants, but let's face it, a Democrat would probably support the same bill if his town had a politically active car dealership in it and just use different rhetoric for it.
The "free market" is a principle, and principles frequently go AWOL when reelection funding is on the line. Or if you want to be even more cynical, you can consider it just the Republican's "branding" rather than beliefs. Something to keep the common voters rooting for the team, while the business of politics continues to be business.
Chip and signature-on-a-digital-pad was what I was thinking about, not signature on paper.
Which no one ever checks, much less automatically, because signatures vary wildly even in the best writing conditions. A signature is a placebo, not an actual verification method.
It's not about authentication, it's about nonrepudiation. Next time you are at a POS terminal with a digitizer, take a look around and count how many cameras are watching you. Then think about how you would deny it was you signing, and get away with it.
Then why do I need a signature at all? If I'm identifiable enough not to be able to lie about signing, then I'm identifiable enough not to need signing in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple already ships remote kill software with iPhones.
That statement sent a chill down my spine as an iPhone user. Is there any way to disable this? I'm far, far less worried about my phone getting stolen from my pocket or house (the only two places it resides) than I am about a hacker bricking it.
It's crap like this that makes thinking individuals question the integrity of 'enviro-kooks'.
If you were thinking clearly, you'd notice that it was a headline on a website that gets its money from page views and that inflammatory headlines are a great source of clicks. It's journalism you should be blaming here, not environmentalism.
That is, unless you want to engage in exactly the same kind of attribution error to smear the opposition that you accuse them of making.
I hope you've got a big mixer to make sure that blends evenly, because it turns out that dropping stuff in the ocean isn't like putting food coloring in a glass. The ocean is big and has currents and thermal zones that prevent even, global mixing. That's why Fukushima raised Strontium-90 levels 100-fold in some hot spots in the three months after the disaster.
The science needs to be broken down in ways the average person can understand.
They can't. Almost every time someone tries, it gets taken out of context by either the deniers or the fervent believers and distorted.
It's not the scientists making crazy predictions: it's the laymen who have listened to what the scientists tried to explain and not quite understood it all and who are rightfully concerned by it but either (a) get irrationally scared or (b) think the other side's irrational people and the undecided won't listen unless it's scary enough.
A warm spell somewhere is evidence for AGW, but a cold spell across a region should be ignored.
Well, there are (to broadly generalize) four positions on AGW:
1) Scientifically informed acceptance.
2) Fervent, incorrect denial.
3) Fervent, incorrect acceptance. ("OMG! Hurricane Katrina was directly caused by Global Warming!")
4) Easily swayed people with the memories of goldfish.
#4 is the group of people that keeps "swing voting" on it depending on the current weather.
In the long run, we'll all be dead. Call me when they figure out how to avoid that, and then we'll talk about thousands of years.
Why? If you already can't care about the future of other humans, then why should we expect you to be interested in contributing later?
That flow is also a reason why it's heavily used for hydroelectric power. The Columbia River is also both a major protected wild salmonid habitat and also a major shipping route for the NW.
Draining it to feed CA would not go over well in OR/WA.
Although if that is your scale, even the UK has free essential health care, paid by taxes, without anyone thinking of us as lousy pink commies.
America also has a number of socialist programs: social security for national pensions, free healthcare for the indigent and the elderly (though managed through terrible public-private collaborations), the minimum wage, progressive income and inheritance taxes, etc.
We just have a lot less than the Europeans do, and believe me, there are plenty of far right-wing people in America who do think of the UK that way thanks to the NHS. But honestly, the UK is at the far right end of the scale economically in Europe. Much more like the US than the EU.
There are about 13,900 vehicle fires per year without structural involvement and 366,000 home structure fires of which only 8,9000 started in a garage or vehicle storage area, according to the NFPA. Cars don't even make the 1% cut-off for inclusion in their table of sources of ignition. Your washer and drier are a far bigger risk (15,200 house fires).
By far the most common causes of house fires are cooking accidents (43%), heating equipment (16%), arson (8%), faulty wiring or other electrical (6%), and smoking accidents (5%).
So, do whatever everybody else does ... rent porn, order pizza and drink scotch.
Yes, but what do you do for special days?
I see no evidence for this. There is not enough oil to spend on transportation driving fuel guzzling vehicles like in the US but this is not the model used in other 'civilized' places in Asia like Japan. They use electric public transport a lot.
Japan is not the model that places like China and India are going with. Auto use is on the rise in both countries, since ownership of a car, just like in America, is partially a status symbol and partially a means of great autonomy. China passed the US for largest number of auto sales in 2009, and they've multiplied the number of miles of car-capable roads by tenfold from 1999 to 2011. There's roughly 3 cars for every 5 families in China right now. Imagine what it's going to be like when it reaches 2 per family like the U.S. India's sales have been on a slump since the global financial crisis, but they are still the 6th largest automobile market and are expected to continue growth. Per capita, people in the US consume 4x the oil that the Chinese do.
But it's not just oil. Food is the biggest concern, especially as Western diets start to dominate. Meat takes a lot of land to feed by grazing. It takes less land to feed with grain but more water and energy. Converting diets from traditional, more plant-heavy diets to more affluent and meat-heavy diets will put a strain on world land and water resources.
Water is also a huge issue, especially with climate change reducing snowpacks and the resulting unreliability of streams and rivers bringing greater droughts and floods. Increased agricultural use of water will not aid in matters either. Desalinization can help, but that's energy costly.
Speaking of energy, people in the US use about twice as much power as people from the EU, and they use about twice as much power per capita as the Chinese, who use 3-4x as much as people in India. That's going to rise, and it's probably going to come from coal due to no one wanting to compromise growing their standard of living at the fastest possible rate despite the long-term consequences for everyone. As air conditioning and consumer electronics and appliances spread, so will energy consumption.
In short, trends do not look good without a massive shift towards lower birthrates.
Yes, I am because that's exactly what's happening. Sexual orientation ranges along a continuum, from exclusive attraction to the opposite sex to exclusive attraction to the same sex. I don't need to see 50 god damned options so you can personally identify the exact brand/amount of penis/vagina/other you like or don't like to me.
Sexual orientation != gender != physical sex (and certainly != some fetish).
And frankly, it's isn't about you. Or me. Or anyone else but the person trying to deal with their own identity. I'm lucky to be part of the majority, but I've known people who didn't fit into the simple M/F boxes, and if it helps them find a place, then I'm all for it.
You know, concepts like socialism and even communism actually sound pretty good.. on paper, but in reality they forget one ineffable truth: Human beings like power and being in control.
No, that's definitely not their sin of omission. Marx's "The Communist Manifesto" is almost entirely about this issue and proposes instituting checks and balances on this, like progressive income taxes, the abolition of land ownership, a 100% inheritance tax, a minimum wage, free education, no more child labor, and the centralization of several utilities and services considered essential or potentially exploitative in the hands of private citizens.
The failure to recognize the abuse of power as an abuse is more capitalism's failing. Socialism's failing is Marx's denial that people will attempt to get the most reward for the least effort. He glosses over the issue by pointing out that most of the rich still work (but ignoring that most of them do so in the attempt to acquire more than what they need).
Cynical as I am, I unfortunately believe that even in the fictional reality of the Federation where energy and posessions are easy to come by and essentially free, there's always going to be a group of people who want all the power and control they can amass.
Deep Space Nine is the show for you then. It's certainly the show which is least idealistic about the Federation. (And really, in any Star Trek, it seems that to rise to Admiral rank, you have to be corrupt, a zealot, or outright evil in some other way.)
What is THAT supposed to mean?
Literally what it says at face value.
It means a mixed-model economy in which the government steps in when essential services would be poorly served by a profit motive, and the free market is allowed to handle issues where a profit motive would drive improvements. Typically, it also includes strong worker protections, socialized medicine, and mostly public utilities and transit.
On the more free-market end, you'll have countries like Germany and the UK. On the more socialist end, you'll have counties like France and the Scandinavian countries.
The only think I'd add is to this part:
And we need to understand that the poor don't have 40 hour a week jobs. Jobs for the poor are scheduled on a weekly basis. So one week, they're working M 8am - 3 PM, W 3PM - 7PM, Thrs 8am - Noon. And maybe another day. Then it switches completely the next week to a completely different schedule; so planning ahead is impossible. And you are very rarely scheduled for more than 30 hours - so, you have to get another job that pulls the same crap.
Ever since the housing bubble collapsed, many employers are taking this one step further by demanding continuous availability. That means that your schedule must be open at all times, and if you have conflicts with another job, then you'd better pick which one is more important.
I know a few friends who can't even get a second job because of this "dance for it, monkey!" attitude.
Overpopulation is only a problem in India and China. The rest of the civilized world, especially Japan, is having severe problems due to negative population growth. Population is predicted to plateau and start shrinking after around 2060. I am not worried about overpopulation.
The problem is not really that the number of people is increasing in "the civilized world." The problem is that the rest of the world is getting "civilized," and China and India are at the forefront of multiplying the resources consumed per capita while also growing their populations. If everyone in the world lived at a US standard of living, we absolutely could not feed and provide energy for the populace. Especially without transitioning away from carbon-heavy energy.
We're caught between a rock and a hard place. You don't want to kill off people or impose harsh fertility limits, because, you know, ethics and human decency, but you can't feed everyone steak in air conditioned restaurants either, and it's extremely hard to say, "No you can't have that," while having it yourself or convincing the people who already have it to give it up.
Part of the reason for the electoral college system was to make elections actually slant more dramatically one way or the other.
No it wasn't. The electoral college was not designed with a two-party system in mind (the greatest evidence of this is the elections of 1796 and 1800). No, it was designed with Congress as a backup in case no one won a majority, because they expected that to happen quite often once Washington was no longer in the picture. In fact, the framers were more worried about a couple of large states ganging up than what we would now think of as issue-driven parties. (This is the main reason for the large state/small state compromise showing up against in assigning electors by Congressional + Senate seats). They expected most elections to have to be decided between more than five candidates since electors from multiple states would have difficulty colluding before sending their votes in.
So dramatic, magnified consensus was not one of the design goals for it. In pretty much every way, it was designed without the opinions of the public much in mind. It turns out that you don't actually have any Constitutional right to elect the President. States can choose to pick the electors without you. (In fact, South Carolina did that all the way up until it seceded from the Union.)
You can read more of the history of the debate in the Constitutional Convention here. Also some really great history of the foundation of the first political parties in the years leading up to and after the ratification of the Constitution.
George W Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, and many of the people on your list bear almost NO resemblance to a modern Republican in terms of political views (e.g. Roosevelt, Eisenhower).
Still, the GP's argument is almost as bad for much the same reason, because if the current Republicans kept getting drubbed in the polls, they'd very quickly become a different party. The parties change their mix of positions about once every 2-3 generations or so -- sometimes much faster. Heck, just look at how different Republicans were today and in the 1990s, the 1970s, the 1950s, and the 1930s.
Well, you know what you do when someone pushes you around. You FIGHT BACK. Punch them in the face if you're on the school yard, or ridicule and sue them if you're in the corporate world.
A bully is someone who picks on someone because they know that they can't/won't fight back. If your problem is the latter, then it's simple to do as you say. If you simply *can't* fight back, because the other party will destroy you if you try, then that's a different story. What you advocate is simply self-destructive stupidity in the name of pride.
Fighting back in court isn't free, and King's victims simply can't afford justice.
I do look in amazement at scenes of the roadside carnage in the south caused by what I perceive as a dusting of snow.
That's your problem right there. It wasn't "a dusting of snow." It was wintry mix, complete with 1/4 thick sheets of solid ice on all the roads that formed as people were trying to get home.
Plus, honestly, if 80% of the people in Atlanta had panicked and jumped on the roads in the same half hour in good driving conditions, you'd have had hours long snarls anyway. The ice that trapped us in transit made it much, much worse, but it would have been bad without it. Probably not, "abandon your car and walk home because it's low on gas, and the gas station 1 mile away is about 2 hours away in this traffic" bad, but still bad.
It's the same look I get when I complain to my store managers in Florida about it being oppressively hot in Boston when it's 'only' 96 degrees in August.
People in the South are spoiled by air conditioning. I know, because I lived in Oregon for a few years and didn't understand what it was like to live in a house without AC in that weather until it happened.
That led to his next inquiry: If current could turn off regions of the brain making people temporarily math-challenged, could a different type of stimulation improve math performance?
Here's one. What's the long-term effect of using TCMS during development? Strengthening of the affected areas or weakening thereof / dependency on the stimulation?
It kind of depends on how you make your own living.
If you make your living as a middle man, it doesn't seem like an achievement; it looks more like a disaster.
Yes, and if you make your living as a window-maker, anti-vandalism laws might seem to be a bad idea too. The car dealer is a holdover from the days in which haggling was a common practice. The average consumer today would far rather get the best deal by comparing fixed numbers rather than their ability to beat a negotiator who practices every day at screwing people of as much extra money as possible.
Which is even more baffling, I usually associate free market to republicans. Dems are usually supporters of bigger government.
Don't buy the talking points of the parties. Each party has a number of conflicting interest groups within them, and which group is on top varies from region to region. Some conservatives believe in the free market almost religiously, while many others believe in the free market is only a great idea to apply *outside* of their industry. Furthermore, the lower you go down from the national level, the more an individual politician's interests will be tied into which big fish is willing to dribble money into their campaign, and that will more often than not be tied to the local rich guy.
Car dealerships are local businesses that pull in a lot of money and which have long had a history of being big donors to local politics. There are a number of ideological reasons that Republicans would support protection of a local elite at the expense of what the public wants, but let's face it, a Democrat would probably support the same bill if his town had a politically active car dealership in it and just use different rhetoric for it.
The "free market" is a principle, and principles frequently go AWOL when reelection funding is on the line. Or if you want to be even more cynical, you can consider it just the Republican's "branding" rather than beliefs. Something to keep the common voters rooting for the team, while the business of politics continues to be business.
Chip and signature-on-a-digital-pad was what I was thinking about, not signature on paper.
Which no one ever checks, much less automatically, because signatures vary wildly even in the best writing conditions. A signature is a placebo, not an actual verification method.
It's not about authentication, it's about nonrepudiation. Next time you are at a POS terminal with a digitizer, take a look around and count how many cameras are watching you. Then think about how you would deny it was you signing, and get away with it.
Then why do I need a signature at all? If I'm identifiable enough not to be able to lie about signing, then I'm identifiable enough not to need signing in the first place.